Contributors. Sylvia Cowan, Johan Lindquist, Melody Chia-wen Lu, Koji Sasaki, Shin Hyunjoon, Mariko Asano Tamanoi, Mika Toyota, Carol Upadhya, Wang Cangbai, Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh
Contributors. Sylvia Cowan, Johan Lindquist, Melody Chia-wen Lu, Koji Sasaki, Shin Hyunjoon, Mariko Asano Tamanoi, Mika Toyota, Carol Upadhya, Wang Cangbai, Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh
Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia
240
Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia
240eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Contributors. Sylvia Cowan, Johan Lindquist, Melody Chia-wen Lu, Koji Sasaki, Shin Hyunjoon, Mariko Asano Tamanoi, Mika Toyota, Carol Upadhya, Wang Cangbai, Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822377474 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/10/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Xiang Biao is University Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Global "Body Shopping": An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry.
Brenda S. A. Yeoh is Professor in Geography at the National University of Singapore. She is a coeditor of The Cultural Politics of Talent Migration in East Asia.
Mika Toyota is Associate Professor in the College of Tourism at Rikkyo University. She and Yeoh are coeditors of Migration and Health in Asia.
Read an Excerpt
RETURN
Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia
By Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Mika Toyota
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5531-1
CHAPTER 1
To Return or Not to Return
The Changing Meaning of Mobility among Japanese Brazilians, 1908–2010
KOJI SASAKI
In 1938, Shungoro Wako, an officer of the Japanese Imin Takushoku Gaisha (Company for Emigration and Colonization) in Brazil, made this remark in the introduction to his collection of statistical and historical data on Japanese migrants in a rural region in São Paulo:
If someone asks me to choose between return and permanent settlement, I, with all my sincerity, would never hesitate to answer, "I ardently desire to return." ... [However,] I will work very hard until I am buried in this country [Brazil]. I will cherish the visions of my dear homeland [Japan] and will pray for its prosperity until the last moment of my life. Nonetheless, I will dedicate my body and soul to raise my children as outstanding Brazilians. (1938, 3, 11)
His painful inner struggle may look puzzling to today's readers. What compelled him to suppress the burning desire to return? How should we reconcile his deep attachment to Japan and the determination to raise offspring as Brazilians? It is evident from his writing that his dilemma did not arise from his calculation of conflicting personal interests, but was rather deeply ideological and even morally charged. Indeed, to return or not to return was a question of utmost importance among the Japanese community in Brazil during a good part of the twentieth century. Never a straightforward question, whether or not to return aroused considerable agony and confusion. The intention to return was driven not only by economic considerations but also by migrants' emotional perceptions of their relations to the larger global political order, particularly the rise and fall of the Japanese empire and the consolidation of the Japanese and Brazilian nation-states.
This chapter examines the changing perception of return among the Japanese in Brazil from the beginning of the twentieth century to the early part of the twenty-first century. It follows the analytical strategy of regarding "return" as an idea, or, more precisely, as an imaginary that defines the directionality of one's physical movement, gives particular meanings to mobility, and shapes the mobile subjects' self-positioning in the world (Xiang, introduction, this volume). By taking mobility as a medium through which the migrant intentionally acts on the external world, this chapter teases out how the meaning of return changes with the rise and fall of the Japanese empire over three time periods. These narratives span the first half of the century, the establishment of a new world order centered on nation-states since the 1950s, and the reemergence of transnational networks with intensified globalization after the 1980s.
