April
4 , 2003
Brokered
Homeland:
Joshua Roth Explores Barriers to Belonging in Japan
| 
Photo:
Fred LeBlanc
Joshua
Roth |
“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).
From 1994 to 1996, Roth lived and worked in Hamamatsu, a large
industrial city south of Tokyo to which many Nikkeijin migrated
during the 1980s and ’90s, a period of economic boom in
Japan and bust in Brazil. He found numerous social regulations
dividing Nikkeijin and Japanese workers there, from segregated
factory dormitories and baths, to different-colored hard hats
and uniforms. Such regulations, Roth writes, have led Nikkeijin
and Japanese to a new self-consciousness about their identity
and, increasingly, to what he calls “oppositional florescence,”
the overemphasizing of cultural differences between the two groups.
Roth discovered that many Hamamatsu factories hire Japanese Brazilians
and other Nikkeijin through employment brokers unregulated
by the government. Feeling less responsibility for brokered workers
than for direct hires, Roth explains, managers deny health coverage,
accident insurance, and other basic legal protections to Nikkeijin
employees. Some even blame Nikkeijin for workplace injuries
caused by faulty safety equipment and withhold the apologies and
compensation offered to injured Japanese employees. When he interviewed
Japanese Brazilians injured on the job, however, Roth found that
most wanted to reconcile with employers—a stereotypically
Japanese gesture of loyalty and sacrifice—but felt forced
to seek justice in the courts instead when confronted by unsympathetic
attitudes on the part of employers. As a result, they are further
marginalized as “troublesome, self-interested foreigners”
who lack respect for Japanese culture and tradition.
Roth found that Nikkeijin
have a slightly better social experience outside the workplace
and beyond the government-sponsored internationalization efforts
that tend only to amplify differences between Japanese and “other.”
A Japanese neighborhood reached out to Roth, for instance, by
including him in preparations for its city kite festival, a traditional
Japanese celebration of first-born sons and neighborhood solidarity.
One family even invited Roth, four Japanese, and two Brazilians
to play the Latin samba drums at its kite festival party. “The
communitas achieved between Japanese and Brazilians during
the kite festival may be significant in that it offers an alternative
vision of how these two groups may relate to each other,”
writes Roth. “It is a vision of a mutually enriching relationship
rather than one in which one group is forcibly incorporated by
another.”
Such positive interactions were few and far between, however,
and Roth concludes that reform of immigration and employment systems
that inhibit community are the only hope for true multiculturalism
in Japan. “It is an easy and frequent assumption that cultures
just don’t mix,” says Roth. “I’m trying
to elaborate a much more complex relationship than that, one in
which economic and legal structures can foster or discourage a
sense of community.”
On sabbatical last year, Roth continued his study of Japanese
Brazilians, this time considering their community identity in
Brazil. In one paper from that study, Roth argues that Japanese
Brazilians have successfully promoted themselves as “model
Brazilians, fully compatible with Brazilian society,” pointing
out that Japanese-style croquet is the only ethnic-exclusive sport
given free public playing space in Sao Paulo. Currently Roth is
looking at the appropriation of Japanese images by Brazilian popular
culture and the blending of geisha, samurai, and other Japanese
icons with samba music and other things “quintessentially
Brazilian.”
Roth will read from Brokered Homeland at the Odyssey
Bookshop, Tuesday, April 8, at 7 pm.
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