Abstracts & Biographies

Transnational Japanese Diaspora

Preserving the Brazilian Nikkei Literary and Cultural Heritage

November 5, 2021

Panel 1

Koroniago: A less prestigious Japanese language or a language of Japanese-Brazilian identity or a dialect of memory preservation?

Leiko Matsubara Morales, Associate Professor of Japanese, University of São Paulo. She is a researcher of Japanese Language, Literature and Culture in the Literature Program of University of São Paulo

Abstract: The Japanese presence in Brazil exceeds 113 years, and in 2008 descendants reached their sixth generation (Veja Magazine, 2008). There is a large notable community of speakers in which Japanese is the language of communication between both native Japanese and their descendants. Thus, language, as well as culture, in the sense of social and cultural practice, are natural acquisitions resulting from the coexistence of Japanese people through activities performed by Japanese associations, gathered around kaikan. However, some studies have noticed a hierarchization between the local culture known as Nikkei and a Japanese one, native to Japan. This is identified in terms of koroniago, known as the Japanese-Brazilian variant, a dialect that brings different elements from the Tokyo dialect due to lexical borrowings and syntactic constructions based on code-switching. What we present in this paper are some examples of the emergence of that variant in the extent of the current use of the language and also of Japanese language teaching in nihongogakko, a type of community school. We search to understand how this may have contributed to the erasure of the Japanese language in Brazil due to the lack of a host language policy based on sociolinguistic studies and on papers regarding people’s empowerment, especially teachers who spoke that variant.

The Postwar Afterlife of Livraria Yendo

Ted Mack, Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature, University of Washington. He is the author of Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature: Publishing, Prizes, and the Ascription of Literary Value (Duke, 2010) and the forthcoming Acquired Alterity: Migration, Identity, and Literary Nationalism (California, 2022).

Abstract: In my talk I will use newly digitized and character-recognized texts in the Hoji Shimbun Database to examine what became of a prewar Japanese-language bookstore that was central to the intellectual and cultural lives of the migrants living in Brazil: Endō Shoten, or Livraria Yendo. In addition to providing a preliminary postwar history of the business, I will use this case to discuss the value of new technologies to expand our understanding of the humanities.

Questions & Answers

Panel 2

Fujin Ran (Column for Ladies) in the Burajiru Jihô Newspaper: Bilateral Social Influence (1917-1924)

Monica Okamoto, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, Federal University of Paraná. Author of the book The French Influence in the Brazilian Discourse in Japan. Immigration, Identity and Racial Prejudice (2016). Coordinated with Maria Ligaya Fujita the web documentary NipoBrasileiros (Pietà Filmes, 2019), winner of the Brave New Series Award at the Seoul Web Festival 2019. Researcher at the National Research Foundation of South Korea in the area of Asian immigration (May 2017- May 2019).

Abstract: In this paper I analyze the social condition of Japanese immigrant women in Brazil based on the articles by Fujin Ran (Column for Ladies), which were published between 1917 and 1924 in the Japanese-Brazilian newspaper Burajiru Jihô (Brazil News 1917-1941). I examine how this press tried to resume social control by redirecting the thinking and behavior of these women for the benefit of the male immigrants and the Japanese government. Jihô’s effort to subdue Japanese immigrant women, however, culminated in a process of bilateral social influence. It is necessary to point out that the approach of this research is not exclusively oriented to gender relations or other articulations in this sense. In effect, this study focuses on Japanese immigrant history and the role of Nikkei newspapers in addressing issues of the female universe.

From Nihonjinron to Mimicry in Ryoki Inoue’s Saga

Ignacio López-Calvo, Presidential Endowed Chair and Professor of Latin American Literature, UC Merced. He is the author of 80 articles and 8 books: Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production; Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Tusán Literature and Knowledge in Peru; The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru; Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety; Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture; “Trujillo and God”: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator; Religión y militarismo en la obra de Marcos Aguinis 1963-2000; Written in Exile: Chilean Fiction from 1973-Present.

