Japanese Brazilian Saudades by Ignacio López-Calvo

Author:Ignacio López-Calvo [López-Calvo, Ignacio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, Latin America, South America
ISBN: 9781607328506
Google: x5-fDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2019-07-01T04:15:57+00:00

4

The Impact of World War II on the Nikkeijin

Although this study focuses, for the most part, on Nikkei self-definition, it also analyzes complementary texts and films written or directed by non-Nikkeijin, such as the homonymous essay and film Corações Sujos (Dirty Hearts) included in this chapter. Of course, many other texts about Brazilian Nikkeijin could have been incorporated, including renowned Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s (1910–98) Ikemono no Kiroku (I Live In Fear, 1955), non-Nikkei Brazilian Glauco Mirko Laurelli’s Meu Japão Brasileiro (1965), Japanese American Karen Tei Yamashita’s (1951–) Brazil-Maru (1992), Japanese Sugako Hashida’s (1925–) Haru to Natsu, Todokanakatta Tegami (Haru and Natsu, the Letters that Wouldn’t Arrive, 2005), and non-Nikkei Brazilian Bernardo Carvalho’s (1960–) O Sol se Põe em São Paulo (The Sun Sets in São Paulo, 2007), among many others.

The analysis of Júlio Miyazawa’s texts in the first chapter of this study emphasized the power of collective forgetting in the process of nation building. Likewise, in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolf Trouillot argues that in “vernacular use, history means both the facts of the matter and a narrative of those facts, both ‘what happened’ and ‘that which is said to have happened.’ The first meaning places the emphasis on the sociohistorical process, the second on our knowledge of that process or on a story about that process” (2). This chapter analyzes how the Nikkei and non-Nikkei Brazilian communities chose to either remember or strategically forget the nefarious episode of the Shindō Renmei movement. Societal amnesia, taboos, and imposed silences of historical forgetting are as telling as how historical episodes are narrated. It is noteworthy, for example, how Issei Tomekiti Goto’s (1908–) autobiography Como uma Erva Silvestre (Like a Wild Herb, 1995; originally published in Japanese in 1981), which dwells on the trials of the Nikkeijin during World War II and its aftermath—including the displacement of numerous Nikkei families from coastal areas, the prohibition of speaking Japanese in public, the freezing of Japanese assets, and the closing of Japanese-language newspapers—never once mentions the Shindō Renmei episode.

Likewise, in the preface to his Passos da Imigração Japonesa no Brasil, Tsugio Shindo reveals his motivation to write his historical study Brasil e Japão: Os 100 Anos de Tratado de Amizade (Brazil and Japan: Centenary of the Friendship Treaty, 1999): “Two mothers, who work as translators and interpreters, and whose children are studying in elementary school, told me: ‘Our children have to write a paper on the conflict between the Kachigumi and the Makegumi, which took place in Brazil after the war, but we do not know anything about it.’ In other words, their parents did not teach them anything nor was there any available Portuguese-language literature for research.”1 Yet, Shindo discloses, thirty-tree years after the tragic events, many Nikkeijin in the city of Registro are still resentful against the Kachigumi for having taken innocent lives (232). The author, therefore, felt the need to fill the lacuna about this episode of Japanese Brazilian history.

This chapter provides a contrast between

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