There are more people of Japanese extraction living in Brazil’s Sao Paulo Province than there are in all the other countries of the world put together, Japan excluded.
The remarkable immigration began in 1908, a year after the US had prohibited virtually all further Japanese arrivals. The government in Tokyo encouraged it, believing their country had too many farmers for the land available. And many more arrived in Brazil in the years immediately following World War II. But few of the Japanese Brazilians, known locally as “Nikkei,” remained farmers for long. Most took education very seriously, and many moved into the city and quickly became prosperous middle-class success stories. And the other Brazilians were if anything proud of them. If these hard-working and talented people can run our businesses and use their Japanese connections, went the general opinion, then maybe one day Brazil will be as rich as Japan.
A Discontented Diaspora looks at the phenomenon in general, then goes on to investigate two specific areas of Japanese-Brazilian activity — their participation in erotic movies and their involvement in political radicalism, both during the 1960s and 1970s.
The films the author discusses don’t appear very erotic by the standards of today’s pornography. Screened 40 years ago in mainstream Sao Paulo cinemas, they seem rather to be social comedies on mildly sexual topics. He describes researching them at somewhere called the Canal X Pornography Superstore where he sat on the floor with his laptop peeling open plastic containers of films that hadn’t been touched, let alone rented out, for decades. The regular customers thought he was a tax-inspector.
What characterizes them, he considers, is that their female Japanese-Brazilian performers were considered both “exotic” and alluring. Whether they were alluring because they were exotic, or whether the two categories simply co-existed, isn’t clear. Either way, the supposed attractiveness — and submissiveness — of Japanese-Brazilian women is part of Brazilian folklore, it seems, along with the docile, hard-working nature of the men — plus their tendency to be less than entirely admirable as drivers.
Jeffrey Lesser probably opts to study the Japanese-Brazilian involvement in student militancy opposed to the dictatorship of President Arthur da Costa e Silva (which began in 1964) because of the ethnic-based movements of that period in the US, such as the Black Panthers. He finds the involvement of minorities in Brazil to have been far smaller, though not insignificant. In the popular view at the era, these reserved, conservative citizens could quite possibly be bank robbers in their free time. But more often it was simply students who became radicalized, as did so many others students elsewhere, with their ethnicity of only marginal importance. The press however, compliant with the regime, presented them as being uniquely violent in what was perceived as a Japanese tradition.
A precursor in terms of Japanese political involvement was a secret society from the 1940s, Shindo Renmei, that aimed to preserve Japanese language and culture in Brazil, and even denied Japan’s defeat in the war. The student militants of the 1960s and 1970s, by contrast, wanted to be a part of a wider Brazilian student radicalism, and not be seen as specifically Japanese.
There doesn’t turn out to be a great deal of material for Lesser to work on. He tracks the careers of two Japanese-Brazilian militants of the period, then spends a lot of time on the 1970 kidnapping of the Japanese Consul to Sao Paulo by student radicals. The release of five students being held (and tortured) by the authorities was the condition for the consul’s release, and one of these was known to the public as “Mario Japa” (“Japanese Mario”). The exchange took place after the consul had been held for five days, and he made the headlines on his release by refusing to condemn his captors. They had behaved, he said, like gentlemen. The students were deported to Mexico but allowed to return to Brazil nine years later. The consul later became Japan’s ambassador to Brazil.
As for this book’s author, he’s an Atlanta professor who’s written two other books on Brazilian immigrants. He describes himself as being Jewish-American, and his wife, born and raised in Sao Paulo, as Jewish-Brazilian. His Japanese-Brazilian interviewees found these facts reassuring. He, too, was an outsider, they concluded, and so would understand their problems.
Sao Paulo is a place of immigrants. In addition to its 1.2 million Japanese-Brazilians it boasts the world’s largest Italian community outside Italy and the world’s largest Lebanese community outside Lebanon. And despite the fact that there are a quarter of a million Japanese Brazilians now living back in Japan, ostensibly looking for temporary work (a movement that began in the 1980s), the subjects of this book can’t nowadays really be described as “discontented.” They’re often well off, are admired by other Brazilians and are in many ways the South American version of the US idea of a “model minority” writ large.
Of course the student radicals of 40 years ago were discontented, as were student radicals all over the world, and in this sense the phrase provides a catchy title for what is an interesting, often surprising and generally well-researched book.
If the Japanese-Brazilians are discontented at all these days it’s because they want to be considered simply as Brazilians like everyone else, an appellation the rest of the population stubbornly resists. But Brazil’s fondness for them, and pride in them, is unmistakable. This proprietorial sense, combined with a continuing feeling of difference, was exemplified by a famous 1992 advertisement for Semp Toshiba (a Brazil-based company making electronic products) that in Portuguese announced proudly “Our Japanese are more creative than everyone else’s Japanese.”
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