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Engaging with the 'transnational turn' in collective memory studies, this article examines how national and transnational elements intersect in cultural memory-making of the Pacific War in contemporary Japan. Through a case study of a recent Japanese television drama (Two Homelands, 2019) about Japanese Americans who were caught up between two countries at war, it argues that the incorporation of transnational Nikkei memories into Japanese national war memory on a popular cultural level both challenges and reinforces the dominant war narratives in Japan. Ultimately, Two Homelands uses Nikkei voices and their wartime experience of racial discrimination and internment to reinterpret Japan's role in the Pacific War and promote the revisionist-nationalist narrative of the war. As such, the drama exemplifies the desire within Japan to rehabilitate the persisting cultural trauma of the war and defeat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1990, a revised immigration law offered foreigners of Japanese descent (nikkei) the right to work for unlimited duration in Japan. Many nikkei came from Latin America to take on blue-collar jobs in the country’s factories. Homi Danchi, a working-class housing complex in Toyota, Japan, has since become known for its Brazilian immigrant community. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this study analyzes the self-narrated biographies of three Brazilian immigrants who actively participate in community activism in Homi. Applying Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice and his critique of the “biographical illusion,” this article examines how the abstract ideology of Japanese-style multiculturalism (tabunka kyōsei) is understood and practiced at a local level. It argues that our narrators’ practical desires to recreate multicultural community in Homi reapply abstract multicultural values to a local context, thereby implicitly acknowledging multiculturalism’s symbolic capital and limiting the extent of activism to Homi. Applying the symbolic capital of multiculturalism to everyday practice, in turn, makes activism meaningful and imagines a community of fellow actors, albeit to the exclusion of outsiders. Multiculturalism thereby becomes a question not primarily of coexistence, but of community-building. We also underline the role that narration of one’s own history plays in mediating between individual experience and community belonging, contributing to methodological debates about Bourdieu’s biographical method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The destruction of Okinawa after the Pacific War led Okinawans to look for new interpretations of their past to overcome the hardships of the present and imagine a new future. Although scholars have recently examined Okinawans' memory politics, they have paid little attention to the history of Okinawans in South America and their memory construction during the American occupation of the Ryukyu Islands between 1945 and 1972. To fill this gap, this article analyzes Okinawans' diasporic memory narratives in Argentina in conjunction with transnational memories circulating between 1945 and 1965. Community leaders in Argentina during this period intended to construct a compelling remembrance narrative that could support their identity claims in the face of an uncertain future for their home islands. While this process was shaped by existing transnational discourses, Okinawan immigrants in Argentina negotiated and accepted only those ideas that fit their local agenda and served as sources of diasporic identity and pride. Even if Okinawan immigrants claimed to be Japanese, these memories need to be analyzed as strategies to rebalance asymmetrical power relationships within Japanese immigrant society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For diaspora communities, they often stand as material reflections of the process of cultural continuity and assimilation. In the case of forced immigrants, such as the incarceration of roughly 120,000 Nikkei (Japanese Americans) during World War II, the degree to which they were able to reconstruct features of the gardens of their homelands is particularly instructive. Using primary sources in public archives, we investigate how interned Nikkei used gardening to endure their incarceration and to recultivate their traditional relationships with nature. For Nikkei internees, gardens provided a wealth of material and psychological benefits. Because the camps were typically at locations largely devoid of vegetation, gardens provided a means to making their forced incarceration in hostile landscapes more habitable. Most importantly, because camp gardens were explicit celebrations of Japanese heritage, they constituted subtle acts of political resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the process of Japanese emigration to Peru in the early-twentieth century, culminating in their extraordinary rendition from the same country at the hands of the United States government at the height of World War II, analyzing the processes through the lens of Seiichi Higashide's 1981 testimonio Adios to Tears (Namida no Adiosu). It follows Higashide's journey from Hokkaido, Japan to Ica, Peru, and finally, via rendition, to the United States, first to Crystal City internment camp in Texas before being 'paroled' as an 'undocumented immigrant' to Seabrook