Based on over two years of participant-observation in labor brokerage firms, factories, schools, churches, and people’s homes in Japan and Brazil, Sarah LeBaron von Baeyer presents an ethnographic portrait of what it means in practice to “live transnationally,” that is, to contend with the social, institutional, and aspirational landscapes bridging different national settings. Rather than view Japanese-Brazilian labor migrants and their families as somehow lost or caught between cultures, she demonstrates how they in fact find creative and flexible ways of belonging to multiple places at once. At the same time, the author pays close attention to the various constraints and possibilities that people face as they navigate other dimensions of their lives besides ethnic or national identity, namely, family, gender, class, age, work, education, and religion

With an immigrant population currently estimated at roughly 280,000, Japanese Brazilians are now the second largest group of foreigners in Japan. Although they are of Japanese descent, most were born in Brazil and are culturally Brazilian. As a result, they have become Japan's newest ethnic minority. Drawing upon close to two years of multisite fieldwork in Brazil and Japan, Takeyuki Tsuda has written a comprehensive ethnography that examines the ethnic experiences and reactions of both Japanese Brazilian immigrants and their native Japanese hosts.

DIVA multidisciplinary study of the transnational cultural identity of Brazilian nationals of Japanese descent and their more recent attempts to re-settle in Japan./div

This is an ethnographic study, based on fieldwork and extensive personal interviews, of Brazilians of Japanese descent who have migrated to Japan in response to the government's call for ethnically acceptable unskilled workers. These people of Toyota City are among 200,000 Brazilians of Japanese descent who live in Japan today, forming Japan's third-largest minority group.

After the introduction of the "long-term resident" visa, the mass-migration of Nikkeis (Japanese Brazilians) has led to roughly 190,000 Brazilian nationals living in Japan. While the ancestry-based visa confers Nikkeis' right to settlement virtually as a right of blood, their ethnic ambiguity and working-class profile often prevent them from feeling at home in their supposed ethnic homeland. In response, many have converted to Pentecostalism, reflecting the explosive trend across Latin America since the 1970s. Jesus Loves Japan offers a rare window into lives at the crossroads of return migration and global Pentecostalism. Suma Ikeuchi argues that charismatic Christianity appeals to Nikkei migrants as a "third culture"--one that transcends ethno-national boundaries and offers a way out of a reality marked by stagnant national indifference. Jesus Loves Japan insightfully describes the political process of homecoming through the lens of religion, and the ubiquitous figure of the migrant as the pilgrim of a transnational future.

This book presents an ethnographic portrait of transnational Japanese-Brazilian labor migrants and their families as they navigate life between Japan and Brazil. The author pays particular attention to gender, generation, and class, and to structures besides work such as family, education, and religion.

Japan has witnessed the arrival of thousands of immigrants, since the 1990s, from Latin America, especially from Brazil and Peru. Along with immigrants from other parts of the world, they all express the new face of Japan - one of multiculturality and multi-ethnicity. Newcomers are having a strong impact in local faith communities and playing an unexpected role in the development of communities. This book focuses on the role that faith and religious institutions play in the migrants' process of settlement and integration. The authors also focus on the impact of immigrants' religiosity amidst religious groups formerly established in Japan. Religion is an integral aspect of the displacement and settlement process of immigrants in an increasing multi-ethnic, multicultural and pluri-religious contemporary Japan. Religious institutions and their social networks in Japan are becoming the first point of contact among immigrants. This book exposes and explores the often missed connection of the positive role of religion and faith-based communities in facilitating varied integrative ways of belonging for immigrants. The authors highlight the faith experiences of immigrants themselves by bringing their voices through case studies, interviews, and ethnographic research throughout the book to offer an important contribution to the exploration of multiculturalism in Japan.

In this book, Ethel Kosminsky studies the Japanese emigration to the planned colony of Bastos in São Paulo, Brazil in the early twentieth century. She explores the stories of Japanese immigrants who replaced the labor of recently-freed slaves on coffee plantations, and their descendants’ return migration to Japan when the Bastos economy began to suffer in the late twentieth century. Using interviews and fieldwork done in both Bastos and Japan, Kosminsky integrates sociological, historical, political, economic, and ethnographic knowledge to analyze the consequences of these temporary labor migrations on the immigrants and their families.

The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions explores the global spread of religions originating in Brazil, a country that has emerged as a major pole of religious innovation and production. Through ethnographically-rich case studies throughout the world, ranging from the Americas (Canada, the U.S., Peru, and Argentina) and Europe (the U.K., Portugal, and the Netherlands) to Asia (Japan) and Oceania (Australia), the book examines the conditions, actors, and media that have made possible the worldwide construction, circulation, and consumption of Brazilian religious identities, practices, and lifestyles, including those connected with indigenized forms of Pentecostalism and Catholicism, African-based religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda, as well as diverse expressions of New Age Spiritism and Ayahuasca-centered neo-shamanism like Vale do Amanhecer and Santo Daime. Contributors include Ushi Arakaki, Dario Paulo Barrera Rivera, Brenda Carranza, Anthony D'Andrea, Sara Delamont, Alejandro Frigerio, Alberto Groisman, Annick Hernandez, Clara Mafra, Cecília Mariz, Deirdre Meintel, Carmen Rial, Cristina Rocha, Camila Sampaio, Clara Saraiva, Olivia Sheringham, Neil Stephens, José Claúdio Souza Alves, Claudia Swatowiski, and Manuel A. Vásquez.

This book tells the story of how families separated across borders write--and learn new ways of writing--in pursuit of love and money. According to the UN, 244 million people currently live outside their countries of birth. The human drama behind these numbers is that parents are often separated from children, brothers from sisters, lovers from each other. Migration, undertaken in response to problems of the wallet, also poses problems for the heart. Writing for Love and Money shows how families separated across borders turn to writing to address these problems. Based on research with transnational families in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and North America, it describes how people write to sustain meaningful relationships across distance and to better their often impoverished circumstances. Despite policy makers' concerns about "brain drain," the book reveals that immigrants' departures do not leave homelands wholly educationally hobbled. Instead, migration promotes experiences of literacy learning in transnational families as they write to reach the two life goals that globalization consistently threatens: economic solvency and familial intimacy.