There are more people of Japanese extraction living in Brazil’s Sao Paulo Province than there are in all the other countries of the world put together, Japan excluded.
The remarkable immigration began in 1908, a year after the US had prohibited virtually all further Japanese arrivals. The government in Tokyo encouraged it, believing their country had too many farmers for the land available. And many more arrived in Brazil in the years immediately following World War II. But few of the Japanese Brazilians, known locally as “Nikkei,” remained farmers for long. Most took education very seriously, and many moved into the city and quickly became prosperous middle-class success stories. And the other Brazilians were if anything proud of them. If these hard-working and talented people can run our businesses and use their Japanese connections, went the general opinion, then maybe one day Brazil will be as rich as Japan.
A Discontented Diaspora looks at the phenomenon in general, then goes on to investigate two specific areas of Japanese-Brazilian activity — their participation in erotic movies and their involvement in political radicalism, both during the 1960s and 1970s.
The films the author discusses don’t appear very erotic by the standards of today’s pornography. Screened 40 years ago in mainstream Sao Paulo cinemas, they seem rather to be social comedies on mildly sexual topics. He describes researching them at somewhere called the Canal X Pornography Superstore where he sat on the floor with his laptop peeling open plastic containers of films that hadn’t been touched, let alone rented out, for decades. The regular customers thought he was a tax-inspector.
What characterizes them, he considers, is that their female Japanese-Brazilian performers were considered both “exotic” and alluring. Whether they were alluring because they were exotic, or whether the two categories simply co-existed, isn’t clear. Either way, the supposed attractiveness — and submissiveness — of Japanese-Brazilian women is part of Brazilian folklore, it seems, along with the docile, hard-working nature of the men — plus their tendency to be less than entirely admirable as drivers.
Jeffrey Lesser probably opts to study the Japanese-Brazilian involvement in student militancy opposed to the dictatorship of President Arthur da Costa e Silva (which began in 1964) because of the ethnic-based movements of that period in the US, such as the Black Panthers. He finds the involvement of minorities in Brazil to have been far smaller, though not insignificant. In the popular view at the era, these reserved, conservative citizens could quite possibly be bank robbers in their free time. But more often it was simply students who became radicalized, as did so many others students elsewhere, with their ethnicity of only marginal importance. The press however, compliant with the regime, presented them as being uniquely violent in what was perceived as a Japanese tradition.
A precursor in terms of Japanese political involvement was a secret society from the 1940s, Shindo Renmei, that aimed to preserve Japanese language and culture in Brazil, and even denied Japan’s defeat in the war. The student militants of the 1960s and 1970s, by contrast, wanted to be a part of a wider Brazilian student radicalism, and not be seen as specifically Japanese.
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