While the meaning of return has been contested and never stable, a particularly sharp historical turning point took place in the 1950s. In the first half of the twentieth century, the migrants' return was discouraged because Japan was preoccupied with its imperialistic expansion project; furthermore, return was unlikely due to economic and transport constraints. Nevertheless, return remained a major concern among the migrants during that period and it was in fact an important topic of heated debate among them whether they should return and under what conditions. This continued to be the case for a short while even after the Second World War ended in 1945. In the second half of the century, however, return gradually lost its ideological and sentimental connotation as the migrants had succeeded in establishing a respected minority status in Brazilian society. As a result, when tens of thousands of descendants of former Japanese emigrants (Nikkeijin) headed to their ancestors' homeland in the 1980s and 1990s, they hardly viewed their experience as a return. Rather, the cultural and linguistic differences caused an immense sense of alienation on the part of these migrants. The Japanese government, on the other hand, exploited the ambiguity of their status by creating a special legal migration channel for these descendants on the basis of their blood relations with Japanese citizens. This channel, exclusive to the Nikkeijin, allowed them to live and work in Japan relatively freely, although it was less liberal in allowing, let alone encouraging or supporting, the Nikkeijin's permanent settlement. Under this system of quasi-return, the preference for ethnic homogeneity and the need for cheap labor in a time of increasing globalization were also reconciled. In this sense, the history of return is a history fraught with changing logics of what it means to be a mobile subject. Specifically for the Japanese Brazilians, their subjectivity shifted continually from self-styled imperial subjects to national citizens (of Brazil) and to transitional labor.
The Desire to Return as a "Disease"
The Japanese emigration to the Americas began as part of a state-initiated program designed to counter the twin problems of overpopulation and rural poverty during the Meiji period (1868–1912) (see Gaimu-sho 1941). In the late nineteenth century, the government sent groups of Japanese to Hawaii and North America. With the rise of the anti-Japanese movement in the United States in the early twentieth century, however, the Japanese government and numerous "emigration companies" (private enterprises that specialized in recruiting and sending Japanese citizens abroad for fees) looked to South America for alternative destinations. Meanwhile, Brazil was looking for a solution to the labor-shortage problem that it faced on its coffee plantations following the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the Italian government's prohibition of emigration to Brazil in 1902 (Lesser 1999, 85). These events resulted in massive migration from Japan to Brazil. After the first Japanese migration to São Paulo in 1908, initiated by the private Imperial Colonization Company, more than 183,000 Japanese had headed to Brazil until 1941 (Gaimu-sho 1941, 179–80).
The migrants largely perceived their emigration to Brazil as an alternative to the rural-urban seasonal migration (dekasegi), which was commonly practiced by Japanese farmers in the Meiji period. The farmer-migrants undertook work in the Brazilian coffee fields for a number of years, and they expected to return to Japan after that. "Kokyo ni nishiki wo kazaru" (to return to the homeland dressed in brocade), as the Japanese saying goes, was the ultimate goal of migration. This mentality was further reinforced by the fact that the reality of working in the Brazilian coffee plantations was far from what was originally promised in the advertisements of the emigration companies. In addition to the extremely harsh working conditions that were carried forward from the slavery system, the poor harvest in the first years and low wages fell greatly short of the migrants' expectations. The Japanese migrants were eager to return to Japan as early as possible, and they were largely indifferent to improving their long-term life prospects in Brazil.
Such an attitude was however criticized in the 1920s by the educated members of the migrant community, especially editors of immigrant newspapers, leaders of immigration organizations, and Japanese diplomats. During the 1920s and 1930s, immigrant newspapers took it as their primary duty to analyze the life of the Japanese in Brazil and to critique their behaviors. Usually featured on the front page, opinion editorials often sought to pinpoint the problem with the wider Japanese migrant community and even provided detailed guidelines on what constituted desirable attitudes and behaviors. In this sense, the newspapers were not mere disseminators of information but a means of moral guidance. The editorials of such newspapers as Burajiru Jiho (Brazilian news, 1917–41) and Nippak Shimbun (Nippak journal, 1916–41) were particularly influential among the migrants. Despite their diverse social origins and political orientations, the editors agreed that the migrants should abandon their "sojourner mentality" (dekasegi konjo) and instead uphold the "determination for permanent settlement" (eijuu ketsui). For instance, an editorial published in Nippak Shimbun in 1924 bitterly bemoaned the fact that the migrants lacked the determination to stay: "Because the Japanese immigrants are not liberated from the temporary, sojourner disposition, we have not succeeded as much as we could have.... Most of the newly arriving immigrants have repeated the same mistakes, without being able to establish a firm basis. Indeed, this temporary, sojourner disposition is the fundamental disease that inhibits the development of the Japanese immigrants" (Nippak Shimbun 1924; my translation).
