Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production

294 Pages·2019·9.212 MB·English

by  Ignacio López-Calvo

JAPANESE
BRAZILIAN
SAUDADES
The George and Sakaye Aratani Nikkei in the Americas Series
SERIES EDITOR LANE HIRABAYASHI
This series endeavors to capture the best scholarship available illustrating
the evolving nature of contemporary Japanese American culture and com-
munity. By stretching the boundaries of the field to the limit (whether at a
substantive, theoretical, or comparative level) these books aspire to influ-
ence future scholarship in this area specifically, and Asian American Studies,
more generally.
Barbed Voices: Oral History, Resistance, and the World War II Japanese Ameri-
can Social Disaster, Arthur A. Hansen
Distant Islands: The Japanese American Community in New York City,
1876– 1930s, Daniel H. Inouye
The House on Lemon Street, Mark Howland Rawitsch
Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarcera-
tion, Mira Shimabukuro
Starting from Loomis and Other Stories, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, edited and with
an introduction by Tim Yamamura
Taken from the Paradise Isle: The Hoshida Family Story, edited by Heidi Kim
and with a foreword by Franklin Odo
JAPANESE
BRAZILIAN
SAUDADES
DIASPORIC IDENTITIES &
CULTURAL PRODUCTION
Ignacio López- Calvo
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OF COLORADO
Louisville
© 2019 by University Press of Colorado
Published by University Press of Colorado
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Louisville, Colorado 80027
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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the Association of University Presses.
The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part,
by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State
University of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State
University, and Western State Colorado University.
∞ This paper meets the requirements of the ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
ISBN: 978- 1- 60732- 849- 0 (cloth)
ISBN: 978- 1- 60732- 850- 6 (ebook)
DOI: https:// doi .org/ 10 .5876/ 9781607328506
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Lopez-Calvo, Ignacio, author. | Lesser, Jeff, writer of foreword.
Title: Japanese-Brazilian saudades : diasporic identities and cultural production / Ignacio Lopez-
Calvo ; foreword by Jeffrey Lesser.
Other titles: George and Sakaye Aratani Nikkei in the Americas series.
Description: Louisville, Colorado : University Press of Colorado, 2019. | Series: George and
Sakaye Aratani Nikkei in the Americas series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019017945 | ISBN 9781607328490 (cloth) | ISBN 9781607328506 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Japanese—Brazil—Ethnic identity. | Motion pictures—Brazil—History. |
Brazilian literature—20th century—Japanese authors—History and criticism. | National charac-
teristics, Japanese, in motion pictures. | National characteristics, Japanese, in literature.
Classification: LCC F2659.J3 L85 2019 | DDC 305.8956/081—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017945
This publication was made possible with the support of Naomi, Kathleen, Ken, and Paul Harada,
who donated funds in memory of their father, Harold Shigetaka Harada, honoring his quest
for justice and civil rights. Additional support for this publication was also provided, in part, by
UCLA’s Aratani Endowed Chair, as well as Wallace T. Kido, Joel B. Klein, Elizabeth A. Uno, and
Rosalind K. Uno.
Some of the information included in this book was previously published in “Cultural Celebration,
Historical Memory, and Claim to Place in Júlio Miyazawa’s Yawara! A Travessia Nihondin-B rasil and
Uma Rosa para Yumi,” in Imagining Asia in the Americas, ed. Zelideth Maria Rivas and Debbie Lee-
DiStefano, 158–83 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016).
To the memory of Gonzalo López Martínez, my father, my teacher, my role model.

Contents
Foreword by Jeffrey Lesser ix
Acknowledgments xiii
A Note on Translation xv
Introduction: Diasporas, Unstable Identities, and Nikkei Discourse 3
1 Historical Memory and Claiming Place 46
2 Between Assimilationism and Cultural Celebration 84
3 Female Agency, Nostalgia, and Generational Gaps 109
4 The Impact of World War II on the Nikkeijin 141
5 Contested Modernities: Dekasegi (Self- )Representations
and the Nipponization of Brazil 172
6 Brazilian Dekasegi Children in Japanese Film 212
Epilogue 239
Chronological List of Analyzed Works 261
Works Cited 263
Index 275

Foreword
JEFFREY LESSER
One of my favorite literary subgenres has “ethnic” cops as heroes. In these
novels, “ethnicity” is portrayed as an insider identity generated in largely closed
communities whose members struggle in interactions with society at large.
Not surprisingly, the ethnic cop genre is often produced by authors who share
an identity with the main character: typical is Japanese (US) American Naomi
Hirahara’s amateur sleuth, who is a seventy- year- old Japanese American gar-
dener.1 Chinese (US) American author Henry Chang’s fictional hero is Jack
Yu, a Chinese American cop assigned to New York’s Chinatown. In Chang’s
most recent novel, Death Money, a scene in an illegal gambling den in New
York City is described by the narrator this way: “There were a few other
Asians, he could not tell what kind . . . Cuban maybe?”2
Ignacio López- Calvo’s Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic Identities and
Cultural Production is an academic examination of what Chang means when
he describes “Cubans” as a type of “Asian.” By treating identity (ethnic,
national, regional) as situational, López- Calvo makes an important statement
of what has been termed the New Latin American Ethnic Studies, a scholarly
DOI: 10.5876/9781607328506.c000a
x FoREwoRd
movement seeking to move beyond the traditional black-w hite- indigenous
social construction of the region.3 Japanese Brazilian Saudades reminds us that
the essentialist discourses often found among subjects and scholars when
discussing identities are neither uniform nor consistent. Indeed, by decon-
structing the many ways that Nikkei construct aspects of their identities,
López- Calvo reminds readers that being an “insider” and an “outsider” are
two sides of the same coin, constantly being leveraged against an always
changing set of traditional norms.
Japanese Brazilian Saudades is not just an important addition to the New
Latin American Ethnic Studies because of its approach to identity; the book
helps readers to understand why moments of normative ethnicity (i.e., as
practiced or felt by a majority of any particular ethnic group) seem most
likely observed among those least engaged with ethnic institutions. As he
shows, Japanese Brazilian identity discourses are much more varied than
those expressed by, for example, presidents of kenjin- kai, or Nikkei social
clubs. By using a wide source base that includes the discursive, the archival,
and the visual, Nikkei Brazilians helps to denaturalize ethnicity and to turn
identity from essential to negotiated.
Readers will be challenged by a narrative structure that plays with tempo-
rality in the same ways that real humans do, something often absent from
scholarly works that demand that subjects behave like clocks. López- Calvo,
on the other hand, uses the innovative technique of examining contempo-
rary novels and films by the period they cover, rather than the time when they
were produced. In doing this, he shows how saudades, a word often translated
as “yearnings” but which speaks to the national identity of many Brazilians,
gets re- created outside of traditional chronologies. This allows him to avoid
what I consider the most dangerous word in scholarship, “or,” and its binary
categories masking conclusions with false questions. Unlike many scholars
who ask their subjects “do you feel more Japanese or Brazilian,” López- Calvo
privileges a different word, “and,” and thus analyzes complex responses that
do not reduce subject lives to simplicities.
Japanese Brazilian Saudades is more than a book about Japan, Brazil, and
Nikkei; it is a statement of how scholarly work can best represent the com-
plexities and simplicities of multicultural lives.