There doesn’t turn out to be a great deal of material for Lesser to work on. He tracks the careers of two Japanese-Brazilian militants of the period, then spends a lot of time on the 1970 kidnapping of the Japanese Consul to Sao Paulo by student radicals. The release of five students being held (and tortured) by the authorities was the condition for the consul’s release, and one of these was known to the public as “Mario Japa” (“Japanese Mario”). The exchange took place after the consul had been held for five days, and he made the headlines on his release by refusing to condemn his captors. They had behaved, he said, like gentlemen. The students were deported to Mexico but allowed to return to Brazil nine years later. The consul later became Japan’s ambassador to Brazil.
As for this book’s author, he’s an Atlanta professor who’s written two other books on Brazilian immigrants. He describes himself as being Jewish-American, and his wife, born and raised in Sao Paulo, as Jewish-Brazilian. His Japanese-Brazilian interviewees found these facts reassuring. He, too, was an outsider, they concluded, and so would understand their problems.
Sao Paulo is a place of immigrants. In addition to its 1.2 million Japanese-Brazilians it boasts the world’s largest Italian community outside Italy and the world’s largest Lebanese community outside Lebanon. And despite the fact that there are a quarter of a million Japanese Brazilians now living back in Japan, ostensibly looking for temporary work (a movement that began in the 1980s), the subjects of this book can’t nowadays really be described as “discontented.” They’re often well off, are admired by other Brazilians and are in many ways the South American version of the US idea of a “model minority” writ large.
Of course the student radicals of 40 years ago were discontented, as were student radicals all over the world, and in this sense the phrase provides a catchy title for what is an interesting, often surprising and generally well-researched book.
If the Japanese-Brazilians are discontented at all these days it’s because they want to be considered simply as Brazilians like everyone else, an appellation the rest of the population stubbornly resists. But Brazil’s fondness for them, and pride in them, is unmistakable. This proprietorial sense, combined with a continuing feeling of difference, was exemplified by a famous 1992 advertisement for Semp Toshiba (a Brazil-based company making electronic products) that in Portuguese announced proudly “Our Japanese are more creative than everyone else’s Japanese.”
RSS