Kidnapping the Consul: The Local Nature of the Diasporic Construction of Race in Japan and Brazil

This paper explores the negotiating of ethnic, racial and national identities by focusing on the 1970 kidnapping of Nobuo Okuchi, Japan's consul in São Paulo. The kidnapping, planned and executed by a Brazilian leftist guerilla organization, was a direct response to the capture and imprisonment of Shizuo Osawa, a Nikkei militant known widely as “Mario Japa” (Mario the Jap). When the kidnapping became public an intense debate began in Brazil and Japan over the question of ethnic militancy. My paper will focus on the competing discourses in the two countries over the nature of Diaspora and national identity. In Japan, the militancy of Brazilian Nikkei was often discussed in terms of de(generation) based on the claim that historical experience of migration created a national-racial shift away from Japanese “national characteristics” such as hard work and loyalty to the state, to Brazilian ones based on generational conflict and dilettantism. In Brazil, however, the participation of Nikkei in militant activity (and other areas of Brazilian life) was understood as uniquely Japanese. Nikkei militants were desirable because they were assumed to be serious and to always “get the job done.” They were seen as having “bloodlines” that were particularly violent (in contrast to stereotypes of “Brazilians” as fun-loving”) and thus as particularly effective in guerilla warfare. Stereotypes and counter-stereotypes were crucial in the discourses over the kidnapping and the public negotiations over Consul Okuchi's release in return for Shizuo Osawa's freedom. My paper is based on a wide range of documentation, from memoirs, to secret police memos, the newspaper reports in Japan and Brazil, to oral histories. Together they suggest a new way of conceptualizing ethnic and racial history that focuses on identities as negotiated and malleable rather than as essentialized.