Blog 7 – Japanese/Brazilian Immigrants and their Worldly Understanding

By Eric Yu

The Japanese – Brazilian relationship is particularly interesting to understand, especially since it reveals how cross-racial dynamics can be formed and manipulated to achieve a particular goal. DuBois’ concept about interacting within a particular political framework to obtain political power seems fitting for use in this example due to how such immigrants must work for freedom from restrictions via emancipation, obtaining citizenship rights, and working with the political realm for power (Valverde Oct. 27, 2015). While these three steps seem quite obvious at first, the manners of which they are executed on seems quite fitting for immigrants adapting to different cultures throughout the world, not only in the United States. In particular, Schein notes how Japanese people were able to manipulate the idea of “whiteness” by being able to “construct a national hierarchy by identifiable ethnic characteristics” (Lesser 2005, p.114). Such manipulation has furthered itself on a larger scale by actually having control over vital Brazilian structures, such as economics and politics (Lesser 2005). Additionally, such constructions of whiteness play a part in how future Japanese-Brazilians grew up in Brazil and how a number of them did not feel culturally Japanese despite coming from such a family (Veselinovic, 2013).

Original Caption: “Little Tokyo - Liberdade, a central Sao Paulo neighborhood, feels more like Tokyo due to 600,000 Japanese descendents who live there. At weekends its buzzy food stalls attract residents of all nationalities.”

From: Veselinovic, M. (2013, Jul. 24). Mixing sushi and samba - meet the Japanese Brazilians. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/11/world/brazil-japanese-community/

Question: How has the experiences of Japanese in the United States compared to those in Brazil (based off what you know and from the reading)?

Works Cited

Lesser, J. (2005). From Japanese to Nikkei and Back. In W. W. Anderson & R. G. Lee (Eds.), Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas (pp. 112-121). New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Valverde, K. C. (2015, Oct. 27). Lecture on Culture. Personal Collection of K.C. Valverde, University of California Davis, Davis CA.

Veselinovic, M. (2013, Jul. 24). Mixing sushi and samba - meet the Japanese Brazilians. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/11/world/brazil-japanese-community/