This criticism of the desire for return can be attributed to the perception that some migrants' inclination for short-term economic success was detrimental to their own agricultural development in Brazil because agricultural development required long-term investments. However, the educated migrants' desire to assimilate into the Brazilian society and opposition to return reflected their consciousness about Japan's rise as an international power. To many migrants, Japan's rising status required its subjects to demonstrate to the world respectful cultural dispositions. The anti-Japanese movements in North America, which excluded Japanese immigrants as racially and culturally inferior, made the migrants even more eager to prove that they were capable of assimilating into the host society. For example, in 1921 Toshiro Fujita, the Japanese consul in São Paulo, advised Japanese migrants in Brazil to follow Brazilian cultural norms. He insisted that every one of them "should respect the manners and customs of this country and make efforts in assimilating our clothes, foods, housings and even the everyday behaviors into those of the people in Brazil" (Fujita 1921; my translation). Remarkably, this call for assimilation even led to an official recommendation of naturalization, that is, acquiring a Brazilian citizenship. For instance, Burajiru Jiho, which was run by the quasi-governmental Kaigai Kogyo Kabushiki Gaisha (Overseas Development Company), supported the naturalization of Japanese subjects in Brazil throughout the 1920s (Burajiru Jiho 1920b; my translation). The newspaper stressed that the migrants should see themselves as pioneers in the mission of Japan's overseas development, declaring that "there is no reason why being a Japanese requires living and dying in Japan" (Burajiru Jiho 1920a; my translation).
These views, stemming from agricultural and diplomatic reasoning, were solidified in the late 1920s with the emerging cosmopolitanism of the Taisho (1912–26) and the early Showa (1926–89) periods. In the 1920s, a number of Japanese local "overseas associations"—not-for-profit organizations set up by prefectural governments throughout Japan between the 1910s and 1930s aimed at promoting overseas emigration and development through education, research, and recruitment—acquired lands in the rural São Paulo regions to build new plantations to facilitate long-term settlement of the Japanese migrants. Some of the settlers in these plantations were members of a newly formed middle class in Japan, who sought to use the migration and colonial developments as an opportunity to carry out social experiments that were typically informed by cosmopolitan utopian visions (Gaimu-sho 1953, 45). Yoshiyuki Kato, a leader of Burajiru Takushoku Kumiai (Cooperativa de Colonização do Brasil; Society for Colonizers in Brazil), for instance, launched a movement in 1934 aimed at introducing Western-style collective farming and puritan moral values in the new settlements (Handa 1987, 454). With the motto of "loving the soil, settling permanently" (aido eijuu), the movement represented settlement as an expression of progressive thinking, contrary to the conservative desire to return.
Imagined Remigration to New Territories of the Empire
The 1930s witnessed a decisive shift in the political landscape in Japan and in Brazil. After the Manchuria Incident in 1931, when Japan forcefully annexed a large part of northeast China, the ultranationalist military took full control of the Japanese government. The Japanese public was convinced as well that Japan's imperialist expansion in Asia was justifiable and even benevolent. While politico-theoretical concepts such as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Southern Expansion Doctrine (Nanshinron), and Hakko ichiu (the whole world under one roof) were mostly focused on the new imperialist order in Asia, the immigrant intellectuals in Brazil actively sought to interpret these theories in order to redefine their positions (Handa 1966, 114). The earlier dichotomies of to return or not to return, and of being Japanese or being a new Brazilian, were replaced by more complicated and varied concerns such as whether they should return to new Asian territories occupied by the Japanese empire.
