Searching for Home Abroad

Jeffrey Lesser is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Emory University. He is the author, most recently, of Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil, also published by Duke University Press.

• Acknowledgments ixGlossary xiIntroduction: Looking for Home in All the Wrong Places / Jeffrey Lesser 1Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei: A Short History of Identity Building and Homemaking / Jeffrey Lesser 5Speaking in the Tongue of Antipode: Japanese Brazilian Fantasy on the Origin of Language / Shuhei Hosokawa 21Identity Transformations among Okinawans and Their Descendants in Brazil / Koichi Mori 47Interlude: Circle K Rules / Karen Tei Yamashita 67Searching for Home, Wealth, Pride, and "Class": Japanese Brazilians in the "Land of Yen" / Angelo Ishi 75Urashima Taro's Ambiguating Practices: The Significance of Overseas Voting Rights for Elderly Japanese Migrants to Brazil / Joshua Hotaka Roth 103Homeland-less Abroad: Transnational Liminality, Social Alienation, and Personal Malaise / Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda 121Feminization of Japanese Brazilian Labor Migration to Japan / Keiko Yamanaka 163Do Japanese Brazilians Exist? / Daniel T. Linger 201Contributors 215Index 217

“Jeffrey Lesser’s achievement is that he and his colleagues have assembled the most comprehensive, multi-dimensional portrayal to date of the Japanese in Brazil as well as Brazilians of Japanese descent who have gone to work temporarily in Japan. Their research deftly illustrates how the multiple identities of immigrants and their descendants, as well as transnational labor migrants, can generate a plethora of responses as to where and what their real home actually is. As such, this book makes a seminal contribution to Asian, Latin American, and migration studies.”-Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, University of California, Riverside "Searching for Home Abroad makes a major contribution to Brazilian studies and to our empirical and theoretical understanding of transnational migration, liminality, and the construction of transnational identities. Its contributors-from history, sociology, anthropology, and ethnomusicology-provide us with a rich, nuanced, and very much needed understanding of early-twentieth-century Japanese immigration in Brazil, as well as the more recent Japanese-Brazilian emigration to Japan."-Leo Spitzer, author of Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism