This panel aims at investigating how is the construction of the Okinawan kinship and the constitution of such families in the city of Campo Grande. The research will focus people / families that make up the associations in the Okinawan city
Long Abstract:
Japan has always been permeated by the myth of ethnic homogeneity. The idea that homogeneity is present even in countries receiving "nikkeys" immigrants, as is the case in Brazil. However, a few decades it has been possible to note that the multiplicity and diversity are also part of the japanese reality. This diversity makes the group think of themselves and others to think as opposites. Thus, Campo Grande becomes field investigation of this heterogeneity, since it possesses two distinct groups - Okinawans and "naichi" (japanese) - in an opposition movement and aggregation throughout history. When thinking of a "Japanese unit" is over for not paying attention to details that make up the relations between the groups involved (Okinawans, non-Okinawans and non-western). The purpose of this research is therefore to understand how notions of family and belonging can build the oppositions and differences between Japanese immigrants and their descendants.
Papers about japanese/okinawan families in different places are welcome to this panel.
In this paper I will trace a comparison between the uchinanchu and naichi ethos remembering trajectories of migrant families. I am engaged since 2001 in a field research together to Japanese Brazilian and Okinawan associations, migratory movement, identity contrast, global networks and sociability.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is part of my Master Dissertation, result of a field research with intense contact and systematic participant observation among the Japanese Brazilian population in Brasilia, São Paulo and Paraná. The work deals with the identity Nikkey in Brazil with a specific focus on contrastive identity construction operated between Uchinanchu and Naichi, Okinawans and Japaneses. Sharing the dynamics of emigration from Japan to Brazil, the two groups transposed to land elsewhere not only their own culture, language and identity as well as carried on its diaspora for the contrast ratio and distinction between Uchinanchu and Naichi. After a closer relationship with the two groups held in an ethnographic research addressing food, fellowship, parties, sociability, kinship, social articulations, belonging and identity is perceived that the current shape of our communities Uchinanchu and Nikkey differ dramatically. Cultural factors and identity, concepts and ideas that determine feelings of identification and belonging operated in the conformation of two diasporic communities whose trajectories although parallel, have fundamentally different characteristics. Stories about marriages in my family in the generation before that of my jitchan have always impressed strongly. There as a matrimonial arrangement made still in Japan, as well as a case of adoption to ensure the continuity of the family name also in Japan. The ethnographic writing about kinship of my family and other two Okinawans families will point differences between uchinanchu and Japanese ethos. The tree trajectories in issue will show how the difference of ethos can construct so diverse familial trajectories.
This paper traces shifting experiences of transnational migration between Brazil and Japan over the last twenty years. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in both countries, I aim to analyze concepts of settlement, return, and circular migration as experienced by different generations of a single Japanese-Brazilian family.
Paper long abstract:
Two decades have passed since Japan first turned to people of Japanese descent (Nikkei) as a source of foreign labor. As the number of Nikkei migrants—most of them Brazilian—continued to increase, many of them brought or started families in Japan, raising their children partially or primarily outside Brazil. While some Japanese-Brazilians still speak of returning to Brazil, others seek to settle in Japan, viewing themselves not as temporary workers but as long-term members of Japanese society. Still others continue to engage in circular migration between the two countries. Against this backdrop of the last twenty years, my paper seeks to examine how notions of family and "keeping the family together" directly affect different generations' experiences of return, settlement, and circular migration between Brazil and Japan.
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