Japanese Immigrant Community Research Articles

Narratives of Japanese nuclear immigrants in New Zealand: (in)(di)vesting in L2 and identity

ABSTRACT This article reports on a study that investigated the language learning and identity negotiation experiences of Japanese adults, nuclear immigrants, who left Japan and arrived in New Zealand after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident. Drawing on theories of investment, capital and communities of practice, the study explores how the nuclear immigrants negotiate their identities as L2 English learners and users within their New Zealand communities, both the L2 community and the L1 Japanese immigrant community infused with its own cultural and political ideologies. The study also asks why and how they invest or divest in English language learning and using practices. Data was collected via biographical narrative interviews from eight participants. Thematic narrative analysis identified themes which were interpreted in relation to dimensions of social activity represented by micro, meso, and macro levels. The findings indicate that the valuing and acceptance of the participants’ pre-existing capital serve as affordances to affirm and expand their identity, while rejection of their competence by sociocultural norms resulted in their withdrawal from the L2 communities, which eventually caused divestment in L2.

Kiyoshi Karl Kawakami and Japanese America between the Two World Wars

ABSTRACTKiyoshi Karl Kawakami was one of the most influential Japanese immigrant journalists to defend Japanese imperialism. He did so at a time when Japanese immigrant communities showed various responses to Japan’s becoming an Asian empire between the two world wars. This article shows how a Japanese immigrant journalist utilized minority politics to represent Japanese immigrant communities in the United States. Cooperating with the Japanese government’s public diplomacy and propaganda projects, Kawakami also linked the interests of his home country and Japanese immigrant communities to American national interests. For this purpose, he utilized the notions of open-door international trade and anti-communism – both widely shared by the American public – to justify Japanese imperialism and hide its colonial nature.

Unsettling the Japanese Peruvian Legacy of Suffering: Madman in Augusto Higa Oshiro’s “Polvo enamorado”

Augusto Higa Oshiro’s 2013 short story “Polvo enamorado” depicts the experience and behavior of Kinshiro Nagatani, a Japanese immigrant who lives through during the time of the Peruvian government’s anti-Japanese operations in the 1930s and 1940s. However, Kinshiro’s experience with discrimination is not limited to that from the Peruvian society at large, but, more immediately, from the Japanese immigrant community itself, which labels him a madman as his behavior is deemed by them to be socially and morally unacceptable. Drawing on Foucauldian concepts of madness and limit-experiences, which delineate the processes of the construction and isolation of madmen in society, this article first examines how Kinshiro comes into existence as a madman and how his existence is confined to a space of exclusion. Then, it explores how and why the revelation of the processes of his becoming mad serves to offer an alternative view that disturbs the Japanese Peruvians’ prevailing collective memory of suffering and injustice.

The past and present of Japanese immigration to Mexico: towards a future agenda for the study of the Japanese immigrant community in Guanajuato

Since 2011, Guanajuato has become Mexico’s main destination of immigrants of Japanese origin, leading to a North-South migration phenomenon, a novelty in a state that used to be seen as a traditional expeller of the population. Guanajuato has also been the main attractor for Japanese investment, especially in the automotive sector. Japanese capital has instigated an intense process of formation of specific community formation in the State, particularly of corporate expatriates from automotive corporations, who are based in the main cities in Guanajuato. From the few studies of a similar phenomenon in Monterrey and Guadalajara, this document highlights the importance of starting a research agenda to follow the creation of these new communities in the State.

Japanese Immigrant Community in the Eyes of the School Association in Honam Plains, Colonial Korea

Japanese Immigrant Community in the Eyes of the School Association in Honam Plains, Colonial Korea

Listening to the Voices of "Other" Women in Japanese North America: Japanese Prostitutes and Barmaids in the American West, 1887-1920

