[BRIEF NOTE] The plight of the Japanese-Brazilian in Japan

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star reports that the Japanese government is paying immigrants $US 3 000 to leave the country, in an effort to reduce unemployment among the native population. Japanese Brazilians, the third-largest immigrant group in Japan and the largest community in the Japanese diaspora, are unhappy with this.

Brazilian Japanese do not have the protection that Japanese workers do or have strong links within Japanese society to help them cope. Most cannot speak Japanese or have the right skills to readily find alternate jobs.

As long as the economy needed labourers, an estimated 320,000 Brazilians toiled in Japan, mostly at unskilled factory jobs. Many were employed by the electronics industries or by automobile giants like Suzuki, Honda and Toyota.

Last year manufacturers, who had hired Brazilians and other South Americans as temporary hands at their factories, started cutting jobs because of the deteriorating economy and the Japanese yen’s rise against other currencies.

‘’The situation is hopeless,’’ says Evaristo Higa, a Brazilian Catholic priest of Japanese ancestry who is involved with a food and rescue mission for the unemployed.

"More than 50 percent of Brazilians are now unemployed, they don’t have money to buy food or pay for their homes,’’ Higa told IPS. "Some were forced out of company dormitories and had to find homes... most can’t afford the rents.’’

‘’They say they are willing to take on jobs like working in nursing homes for the elderly, but these are not easily available because of the language barrier… and things can only get worse in the spring,’’ Higa said.

Reports say that many Brazilians migrants have started to return home. But a survey conducted by Higa in December indicated that 70 percent preferred to stay on because the economy in Brazil is not conducive to finding employment. "But, if you ask me in a month maybe it will be different,’’ he said optimistically.

[. . .]

Brazilians form the third-largest foreign community - after Koreans and Chinese - in Japan. Most are descendents of waves of Japanese immigration to Brazil that began in 1908.

Encouraged by the Japanese government, which saw migration as a way to relieve poverty and population pressures, nearly 200,000 had arrived by the beginning of World War ll. An additional 63,000 came in the postwar era.

Japan officially stopped sending migrants to Brazil in 1973. Today there are 1.3 million Brazilians of Japanese descent living in Brazil, forming the largest Japanese community living outside Japan.

In more recent decades, Brazil’s economic problems spurred a reverse flow. Japanese Brazilians began emigrating to Japan in large numbers after 1990 when Japan made it easier for foreigners of Japanese descent to enter the country with a view to filling a shortage of manual labour.

Japanese-Brazilian migrants, called dekasegi along with other ethnically Japanese immigrants from South America, have found it difficult to fit into Japan, their putative ethnic identity as Japanese turning out to be largely fictive, with their Brazilian (or other) nationalities turning out to be more important insofar as actual identity is concerned.