This reorientation toward the expanding Japan instead of toward the host society of Brazil was reinforced in the late 1930s as Brazil's nation-building efforts led to tougher restrictions on the immigrants' lives. When Getúlio Vargas took over the presidency of Brazil in 1937, his Estado Novo (New State) regime implemented a series of policies aimed at national unification and imposed severe constraints on foreigners' activities. Education and publications in the Japanese language, along with other languages, such as German and Italian, were strictly prohibited (see Comissão de Elaboração da História dos 80 Anos da Imigração Japonesa no Brasil 1992, 160). Moreover, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 led to the cancellation of diplomatic relations between Japan and Brazil. This in turn resulted in the general repatriation of Japanese diplomats via the Swedish wartime civilian exchange ship and left the Japanese migrants in a state of great anxiety over fear of being abandoned and losing contact with the homeland government. During these years, many were arrested for speaking Japanese in public. It was in this climate of great insecurity that Shungoro Wako made the remark about his painful decision to stay in Brazil, which I quoted in the beginning of this chapter. Despite Wako's determination to stay, a survey in a rural São Paulo region that he conducted in 1938 showed that as many as 85 percent of the migrants there hoped to return to Japan (Wako 1938, 1). Despite such a rise in the desire for return, however, very few migrants could afford the costly trip to Japan (see figure 1.1).
This anxiety about the new political situation of Brazil, the resumed desire for return, and the development of Japanese imperialism collectively resulted in a new conception of return. Rokuro Koyama, the editor of Seisyu Shimpo (News of São Paulo, 1921–41), one of the leading Japanese newspapers in Brazil, argued that the Japanese in Brazil should remigrate to the Southeast Asia region that recently came under control of the Japanese empire. According to Koyama, before Japan's expansion to the Chinese continent, the Japanese were forced to engage in what he called a "hybrid migration" (konko ijuu), wherein emigrants had to adopt the culture of the destination country. The new geopolitical condition, he argued, allowed for an "ethnically pure migration" (minzoku-teki jun ijuu), in which the migrants were no longer required to assimilate and would thus remain "pure" Japanese. He insisted that the assimilative policy of Brazil was inconsonant with the latter migration and that the Japanese people should now engage in nonassimilative migrations within the power zone of the Japanese empire. Seisyu Shimpo published a series of editorials in 1941 that advocated a "glorious retreat" (kouei aru taikyaku) from Latin America to Asia "under the Japanese flag" (Kawabata 1941; my translation).
Although some contending voices saw a retreat to the homeland as something that would undermine Japan's expansion in the world (Kishimoto 1947, 169), this imperialist concept of return acquired strong currency in the migrant community. Ordinary migrants, whose life in Brazil saw few signs of improvement but whose desire to return had been criticized and suppressed by immigrant intellectuals, embraced this new notion enthusiastically. Kiyoshi Ando, the editor of a literary journal in the late 1930s in São Paulo, recalled that "this feverish desire was so influential that the majority of the people expected to remigrate to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere even after Japan's unconditional surrender" (1949, 311; my translation). Curiously, the migrants' eagerness for imperial return or remigration was hardly appreciated by their homeland government, and the desire for migration from one colony to another was largely unrealized. The imagined collective return from Brazil to Japan's Asian empire was the migrants' cautious but desperate response to the dramatically changing political conditions, reflecting their predicament of being caught up between cosmopolitan ideals, imperialist ideology, and emotional pining for home.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from RETURN by Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Mika Toyota. Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction. Return and the Reordering of Transnational Mobility in Asia / Xiang Biao 1
1. To Return or Not to Return: The Changing Meaning of Mobility among Japanese Brazilians, 1908–2010 / Koji Sasaki 21
2. Soldier's Home: War, Migration, and Delayed Return in Postwar Japan / Mariko Asano Tamanoi 39
3. Guiqiao as Political Subjects in the Making of the People's Republic of China, 1949–1979 / Wang Cangbai 63
4. Transnational Encapsulation: Compulsory Return as a Labor-Migration Control in East Asia / Xiang Biao 83
5. Cambodians Go "Home": Forced Returns and Redisplacement Thirty Years after the American War in Indochina / Sylvia R. Cowan 100
6. Rescue, Return, in Place: Deportees, "Victims," and the Regulation of Indonesian Migration / Johan Lindquist 122
7. Return of the Global Indian: Software Professionals and the Worlding of Bangalore / Carol Upadhya 141
8. Ethnicizing, Capitalizing, and Nationalizing: South Korea and the Returning Korean Chinese / Melody Chia-Wen Lu and Shen Hyunjoon 162
Contributors 179
References 183
Index 205