Farms, New Jersey to provide labour for a privately-held company. Higashide, along with many other Peruvian Nikkei of the same era, fell victim to a series of treaties, laws, and finally, global conflicts that ultimately rendered them stateless. Arguing that this history is the product of the fundamental irrationality of racializing global forces implicit in the notion of modernity, I suggest that its aftermaths continue to resonate today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bivalence of Japanese Brazilians (Nikkei) as a source of stress and support for Japanese people living in Brazil was investigated to obtain ideas for developing positive relationships between them. We conducted semistructured interviews with 19 Japanese people on how they engage with Nikkei. A modified-grounded theory approach (M-GTA) was used to identify whether the relationship with Nikkei was a stress or support source. The results indicated that Nikkei were recognized as having both Brazilian and Japanese cultural traits. Japanese people unfamiliar with Brazilian life welcomed the Nikkei s intermediary cultural support and were comforted by their Japanese traits. However, their image as being old-fashioned Japanese people was problematic. Moreover, Japanese people were fond of Brazilian cultural characteristics, although they were concerned about specific differences. Furthermore, Japanese people were stressed when they sensed difficulties due to biculturalism, and when they could not choose relationships or maintain their distance from Nikkei. It is suggested that biculturalism should be appropriately studied, and intercultural social skills developed for building positive relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese people first settled in Australia in the late nineteenth century, yet the history of Japanese Australians remains mostly unknown. In fact, many contemporary people of Japanese heritage often feel alienated from their own ethnic history, even actively rejecting any connection to the Japanese diaspora. This article examines the reasons behind this phenomenon and how the group Nikkei Australia grew out of a need to explore these issues of ambivalent identity. Nikkei Australia is group of researchers and individuals with an interest in rediscovering and retelling Japanese Australian diasporic stories. Drawing on personal narratives and reflections, this article charts the inception of Nikkei Australia and the group's academic, artistic and cultural activities to date, as well as the issues and ideas that inform and frame the group's tasks ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2011, Japanese-Peruvian Keiko Fujimori (1975- ), daughter of the former president, Alberto Fujimori, almost won presidential elections in Peru. Ollanta Humala (1962- ), who identifies himself as indigenous and as a youth studied in 'La Unión,' a Japanese-Peruvian school, defeated her. He had been an army officer; Keiko Fujimori, a congresswoman. She now hopes to win in 2016. This would make her Perú's first elected female president. What is the importance of a candidate's ethnicity or gender? Have such identity factors become meaningless or unimportant in Perú -- despite the historical reality of racism and gender inequality? To answer these quite general questions, this article focuses on history, multiculturalism, and law. Key points are enhanced through conversations with present and former state officials, authors, professors, students, and with the coordinator of the Japanese Immigration Museum at the Peruvian Japanese Cultural Center. Peru is a multiethnic nation-state and being a woman is not an obstacle to power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the participation of the actors Tsuyoshi Ihara (Takahashi), Takako Tokiwawi (Miyuki), Eiji Okuda (Coronel Watanabe), Celine Fukumoto (Akemi) and Eduardo Moscovis (Sub delegate), Brazilian director Vicente Amorin brings to film the 2011 version of the Fernando Morais novel Corações Sujos (2000). The plot revolves around the real story behind Shindo Renmei, a Japanese terrorist group living in Brazil. Towards the end of the Second World War, many Japanese immigrants rejected Emperor Hirohito's surrender to the allied forces. Both the novel as well as the film show a different aspect of how Japanese culture is viewed by Japanese members and Brazilians during the Getulio Vargas presidency in the forties. In 1945 as Japan surrendered to the United States and the Second World War found its end, a large number of Japanese in Brazil believed that Japanese defeat was merely American political propaganda. In this context, the analysis of Corações Sujos, in both novel and film versions, allows one to see how violence symbolizes the past and at the same time becomes a search for answers in the identity dilemma: those who stood by their inconditional love for the Emperor and while “fighting” the Brazilian system, and those who accepted the defeat and started to make Brazil their home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relations between the maps of spatial meanings and generational experiences of Nikkei men and women in Northern Paraná. Our spatial profile refers to the cities of Maringá and Londrina, taking into account the fact that they show a considerable relative population of Japanese and also expressive manifestations of Japanese cultural events, organized according to Cultural and Sports