Representations of Home in Obasan and Nihonjin: The Issei, Nisei, Sansei of Canada and Brazil
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981) and Oscar Nakasato's Nihonjin (2011) are two novels that narrate the lives of Japanese diaspora in Canada and Brazil respectively.Both countries share a rich tradition of Japanese migration during the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, which, while distinct in important ways, has resulted in a significant body of cultural production.In this article, I examine spatiotemporal treatments of the home space in Obasan and Nihonjin, arguing that this realm serves two primary functions: 1) as a site for the expression and construction of identity 2) as a point of disruption and resistance in the face of cultural, linguistic and national alienation.Examining Japanese migration literature from a comparative lens sheds light on the past as a gateway to the present, while nuancing national discourses around race and ethnicity.Although these two narratives are separated by thousands of miles and thirty years in their publication dates, Japanese migrant tales from Brazil and Canada teach us diverse and intersecting lessons about ethnic heritage and cultural plurality.The domestic space is particularly critical for observing these crossings as its attention to language, food culture and other artifacts reveals a multi-layered experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".