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Studies of Latin American immigrants in Japan to date have focused on Nikkei (of Japanese ancestry) from Brazil and Peril, considering their accommodation to Japanese society as a group with [...]

Based upon my informants' conversations about food and music and re-making a home in Japan, in this article I show how owners, managers and customers organized Latino restaurants and clubs as social spaces and contributed to the (re)creation of a transnational Latino culture in Japan. Because the majority of these spaces have relied on generic Latin American tropical iconography, one focus of the article is to show how such tropicalizations serve as cultural capital that benefits club owners and other entrepreneurs, and at the same time has fostered a sense of commonalities and a shared identity within the Latino clientele. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]