By PhD Student Clara Carolyne Fachini Zanirato, Department of Spanish and Portuguese 

The importance of research on migration studies has never been so high in the world as more and more people realize the migratory factors that contributed to the creation of nations worldwide. Within Latin America, it could not be more different.

There is a plethora of studies on migrant people that helped in constructing the national fabrics of Hispanic Americans and Brazilians, however, according to Jeffrey Lesser (2007): “Non-European immigrants have been generally ignored in the historiography, surprising lacunae, given the millions of people involved. Yet, research on Middle Easterners and Asians often take place out of the mainstream or archives, and in these unseen but omnipresent Brazilian worlds terms like “foreigner” and “Brazilian” may be synonyms” (x). Therefore, the goal of my work is to analyze “the unseen, but omnipresent” Nikkei (Japanese descendants) voices specifically within Brazilian and Peruvian literary texts, ethnographic interviews and movies, since these countries have the greatest numbers of Japanese descendant migrants within Latin America. While there is a significant advance of Asian studies within other Latin American countries, there is still a substantial lack of cultural analysis of works produced by Nikkeis written in Portuguese and Spanish. 

My research aims to understand how the Japanese migrant identity suffered transformations and went in different paths in Brazil and Peru within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Even though the conditions that instigated the processes of immigration within the end of nineteenth century and beginning of twentieth century were extremely similar amongst those countries, the outcomes of the identity definition processes took different paths. I look at this identity development through the analysis of Brazilian and Peruvian literary texts and movies written by Japanese descendants, and ethnologic data drawn from interviews I conducted with Japanese descendant subjects. I claim that these different processes resulted in a double-layer identity in Brazil while, in Peru, there is a single-layer identity amongst those migrant subjects. In my analysis, I argue that Brazil and Peru had in fact opposite processes. 

In Brazil, the Japanese immigrants had more opportunities to remain enclosed within their own created colonies which generated a double-layered identity. Since Brazil had many unoccupied lands in the beginning of the 1900’s, the Japanese immigrants that fled the plantations were able to form their own communities and co-op business or concentrate themselves into a semi-enclosed neighborhood in São Paulo (Bairro Liberdade). The lack of contact with Brazilian society allowed this group to remain significantly sheltered within their own cultural practices and transmit the Japanese values to their descendants. Therefore, the next generations would consider themselves Brazilians but also Japanese. 

In Peru, primarily due to the geography of the country, migratory conditions and social injustices, the Japanese immigrants had bigger cultural clashes since the beginning of the immigration period. This then forced the interaction between the immigrants and the Peruvian peoples, which resulted in a single layer of identity (as in “being Japanese is a way of being Peruvian”). That is to say, while in Brazil, they had more opportunities to preserve the Japanese cultural identity, in Peru they were forced to integrate within society. Such identity formation processes are reflected in their cultural productions and representations.

Reflecting the mission of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme, my project illustrates the “importance of the humanities and the arts produced to understanding, representing and addressing global concerns and pressing social issues and to creating a diverse, engaged research and learning community.” It does so by illustrating that while in Peru the cultural works of Nipo-Peruvian authors written in Spanish deal with a variety of developed issues about Peruvian culture, in Brazil the Nipo-Brazilian authors are still producing material (in Portuguese and in Japanese) that mainly search to redeem the Japanese memory and pride amongst the first immigrants. As the Japanese-Peruvian author Augusto Higa Oshiro states, “being Nikkei is a way of being Peruvian.” On the other hand, in Brazil, the process of incorporating the Nikkei facet to the national identity mosaic only started from 1980’s on, making it a very recent transformation. 

I have been conducting field research for archival and data gathering. In 2017, I visited Brazilian Japanese communities in rural and urban centers, the Brazilian Japanese Immigration Museum and the Center of Japanese Culture in São Paulo. I went again in 2018, when Brazil celebrated 110 years of Japanese immigration. The celebrations were planned to take place within the Japan’s Festival, in the later days of July. This is considered the biggest Japanese festival in Latin America, with a general public of one-hundred-and-eighty-thousand people. At Japan’s Festival, I paired up with Bunkyo Institute (or Brazilian Association of Japanese Culture) and the Japanese Immigration Museum in São Paulo to perform a series of interview with Nikkei attendees of the festival. I also traveled to cities in the countryside of the state of São Paulo to interview more subjects that are part of Japanese associations. I was able to interview several people whose ages ranged from 21 to 70 years old, majorly third-generation immigrants, and I made substantial progress on my dissertation data. With the responses I had from these interviews, I was able to build the main ethnographic argument of my research: that Japanese identity in Brazil manifests itself as a double layer of character when the Nikkeis describe themselves differently from what I perceived in Cuzco, and Lima in 2017. The majority of the statements I heard encompassed the sentences: “I am Brazilian, but I am also Japanese.” This sentence represents the two layers of identity that overlap when these individuals are describing themselves. 

When looking at cultural productions of authors such as Augusto Higa Oshiro and Karol Flores Yonekura, it is possible to see the single layer of identity in Peru when they describe Peruvian identity as being intertwined with the Japanese identity. Even though the works of authors such as Higa Oshiro, Fernando Iwasaki and others reflect this statement, I wanted to research amongst people who were not involved with the arts to see if this single layer identity was also manifested within the day-to-day basis to other individuals. I have already had the opportunity to visit and to have access to the archives of the Asociación Peruano Japonesa. 

The Migration, Mobility and Immobility Project allowed me to gather the necessary data in Peru so as to complete my project. Through contacts I have been establishing with Japanese-Peruvian institutions, such as the Departamento de Cultura and the Centro Cultural Peruano Japonés, I was able to attend the Japanese Culture Week in November of 2019 and to conduct the interviews with the support of the Asociación Peruano Japonesa and their chief editor Yuri Sakata Gonzales. I was able to interview and exchange information with people whose ages ranged from 21 to 85 years old and that belonged to the most varied Japanese generations (first through fifth), and the responses helped me to solidify my argument thatNikkei identity is already embedded within national identity in Peru. I was also able to interview several renowned literary authors that have been militant into exposing and bringing attention to the Japanese and Okinawan presence in Peru. They work to highlight the difference those peoples carry as migrant subjects when compared to the native population. Doris Moromisato, Augusto Higa Oshiro and Pépe Cabaña are authors considered tokens of Nikkei representation in Peru, and due to the MMI grant, I was able to present them my research and its findings in contribution to the advancement of the Nikkei identity cause.