Belonging beyond Borders: Japanese Brazilian Stories of Diasporic Return without a “Homecoming”

Abstract

While some diasporic subjects may believe that they hold an “eternal” connection with their homeland, Arai Chisato and Tsuchida Machie question this presumption through their stories of postwar Japanese immigrant women in Brazil who return to Japan in the 1970s and find that it no longer feels like “home.” In this article, I bring Arai’s short story “Homecoming” (1974) and Tsuchida’s autobiographical memoir “I Cannot Sing the National Anthem” (2007) into conversation to critique the discursive processes that construct dominant national and diasporic identities through the exclusion of raced, classed, gendered, and sexualized “others.” I particularly consider how the notions of “home” and “family” used as models for community formation facilitate this exclusion, and I reconsider ways of belonging beyond national and diasporic borders.