The chrysanthemum and the song: music, memory, and identity in the South American Japanese diaspora

Abstract

Music helps form and nurture ethnic identity for large populations of people of Japanese descent in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, and Paraguay. In a story never before told, Dale Olsen offers a musical history and ethnography of this vibrant Asian diaspora, the largest population of overseas Japanese in the world and one of the most successful subcultures in South America. An early immigration of Nikkei - people of Japanese heritage - landed on the coast of Peru in 1899. Hundreds of thousands more arrived in the first half of the 20th century, most seeking work as agricultural laborers. Olsen argues that music became essential for nourishing their Japaneseness, perhaps second only to speaking the Japanese language. Music making, music listening, and dancing all express the soul of the people and tell others who they are, he says. Communicated and transmuted through the intricate workings of collective memory, music has the power to reconstruct and manipulate cultural identity; it helps immigrants maintain strong connections to their ancestral home and to forge new ones in their adopted culture. Olsen provides a history of Nikkei emigration and music from the Japanese homelands, comments on the contributions and the roles of song contests and karaoke in shaping their new social life and identity, and discusses Nikkei aesthetic values. His research sources include interviews, memoirs of immigrants and their children, newspaper accounts of Nikkei musical experiences and thoughts, and observations of musical events. Olsen also documents and interprets his own performances with and for the Nikkei on the Japanese shakuhachi flute. Covering five generations of Nikkei over more than a century, this ethnomusicological investigation makes an original contribution to Japanese diaspora studies. It will be of special interest to scholars of the sociology of immigrant cultures and identity formation, Asian and Latin American studies, and ethnomusicology. It offers a model of innovative theoretical and experimental ways to learn about subcultures in diaspora.