Abstract: Japanese Brazilian literature, like much of Japanese-Latin American cultural production, often reflects Japanese immigrants’ awareness of their responsibility to improve their country’s international prestige abroad. Before departing for their destination, government officials would often remind them about their duty to succeed abroad, each one of them becoming ambassadors of a modern, philanthropic country willing to provide exemplary workers and advanced technology to remote, agricultural areas of Latin America. Although, of course, without the conquering and annexing policies exhibited in East Asia, Japanese immigration to Latin America was certainly part of the imperial designs of a Japanese government that was anxious to find new markets for their products as well as new sources of raw materials and remittances. The immigrants’ impetus to abide by this imperative of providing a good image of the Japanese community and, by extension, of the Japanese empire often brought their cultural production close to the discourse of Nihonjinron, a predisposition at times seemingly inherited by their descendants’ literature. This presentation explores the rhetorical invention of Japaneseness in ways reminiscent of Nihonjinron discourse in Japanese Brazilian author Ryoki Inoue’s (né José Carlos Ryoki de Alpoim Inoue, 1946-) novel Saga. A história de quatro gerações de uma família japonesa no Brasil (Saga. The History of Four Generations of a Japanese Family in Brazil, 2006), as well as the—perhaps unintended—ensuing negation of this stance through the mimicry that characterizes the behavior of an Afro-Brazilian character in the last chapter of the novel.

The Nikkeijin Literary Identity Transformation in Brazil: An Analysis of Portuguese Language Publications in Japanese-Brazilian Newspapers and Literary Magazines

Clara Fachini Zanirato, Assistant Professor of Portuguese, United States Military Academy at West Point. Her research highlights the contributions of the Japanese diaspora to Brazilian and Peruvian identities. Dr. Zanirato's forthcoming manuscript analyses contemporary Nikkei literature and cinema in order to understand the development of diasporic Japanese identities within Latin America. Her other research interests include contemporary immigration literature and audiovisual material in Brazil.

Abstract: The development of a Nikkei identity in Brazil has been the research object of numerous papers and scholars. Understanding the development of the Japanese-Brazilian aspect in the country is fundamental to tracing the critical path for a multifaceted national identity. Concomitantly, the idea of a homogenous and unified Brazilian identity has been debunked if it ever was a reality at all. The literary production of underrepresented minorities such as Nikkeijins is a point of entry into marking their existence within Brazilian society. However, the particularity of Japanese-Brazilian publications is the long-lasting use of the Japanese language in newspapers and journals printed in Brazil. One of the reasons for such linguistic choice is that many of the mentioned publications were also the only way the colônias would receive and pass along news from Japan. However, I argue that it is possible to see in these materials the infiltration (even though forced by laws and policies) of the use of Portuguese language starting in the early 1900s, and, therefore, it reflects some level of integration to Brazilian society.

In this brief paper, I intend to bring to light the Nikkei identity transition by looking at newspapers and literary magazine’s publications. I will do a close reading of selected Portuguese-written occurrences in Japanese-Brazilian journals and newspapers. For this analysis, I chose to work with Burajiro Jihō, first published by Seisaku Kuroishi in São Paulo, in 1917, "Revista Colônia", published since 1944 by Sociedade Paulista de Cultura Japonesa Bunkyo and, finally, "Colônia Bungaku", a literary magazine published by Grêmio Literário Colônia since 1966, founded by Antônio Nojiri.

Questions & Answers

Break

Panel 3

Transnationality in Nikkei Women's Arts in Brazil

Michiko Okano, Associate Professor in the History of Asian Art at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP). She is coordinator of the GEEA (Asian Art Study Group) and author of Ma: in between spaces of art in Japan (2011), Manabu Mabe (2013) and Helena and Riokai: between Brazil and Japan, Paris (2021). She is also curator of InCommom Gaze: Revisited Japan, Oscar Niemeyer Museum, 2016, and Transpacific Borderlands: The Art of Japanese Diaspora, Japanese American Museum, 2017-2018.

Abstract: This presentation aims to understand Nikkei art as a dialogical connection between two different and distant spatialities, the country of origin and the country of displacement. This study is based on six Nikkei female artists: Tomie Ohtake (1913 - 2015) and Alina Okinaka (1920 - 1991), both pre-war immigrants; Sachiko Koshikoku (1937 - 2019) and Shoko Suzuki (1929 - ), post-war immigrants; and Erica Kaminishi (1979 - ) and Yukie Hori (1979 - ), descendants of Japanese born and raised in Brazil.