JAPANESE IMMIGRANT WOMEN’S lives have been discussed primarily within the narrative of migration and settlement. Their conventional portrayal was that of mothers who supported their husbands on farms and in shops faithfully, caring for their children along with their daily chores, with some working outside the home, participating in a variety of social activities, and contributing to the welfare of the family and the development of the ethnic community. As Yuji Ichioka and other historians have shown, however, the transition from the migration to the settlement period was, in fact, fraught with conflicts between the immigrant elites and certain groups of women who deviated from community norms. Prostitutes constituted a significant part of the Japanese population in the early stage of migration, undermining Japanese consuls’ efforts to maintain Japan’s reputation as a “civilized” country. As Japanese brides increased in the 1910s, a considerable number of them came to dislike the husbands typically chosen by their parents and ran away with other men. Concerned about the deteriorating image of the Japanese in American society, Japanese leaders attempted to force these “deviant” women to conform to the idealized image of Issei women as “good wives and wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo). The strength of these studies lies in the authors’ ability to illuminate the internal dynamics of the early Japanese immigrant community and the reform agendas that immigrant leaders had. We learn from these studies how Japanese leaders dealt with structural pressures imposed by the dominant society, how they struggled to earn the respect of white Americans, and why certain women’s behavior did not fit into the self-portrait that immigrant leaders painted for themselves and fellow countrymen. They do not tell us much, however, about deviant immigrant women themselves. Prostitutes, in particular, have been described as victims of male exploitation who had little control over their lives, and even Yuji Ichioka, who had sought to

Inheritance and Change of Japanese Word Accent in a Japanese Immigrant Community in Paraguay : A Case of Immigrants from Hiroshima Prefecture and their Families

Inheritance and Change of Japanese Word Accent in a Japanese Immigrant Community in Paraguay : A Case of Immigrants from Hiroshima Prefecture and their Families

書評: Rumi Yasutake, Transnational Women's Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859-1920

書評: Rumi Yasutake, Transnational Women's Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859-1920

The voices of women on birth control and childcare: a Japanese immigrant newspaper in the early twentieth-century USA

This paper investigates how the voices of Japanese women living in the US were constructed in developing Japanese immigrant newspapers in the early twentieth century. It asks how these voices were linked to representing and establishing the concept of ‘essential’ motherhood and a racial, transnational and ethnic group identity. The voices of women on the subject of motherhood were formed in connection with ideas of ‘home’. They were formed under the influence of Japanese transnational discourses of motherhood popular in Japan. At the same time, they were articulated in the interests of permanent settlement and the formation and reform of Japanese immigrant society. These voices defined ‘home’ as a place to reproduce the second generation, which would help to establish a ‘healthy’ and ‘civilized’ Japanese immigrant community acceptable to US society. Women were given the role of establishing a good ‘home’ and a desirable Japanese immigrant society by Americanizing themselves and their children. Furthermore, they had the mission of passing on and establishing a racial and transnational identity as Japanese in the US. Reflecting these components of the idea of ‘home’, women's discourses of birth control and desirable childcare were formed through the immigrant media.

Friends Along the Way

By his own account, sociology provided my father a good run. Looking back, it was possible for him to discern in his career the rising fortunes of the field itself over the second half of the 20th century, which lifted him during a bright period of ascendance in the 1950s and carried him through decades of professional satisfaction to the safe shore of a distinguished retirement and comfortable pension. That it had all worked out so well for him in the end was a genuine source of wonder and gratification to my father. His upbringing in a Japanese immigrant community in Los Angeles provided scant basis for envisioning a life of academic scholarship, yet he lacked in his adulthood the imaginative power to conjure even a single alternative path his life might have taken. Indeed, though his early scholarly work on educational opportunity among minority students spoke to a pre-occupation with the social pathways that led to success, my father preferred to view his own professional trajectory as the unanticipated product of chance and fortuitous friendships. Stuck in a dead-end job with a furniture distributor in Boston (to which my father had improbably migrated following detainment at a Japanese-American interment camp during the Second World War) and desperately wishing to return to his native California, he sought advice from his former instructor Edward Post. Post was an English professor and poet, who had become a de facto mentor to my father during his undergraduate years at Boston University. Whether through considered assessment of my father's interests and skills, or because it was one of his few connections in Los Angeles (likely the latter), Post made the fateful suggestion that my father look up Leonard Broome, a friend and sociologist at UCLA. Broome, having determined that my father would make a useful research assistant on a project about Japanese-American wartime internment, suggested it would be easier to hire him if he were a student. On an upswing in the flush times of the post-War era, the Sociology department soon

