Japanese Brazilians: The Japanese language community in Brazil

This chapter examines Japanese language maintenance and change among contemporary Japanese-Brazilians.Japanese first came to Bra- zil in the early 1900s, and currently over one and a half million people of Japanese ancestry live in the country.Early Japanese settlers were required by the Brazilian government to immigrate as family units and worked on coffee plantations under conditions little different from that of the former African slaves.Gradually, as they acquired some money, Japanese-Brazilians left these plantations and moved to isolated farm areas, living among themselves.To this day, many have maintained the Japanese language and have fostered a strong awareness of their ethnic heritage.Today, however, many Japanese-Brazilians have moved to the cities, as rural Japanese farmers send the smartest children off to the universities to get an education.Instead of returning to the farms, these young people have become professionals, entering the middle classes and associating with non-Japanese.These educated Japanese- Brazilians now even feel some shame about their farming-family background.The Japanese-Brazilians who stayed in farming areas, however, have kept their Japanese customs and still highly respect their parents' traditional ways.In this paper, I will argue that these two types of Japanese-Brazilians have developed distinct styles of the Japanese language, each reflecting different social milieus, economic conditions, and cultural values.Diaspora, Identity, and Language Communities or Kansai (western Japan).For Sao Juanquine is one of the main 'Japantowns' in South America.3This is quite unlike the typical North American city, where few Japantowns exist, and those that do are tourist attractions, as the Little Tokyos of San Francisco or Los Angeles (Adachi 2000a).In Sao Juanqine, people of Japa- nese descent live and work, and the area still has a feeling of being the home of immigrants.People awake at dawn and open their shops; the smells of some of the best Japanese and Brazilian dishes emanate from open windows at mealtimes.Nor are these feelings restricted only to urban areas: When one takes the bus to the countryside, in several hours they will find not only small smatterings of old Japanese settlements, but also whole Japanese communities as well.In fact our traveler might even feel as if they were visiting a Japanese farm village of the early 20th century.'*However, the kinds of Japanese spoken in these two areascity and coun- tryare not the same.The Japanese of urban Japanese-Brazilians is heavily in- fluenced by Portuguese as compared to the Japanese spoken by rural Japanese- Brazilians.Because of this heavy Portuguese influence, the Japanese of urban Japanese-Brazilians is often thought to be dying due to the assimilation, both gradual and rapid, resulting from living among Portuguese speakers (Handa 1980;Nomoto 1969).What I call 'Urban Japanese' is not the result of the process of language death, even though it is significantly different from 'Rural Japanese'.I suggest that these differences are shaped by the different socio-economic values of these two groups.In this chapter, I will examine the cultural and historical elements that shaped these Unguistic differences and the economic and social values that caused them.I will first look at the ethnohistory of early Japanese immigration to Brazil.I will then look at the phonology, morphology, and semantics of the Japanese lan- guage used by urban and rural Japanese-Brazilians.I claim that the Japanese lan- guage is being used quite actively in both locales, and the reason for this is that the language is so closely tied to Japanese-Brazilian identity, sense of self, and notions of class.Indeed, I would say that language is the key symbol and trope in all these cases. The socio-historical development of the Japanese communities in BrazilThe peak period of Japanese-Brazilian immigration was in the 1930s when the Japanese government and privately-funded emigrant associations built four villages in the forests of Sao Paulo and Parana states.5 The Japanese government wished to reduce its population and wanted to establish Japanese colonies overseas to show its political and economic power to the Western nations (Nihon Immin Hachiju-nen-shi 1991).Just a few generations earlier, Japan had finally opened the country after some two hundred and sixty years of self-imposed isolation.Japan felt it had to protect itself from the Western nations expanding their colonies in Asia, particularly India, China, and Indonesia.

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