Tomie Ohtake is a well-known artist in Brazil who has worked with paintings and sculptures, while Alina Okinaka has always been hidden in the shadow of her artist husband, Masao Okinaka. Among a few Japanese-Brazilian women artists of the time, Ohtake, in informal abstractionism and Okinaka, in figurativism, hybridized elements of the two cultures in their works. Sachiko Koshikoku and Shoko Suzuki came to Brazil in search of freedom to work in their arts. Koshikoku adopts the pre-Columbian theme, thus verifying that transnationality is not limited to Brazil and Japan, while Suzuki employs Japanese aesthetics and technique in ceramics, with local clay and the feeling of freedom conquered in Brazil. Erica Kaminishi and Yukie Hori currently live in Paris and Japan respectively, and transnational displacement has brought significant changes to their works. In the case of Kaminishi, the issue of Japanese-Brazilian identity and a sense of belonging is present in her work, sometimes with a critical sense, while Hori brings thematic changes when she goes to Japan to develop her doctorate, presenting the feelings that surfaced as she left the scope of the imaginary and faced the reality of Japan.

Nikkei women artists have a strong presence in Brazil from pre-war immigrants to the present day and produce works that bring transnational dialogue.

Japanese Dances in Brazil: From Traditional Imagination to Pop Experiences

Christine Greiner, Director of the Center of Oriental Studies, Pontifical Catholic U. of São Paulo. She is also full professor of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and the author of several books and articles on Japanese culture and art, and philosophy of the body.

Abstract: The impact of Japanese dances in Brazil started from the very beginning as a way of preserving the cultural memory of immigrants, by bringing people closer together. Several small amateur groups tried to preserve the noh theater dances, the kabuki choreographies, and other different sources of Japanese folk dances. From the second half of the 1980s, professional artists became interested in Japanese culture, focusing on traditional theaters, butoh dance and some specific trainings such as ai ki do martial art. With the explosion of pop culture, in the 1990s, new references appeared, from kawaii aesthetics to many other mediatic movements and fashion tendencies. The purpose of this lecture is to present a brief overview of the impact of these experiences on the Brazilian artistic scene.

Questions & Answers

Discussion

Concluding Remarks

Eiichiro Azuma, Professor of History and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania and Hoover Visiting Fellow

Short Bios of the Other Participants

Eiichiro Azuma is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Asian American history with an emphasis on Japanese Americans and transpacific migration, as well as U.S. and Japanese colonialisms and U.S.-Japan relations. Azuma is author of two monographs and two co-edited books. In 2019, he published In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (University of California Press) and Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Seth Jacobowitz is the Interim Resident Director of the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies (KCJS). He is the author of Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Harvard Asia Center, 2015), which won the 2017 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize in the Humanities. He is also the translator of the Edogawa Rampo Reader (Kurodahan Press, 2008) and of Fernando Morais’ Dirty Hearts: The History of Shindo Renmei (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022).

Kaoru (Kay) Ueda is the Curator for Hoover Institution Library & Archives' Japanese Diaspora Collection at Stanford University and manages the endowed Japanese Diaspora Initiative. She acquires archival materials on Japan and overseas Japanese and promotes their use for educational and scholarly purposes. She also curates and develops the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, the world's most extensive online full-image open-access digital collection of prewar overseas Japanese newspapers. She edited On a Collision Course: The Dawn of Japanese Migration in the Nineteenth Century (authored by Yasuo Sakata in Japanese, Hoover Press, 2020) and Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan (Hoover Press, 2021)

Lidia Reiko Yamashita was born in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil as the second generation of Japanese immigrants. She graduated from the Faculty of Urban Planning and Architecture, University of Sao Paulo. She received a scholarship from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government at the Department of Architecture, Tokyo Metropolitan University. After holding various professional positions, she served as a coordinator at The Japanese Immigration Ship Passengers Lists Digitization Project, Ashiato Subcommittee, Brazil-Japan Committee of the Centenary of Japanese immigration in Brazil in 2005 and became the Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Historical Museum of Japanese Immigration in Brazil in 2007 and later the Chairman since 2019. She has been recently appointed as the sixth Vice President of the Brazilian Society of the Japanese Culture and Social Assistance in April 2021.