Associations. The fieldwork shows different maps of spatial meanings made by Nikkei men and women, mapped along the three generations -- Issei, Nisei and Sansei. This phenomenon constitutes as 'gendered', enabling, over time, the creation of multiple maps of spatial meanings, always in a process of becoming, setting up connections that are still to be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results of a research with young Japanese descendants involved or not with oriental activities, inhabitants of the Curitiba city (Brazil). Nine semi-structured interviews were carried out and analyzed toward reaching identity and the role of body in the process of identity in young people. The results suggest: a) the proper look expresses a supposed behavior or a group of values thought typically related to the Asian culture; b) the Nikkei body appears as a deviant one, since its pattern does not coincide with the ideal beauty in Brazilian society. It promotes prejudice and exclusion, driving them to look for protection and welcoming niches in clubs and associations as a way of gathering, but also a strategy that allows them to set themselves free from the flaws and excesses of the body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key public health approach to promote independent living and avoid nursing home placement is ensuring that elders can obtain adequate informal support from family and friends, as well as formal support from community services. This study aims to describe the use of informal and formal support among community-dwelling Nikkei elders living alone, and explore perceived barriers hindering their use of such support. We conducted English and Japanese semi-structured, open-ended interviews in Chicagoland with a convenience sample of 34 Nikkei elders age 60+ who were functionally independent and living alone; 9 family/friends; and 10 local service providers. According to participants, for informal support, Nikkei elders relied mainly on: family for homemaking and health management; partners for emotional and emergency support; friends for emotional and transportation support; and neighbors for emergency assistance. Perceived barriers to informal support included elders' attitudinal impediments (feeling burdensome, reciprocating support, self-reliance), family-related interpersonal circumstances (poor communication, distance, intergenerational differences); and friendship/neighbor-related interpersonal situations (difficulty making friends, relocation, health decline/death). For formal support, Nikkei elders primarily used adult day care/cultural programs for socializing and learning and in-home care for personal/homemaking assistance and companionship. Barriers to formal support included attitudinal impediments (stoicism, privacy, frugality); perception of care (incompatibility with services, poor opinions of in-home care quality); and accessibility (geographical distance, lack of transportation). In summary, this study provides important preliminary insights for future community strategies that will target resources and training for support networks of Nikkei elders living alone to maximize their likelihood to age in place independently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship often assumes that peoples of Japanese descent scattered throughout the Americas (the Nikkei) are one of the world's diasporas. This paper argues that dispersed ethnic groups should not be considered diasporic unless they have maintained social connections with each other across national borders as members of a transnational ethnic community. By using the Japanese Americans as a case study, I analyze how they are no longer really part of a "Japanese diaspora" because they have generally lost their social connections to the Japanese homeland over the generations and do not have sustained transnational relations with other Nikkei communities in the Americas either In contrast to newer diasporas consisting offirst generation migrants, I suggest some older "diasporas" that have become assimilated and incorporated into their respective host countries are no longer really diasporic but have simply become ethnic minorities which operate in a national context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with an active mission among Japanese immigrants in Brazil, including the support of the Japanese government and the Japanese Catholic Church. The article rejects the hypothesis of an easy accommodation of Catholicism in Japan and suggests that for a proper analysis of the process one has to take into account the specific character of the missionaries activities as well the latent dispute between the nationalist Shintoism and the Brazilian Catholicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After having contextualized the immigration flows between Japan and Brazil, the article focusses on the history and sociology of Christianity among Japanese-Brazilians. As for the younger generations Brazilian Catholicism tended to substitute Shintoism in terms of a religious orientation fostering national identity. On the other hand, statistical data indicate that among decasségui, that is, Japanese descendants born Brazil who returned to Japan as foreign workers, Pentecostalism is on the rise. In order to explain the growing popularity of Pentecostalism, the article refers to approaches suggested by the economy of religion, including the social-network-theory. This conceptual basis even allows some speculations about the future of Christianity and other religions among the Brazilian foreign workers in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aimed to understand the meaning of sports and recreational practices in the Nipo-Brazilian Associations of Cuiabá and Várzea Grande (MT). The sample consisted of 30 players, divided in terms of baseball, gateball and gymkhana "Undokay", and the President of the Association. Data analysis allowed us to conclude that: the rules have a way of promoting family values, friendship and cultural tradition. We also highlight the values of health (concentration, balance, quality of life), leisure (fun, joy, back to being children) and sports (discipline, team spirit, the question of win-loss). