New Worlds, New Lives: Globalization and People of Japanese Descent in the Americas and from Latin America in Japan

During the mass migrations at the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, the Japanese who left their home islands for other Asian shores actually outnumbered those who crossed the Pacific. However, the devastation of World War II and the ensuing repatriations shrunk the Japanese settlements in Asia to such a degree that today 90 percent of the three million people of Japanese descent outside of Japan reside in the Western Hemisphere. Given this situation, the decision of the editors to restrict the scope of this volume to the Americas is a valid one, and so is their geographical coverage within the hemisphere. The book’s 20 chapters deal not only with the large Nikkei communities of Brazil and the United States but also with the midsized groups of Peru and Canada, the small settlements of Bolivia and Paraguay, and the three hundred thousand Latin American dekasegi, or temporary workers, who have settled in Japan during the last two decades.The declared goal of the volume is to examine the impact of globalization on Nikkei identity from an insider’s point of view. The project was conceived as part of the Japanese American National Museum’s community-based approach, and all but 1 of the 23 contributors are of Japanese descent. These types of endeavors often churn out celebratory accounts of the group’s tribulations and accomplishments— more hagiographic than scholarly. New Worlds transcends these limitations, but many of its chapters do exhibit a certain parochialism in their inability to engage the broader literature on migration and ethnicity. Indeed, half of the chapters do not cite a single scholarly work on anything other than their specific case studies: an odd level of insularity for a book on globalization. The editors attempt to overcome this problem by framing the substantive chapters within the theoretical construct of globalization. They then organize the book into three parts: the cases where globalization has preserved or intensified Nikkei identities, those where the effect has been erosive, and those where it has promoted hybrid, transnational, and cosmopolitan identities. But this commendable effort runs into a series of obstacles. Neither the editors nor the contributors attempt to define a specific set of markers (such as marriage, residency, occupational patterns, language use, political preferences, associational activities, or self-definition) that would enable the authors to measure and compare trends in ethnic identity. Individual chapters necessarily touch upon one or more of these, since they represent obvious markers of ethnicity, but they fail to do so in a systematic way. So, for example, we learn that nowadays close to one half of the Nikkei in Brazil, and one-third of those in Peru, marry outside their race, but there is no comparable information for the other countries. The same unevenness appears in the discussion of all other indicators of ethnicity. Given that most of the contributors find, not surprisingly, instances of ethnic identity preservation, erosion, and transformation in the same case study, the lack of a systematic approach makes it difficult to detect dominant trends and the rationale for placing the various cases in the three categories that the editors formulated. Even if the prevailing trends in Nikkei identities could be established, attributing them to globalization becomes problematic. The contributors were not instructed to frame their studies within this construct, and most of them restricted their inquiries to the recent past. How can we know, then, that the identified tendencies did not precede the globalization spurt of the last two decades, or that they reflect internal processes of adaptation instead of globalization? With the exception of the dekasegi phenomenon, the other trends discussed in the volume could have been easily framed in traditional models of assimilation, acculturation, and hybridity. In this regard, globalization theory appears more as an expletive than as a necessary, or even suitable, framework.Despite its conceptual looseness, the book contains much that should be of interest to the readers of this journal. Jeffrey Lesser contributes a fine chapter on the interplay between immigrant identity politics and Brazilian nationalism. The chapters on Brazilian dekasegi show that their remittances have become the third largest source of foreign currency (after coffee and iron ore exports) and discuss Japanese attitudes toward these “returnees.” Naomi Hoki Moniz’s essay on Tizuka Yamazaki makes an apt reading assignment for classes that use this Brazilian filmmaker’s Gaijin. The four chapters on Peru survey the Japanese presence from the first arrivals in 1899 to Fujimori, compare the results of two Nikkei opinion polls conducted in 1989 and 1998, examine gender roles, and insightfully compare race, class, and nationalism in the formulation of Nikkei identities in Peru and the United States. Another explicitly comparative essay examines political empowerment in Gardena, California, Hawaii, and Brazil. And for those interested in a quick overview of Japanese emigration, Harumi Befu’s introductory chapter goes from fifteenth-century pirates to twenty-first-century executives in a dozen pages.

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