Japanese Immigration to Brazil: Historical Memory, Representation, and Japanese Brazilian Identity in São Paulo

This paper examines how Japanese immigration to Brazil has been remembered and represented over the years.  In June 1998, Japanese Brazilians in São Paulo were finally able to build the Japanese Immigrants Monument in Santos, Brazil’s largest port city, in commemoration of ninety-year-history of Japanese immigration to Brazil.  After many years of campaigning and fundraising for the construction of such a monument in memory of immigration, the monument planning committee had commissioned a Brazilian sculptor for the statue of a Japanese immigrant couple and their young son arriving in Brazil, that they had envisioned.  The monument quickly became Santos’s famous tourist site for Brazilians.  A decade later, the immigrant statue almost migrated “back” to Japan for the centenary of Japanese immigration to Brazil in 2008: In April 2007, Japan’s Ministry of Finance announced that it would issue a commemorative 500-yen coin on the centenary, bearing the image of Santos’s immigrant statue with a consent of a major Japanese Brazilian association in São Paulo, which had “built” the monument. Then, in April 2008, the Ministry made a surprise announcement that the commemorative coin would be redesigned entirely, owing to a disagreement with the Brazilian sculptor over her copyright of the image.  Nishida argues that this episode illustrates that Japanese immigrants and their descendants in São Paulo have no ownership of their own image, which has been divorced from the reality.  Japanese Brazilians are not completely in control of how their identity is constructed and represented under hegemonic power.