The expansion of globalization has allowed ethnic minority groups to reconnect with their ancestral homelands. It can also increase the volume of ethnic return migration depending on the ethnic homeland’s labor market and national policies. As one interviewee said, “Everybody has someone in Japan.” However, diasporic return migration results in new ethnic minorities due to cultural differences that have developed among peoples, who earlier inhabited the same country but have been separated for generations (Tsuda 2009). As I deal with returnees, Japan offers a recurrent labor market that provides temporary jobs and the possibility of savings, for those who live in Bastos, a small city, where jobs are scarce.
Based on interviews with elderly immigrants, and using the concept of adjustment (Gans 2000) among other concepts, this book examines the twentieth-century immigration to São Paulo State, specifically to Bastos. Then, I deal with the circular migration of the twenty-first century or transnational labor migration, also based on interviews with the returnees using concepts such as labor broker, and others necessary for data understanding and explanation. The dialogue between the analyzed material and the social sciences allows the creation of concepts, such as the messianic movement in order to understand the national conflicts within the Japanese colonies, especially in Bastos, between the Kachigumi and the Makegumi during and after the end of World War II.
However, the concept of circular migration or transnational ethnic return has been questioned lately due to the dichotomy between Japan and Brazil being undermined by other options, such as moving from Japan to the United States, or other first world countries (Oda 2010). Young middle-class Japanese Brazilians have another option of moving among Brazil, Japan, and Australia, thus creating a triangular circulation on their own behalf (Rocha 2014). Nevertheless, in this research I did not find those migration movements.
Therefore, after analyzing the information, I will compare the data with the adopted concepts and the theory of socioeconomic formation, in order to find whether they explain the phenomena (Marx 1976: 38). I eventually take into account the impact of other migrants (white Brazilians, Italian immigrants, Afro-Brazilian former slaves, and mixed ancestor migrants) on the immigrant community as a whole in the twentieth century.
Using the comparative method, the only one suitable for sociology according to Durkheim (1966), I compare the familial relationships of the twentieth-century immigrants to those of the twenty-first-century transnational migrants, based on socio-historical studies of Brazilian families and Japanese families. I also compare Japanese immigrants to different ethnic immigrants’ families and their adjustment in Brazil, focusing on gender and generation based on literature and my empirical material (Cardoso 1995; Handa 1980, 1987; Vieira 1973; Kawamura 2003; Tsuda 2003; Glenn 1986; Ueno 2009; Kosminsky 2014, 2012, 2009a, 2009b, 2007, 2004).
I also compare the childhood of the earlier immigrants to the current one of children who went to Japan and returned to Bastos and to children who were left behind by their parents. I use the concept of socialization in analyzing one interview with a girl and an observation of a boy, and in analyzing the interviews with adults collected in Bastos, and references collected in Japan. I consider the interviewed girl as an extended case study due to the peculiarities that she presents, which highlight most of the problems these children face according to the literature (Burawoy 1991; Durkheim 1922; Fernandes 1942; Lareau 2003; Plaisance 2004; Kawamura 2003; Ishikawa 2014; Kosminsky 1992, 2000a).
Ethnographic research helps to explain the value of using the theory of transnational labor migration in this setting. I conducted fieldwork in Bastos, with several students, including observation, interviews as dialogues, and participant observation of the immigrants and their descendants (Burawoy 1991). One of the students assisted the elderly Japanese immigrants, translating from Japanese into Portuguese. Others played Taiko 4 with other students at a Taiko classroom. The students and I participated in a lot of activities with the city’s inhabitants and the members of the Cultural and Sport Nikkei Association of Bastos (Associação Cultural e Esportiva Nikkei de Bastos, ACENBA). Before the students and I left Bastos, we followed the Japanese ritual, according to my former Japanese Brazilian student, of giving each person in the community a small gift.
The students and I invited those who were able to come from Bastos and Marília to a round table to commemorate the centenary of the Japanese immigration to Brazil at São Paulo State University, Marília. We heard the stories of hardship and deprivation experienced in their first years of colonization. We also offered Japanese food—one dish showed a sign of adjustment to Brazilian culture, a dessert with coconut—after their testimony. Translators were provided for those who had difficulty communicating in Portuguese. We chose to work in Bastos due to its past as the most Japanese city outside Japan. Its small size also made the fieldwork more manageable.
I’ve used pseudonyms for all interviewees even for those from Marília who took part in the centenary of the Japanese immigration to Brazil.
The sociological history of the two migration movements provides a framework for our ethnographic research which, mediated by the sociological imagination, investigates the relations between history and biography within society or the links between “the personal troubles of the milieu and the public issues of social structure” (Mills 2000: 6, 8). It is comparative due to the cross-cultural comparison between Japanese immigrants’ families and transnational Japanese Brazilian families (Baily 1990; Baily and Ramella 1988; Kosminsky 1996, 1999, 1999a, 2000b).
Detailed Fieldwork
My first fieldwork step started in 2005 when my students and I interviewed the elderly immigrants who had arrived years earlier as landowners in Bastos. They had come directly from Japan and settled on land that their parents had bought before leaving. Among these immigrants were Mrs. Saito and Mrs. Tanaka. Monica Sasai conducted most of Mrs. Saito’s interview in Japanese and translated it into Portuguese. A couple of Nisei, Elisa and Cesar, who ran a local photo shop, introduced my students and me to Mrs. Saito’s daughter, who owned a gift store. Takahashi Akira drove us to Mrs. Tanaka’s home; she spoke Portuguese in her interview. Both women spoke about their childhood and youth, their families’ relationships, their experiences, and their feelings about their immigration. Both were middle class, although Mrs. Tanaka might be considered upper middle class in Japan. They came with their own families, as proprietors of land in Bastos and brought capital with them. They felt their adjustment to life in Brazil ran smoothly. I noticed how they valued their links with Japanese culture and their concern about keeping Japanese customs, especially when they talked about marriage and the responsibility of the oldest son to his parents.
My second fieldwork step occurred in 2006 when my students and I arrived at the kaikan 5 (Associação Cultural e Esportiva Nikkei de Bastos—ACENBA—Nikkei Sport and Cultural Association of Bastos), where we were very well received. We sat down around a big table in the meeting room that displayed pictures of former directors on the wall. Old picture albums of directors and houses were on a small table in the corner. Mr. Takahashi Akira introduced us and then presented everybody who was there: Mr. Goichi Watanabe, Mr. Kobayashi, Mr. Fukui, Mr. Roberto Hiroshi Takeuchi, Dr. Yoshi, professor of anthropology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, who spoke only Japanese, and came with a grant to assemble the Regional Museum Saburo Yamanaka of Bastos; Cleide Yamamoto, a bilingual young woman who had been helping Dr. Yoshi and later showed us the city and a poultry farm, and Ms. Yanagisako, professor of Japanese who came through JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) in order to teach Japanese at the ACENBA. The following day Mr. Hasegawa and Dona Luisa, who were labor brokers, were interviewed.
My students and I interviewed seven men and two women: Takahashi Akira, seventy-eight;6 Goichi Watanabe, a medical doctor and president of ACENBA, in his late seventies; Mr. Kobayashi in his late sixties; Mr. Fukui in his early seventies; Mr. Hasegawa in his early seventies, Antonio Suzuki, eighty-three; Dona Luisa in her early thirties, and sixty-eight-year-old Keiko Fukui,7 who with her husband owned the hotel where we stayed as guests during the field research.8