April
4, 2003
Brokered Homeland:
Joshua Roth Explores Barriers to Belonging in Japan
| 
Photo:
Fred LeBlanc |
“In Brazil,
I’m called Japones, and here in Japan, I’m called
‘gaijin’ (foreigner). I have no home.”
— comment by a Brazilian of Japanese descent working in
Japan, in Joshua Roth’s Brokered Homeland
Assistant Professor
of Anthropology Joshua Hotaka Roth moved to Tokyo in 1987, hoping
to teach English, solidify the Japanese language he had learned
at Columbia University, and connect with the country of his mother’s
birth and his own earliest childhood. He made a wide range of
friends, both Japanese and foreign, including several Japanese
Brazilian scholarship students who made him aware of the boundaries
of belonging within Japanese society, boundaries that kept even
immigrants of Japanese descent from feeling at home. Five years
later while doing graduate work in anthropology at Cornell University,
Roth returned to Japan to study the factors that divide Japanese
from overseas Japanese (Nikkeijin). He focused particularly
on Japanese Brazilians who were increasingly seeking work in Japan’s
automobile and electronics factories. Roth describes his research
in Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan
(Cornell University Press, 2002). more>
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