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the main religious transition that accomplished the redefinition of Japanese Brazilian identity after the Second World War. State Shinto was the main world view of the Japanese immigrants in Brazil until the 1950s, playing a key role in the Japanese resistance of Brazilian acculturation process and in the cognitive dissonance that resulted in the Shindo Renmei movement. The Catholic Church began its proselytizing inside the Japanese community in the 1950s, initially attending to Japanese Catholics and the nisei. After the Second World War the Church participated in the clarification campaigns against Shindo Renmei. With the collapse of Shinto nationalism the missionary activities were especially directed towards the nisei and for that the incorporation of Japanese Catholic symbols proved highly effective. The combination of Japanese and Brazilian Catholic elements represented the development of a hyphenated religiosity, facilitating the trend of Catholic belonging and at the same time offering some cultural continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly interest in Jews as a subject of Latin American Studies has grown markedly in the last two decades, especially when compared to research on other Latin Americans who trace their ancestry to the Middle East, Asia or Eastern Europe. In this context, we propose the use of the term ‘Jewish-Latin American’, rather than ‘Latin American Jewry’, in order to shift the dominant paradigm about ethnicity in Latin America by returning the ‘nation’ to a prominent position at a moment when the ‘trans-nation’, or perhaps no nation at all, is often an unquestioned assumption. After analyzing the historiography of the Jewish presence in Latin America as a means of understanding the state of the ‘field’, we advance a series of propositions that might be useful to all students of ethnicity in the region, particularly to scholars working on minorities whose ancestors were characterized religiously as non-Catholic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We perform non-linear analysis on stock market indices using time-dependent extended Tsallis statistics. Specifically, we evaluate the q -triplet for particular time periods with the purpose of demonstrating the temporal dependence of the extended characteristics of the underlying market dynamics. We apply the analysis on daily close price timeseries of four major global markets (S&P 500, Tokyo-NIKKEI, Frankfurt-DAX, London-LSE). For comparison, we also compute time-dependentGeneralized Hurst Exponents (GHE) H q using the GHE method, thus estimating the temporal evolution of the multiscaling characteristics of the index dynamics. We focus on periods before and after critical market events such as stock market bubbles (2000 dot.com bubble, Japanese 1990 bubble, 2008 US real estate crisis) and find that the temporal trends of q -triplet values significantly differ among these periods indicating that in the rising period before a bubble break, the underlying extended statistics of the market dynamics strongly deviates from purely stochastic behavior, whereas, after the breakdown, it gradually converges to the Gaussian-like behavior which is a characteristic of an efficient market. We also conclude that relative temporal variation patterns of the Tsallis q-triplet can be connected to different aspects of market dynamics and reveals useful information about market conditions especially those underlying the development of a stock market bubble. We found specific temporal patterns and trends in the relative variation of the indices in the q-triplet that distinguish periods just before and just after a stock-market bubble break. Differences between endogenous and exogenous stock market crises are also captured by the temporal changes in the Tsallis q -triplet. Finally, we introduce two new time-dependent empirical metrics (Q -metrics) that are functions of the Tsallis q -triplet. We apply them to the above stock market index price timeseries and discuss the significance of their temporal dependence on market dynamics and the possibility of using them, together with the relative temporal changes of the q -triplet, as signaling tools for future market events such as the development of a market bubble. • The Tsallis q -triplet showed in all cases non-Gaussian BG statistics. • In financial markets, the non-extensive statistics changes with time. • We showed the multi-scaling character of stock market using the GHE method • The Tsallis statistics and the GHE approach reveals the underlying processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]