The Development of a Japanese New Religious Group in the Japanese Immigrant Community of Hawai'I(Section 9)

The Development of a Japanese New Religious Group in the Japanese Immigrant Community of Hawai'I(Section 9)

Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experience of Place

For several decades, the best-known slogan of the environmentalist movement has been Think globally, act locally. This double imperative derives from environmentalists' attempts to propagate images of global ecology that might help to make the functioning of the planet as a whole accessible to average citizens, as well as to connect such an understanding with the experience of local places.1 From the enormous ease and frequency with which this popular slogan is quoted, one might assume that it proposes a smooth conceptual connection between the experience of particular places and an understanding of planet-wide ecological systems. In fact, however, different types of environmentalist thought diverge quite substantially in the ways in which they envision the global and its relation to the local; how the global and the local can and should be considered and experienced together remains as much of an open question for an ecological perspective as it does for other approaches to globalization. The objective of this essay is to explore how literary texts negotiate the juncture between ecological globalism and localism and how, from a comparatisi viewpoint, they link issues of global ecology with those of transnational culture. The analysis will focus on a novel whose narrative material as well as storytelling strategies situate it at the intersection of several national and regional literary traditions. Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990), a novel by Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita, draws on some of the conventions of U.S.-American ethnic writing, yet it has far stronger affinities with late twentieth-century Latin American fiction. Yamashita lived in Brazil for almost a decade and wrote her second book on Japanese immigrant communities in that country; the influence of both Portuguese and

Who Is One of Us? (Re)discovering the Inside-out of Australia's Japanese Immigrant Communities, 1901-1957

Who Is One of Us? (Re)discovering the Inside-out of Australia's Japanese Immigrant Communities, 1901-1957

The Unfolding of the Lotus: A Survey of Recent Developments in Shin Buddhism in the West

In the lobby of the Hongwanji International Center in Kyoto, there is a world map indicating the world outreach of Shin Buddhism. The radiating spokes point to branches in North America-United States and Canada; South America-Brazil; Europe-Germany and Switzerland; and Asia-Okinawa and Taiwan. Over the map the plaque reads Shinshu Unites the World. In the years since the map was installed, new Shin communities have emerged in Mexico, England, Belgium, Austria, and Poland. The international growth of Shin Buddhism can be likened to the unfolding of a lotus. The chrysalis or bud of the lotus is its center and foundation in Japan. With the increase of information and study of Jodo Shinshu among scholars of religion and lay people, the significance and challenge of the Shin interpretation of Buddhism has become clearer. With these developments has come the recognition that despite its deep root in and relation to the overseas Japanese immigrant communities, located largely in North and South America, Shin Buddhism is a world religion, universal in scope and capable of meeting the spiritual needs of persons unconnected toJapanese society and culture. With these brief observations as background, we will survey some of the most significant aspects of the continuing international progress of Shin Buddhism as it has taken shape through influential leaders, organizations, and literature. In order to put our study in proper perspective, it should be noted that the international thrust of Shin Buddhism began much earlier in the Meiji era (1868-1911) as laborers went abroad to work in various parts of the world. Later, within the sphere of advancingJapanese political influence in the twentieth century, missions were established in China, Korea (then Chosen), and Taiwan (then Formosa). From the very beginnings of Shin Buddhism in America, there have been efforts to reach English-speaking western people. In Hawaii the universalistic perspective was promoted by Bishop Yemyo Imamura, who was the foremost leader from 1900-1932. He initiated a variety of outreach activities sponsored by the International Buddhist Association. He encouraged the use of English in

The Japanese immigrant community in Brazil: Language contact and shift

This study describes the language contact and language shift among different generations of Japanese immigrants in Brazil and considers the social factors involved in the abandonment of the ethnic code (Japanese) and its chances of survival from now on. The survey of the situation reveals that, in most cases, ethnic identity switch is accompanied by mother tongue replacement with Portuguese by the third generation.