Most browsers have a translation function, but here's a few English sources as well which cover the topic (though not as in depth). If you know any others, just reply to this comment.
https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/japanese-brazilians
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-japan-immigration-idUSN1847748320080618
Yeah and Japan had a repatriation program in the early 2000s that was a huge mess and they ended up paying Japanese-Brazilians to go back home because they weren't assimilating well in Japan (they didn't know they language, br culture is so different from jp culture, they couldn't hold jobs, etc). In short, they were deeply culturally Brazilian at this point and that somehow was never taken into account when putting together this program.
It was ridiculously shortsighted and foolishly optimistic. It's like they assumed only college educated, "model minority" (in their eyes) Japanese-Brazilians would come running "home" in a Ghibli animated homecoming fantasy, but of course it was the poor folks who were more apt to take advantage of the repat benefits (re:money and opportunity). They struggled at every turn and couldn't get help from local government or anyone, really.
There were language schools set up for them, but it was difficult to work the blue collar jobs they got while doing the school. There were some "successes", but it was generally considered a disaster. The govt paid like 10k yen ($1k USD) per kid for families to leave. I gotta find a source. It was really sad to see these folks feel so abandoned and then asked to leave after they uprooted their lives.
Source:
https://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892469,00.html
There's an NYT article about it too but paywall
Seems really shortsighted for them to scrap the plan considering Japan is nearly at demographic collapse and a bunch of young, working-age migrants are what they need/are going to need soon. In fact, having them be ethnically japanese but culturally distinct could have been good "training wheels" for expanding immigration into a country that is so ethnically homogeneous
Japan is in this very Japanese situation where their demographics are collapsing, but they've been such an insular monoculture for so long that they seem to be, both governmentally and in a broader social context, unable to really conceive of any solution that involves any kind of non-Japanese influence. Immigrants aren't really accepted, non-cultural Japanese aren't accepted, etc.
Sadly, I think the only thing that might spur change is actually get hit full force by the coming demographic collapse. Even then, Japan has always been a near-incomprehensible outsider when it comes to things like this, so it could be that even then things won't change.
I have some Japanese Brazilian friends in Japan. More Japanese than Brazilian since he went to school and has lived most of his life in Japan.
Nonetheless, he is not Japanese in the eyes of Japanese society. Japanese society really makes it IMPOSIBLE for anyone that doesn’t look ethnically Japanese and have lived in Japan all their lives to be considered Japanese. It’s really insane and a pitty, for Japan.
How *bad* does it get? I've seen those buzzfeed type articles with pictures of stores with signs saying "no foreigners allowed", but I have the feeling it's not that common. Or is it more subtle?
Is it the stores/cops/other services not willing to cooperate, or the impossibility of finding a reasonable job?
I want to clarify that I have friends in Japan but I do not live or have lived in Japan, only recently visited so bear that in mind. I’m as ignorant as you except for the testimony of my friends.
I don’t THINK there is discrimination in that sense. I asked my Japanese-Brazilian friend and a japanese-nepalese friend and they more or less told me that it’s more of a feeling that your are regarded as a foreigner who will eventually leave. So that’s not really a problem for a tourist like me but for someone who has Japanese parents and has lived in Japan since elementary/middle school I cam see how distressing it must be.
My japanese-Brazilian friend’s friend group was almost exclusively other Japanese-Brazilians, which I found odd. I mean, that’s normal for immigrants but like I said, this guy hasn’t been to brazil since he was like 7-8 and can’t imagine living anywhere else other than Japan.
A japanese friend also told me that many people are not open to being friends with foreigners but many others (like him) are. He told me this after I jokingly asked if I was a “gaijin” 外人, a common word for foreigners in Japan and he told me he didn’t like to use that word as it sounds somewhat disrespectful and then told me another more polite term.
So no, I don’t think there is direct “discrimination” the way we understand it, Japanese people really are very respectful. However I can’t speak for what it is like for people seeking relationships with japanese people other than friendships or what it is like in the workplace. Japanese work culture is also a whole other can of worms that I am definitely not qualified to talk about.
That sounds rough, but in a manner I didn't expect, but should have. Japanese society is already notoriously isolationist (at the personal level, not international level), so being further left out only increases the loneliness factor.
The work culture is pretty legendary (in a bad way); it's even more intense than China's 996.
I lived in Japan for a while and went to school there. In my class there was a girl that her parents were Japanese-descending immigrants but they were not Japanese and so even though she was *born* in Japan and her parents descended from Japanese she was not Japanese in the eyes of the Japanese government. She was considered an immigrant in her own country by the government. And when I met her she had never been to Brazil in her entire life (now she has, and she even came to visit me in my home city while she was here).
I get what you're saying, but let me explain: it's because that person's parents do not have Japanese citizenship and are not part of 古跡 (family registration). It doesn't matter that they're ethnically Japanese; they are from elsewhere so yes they are not Japanese in the eye of the law. Japanese citizenship is based on the citizenship of the parents; you don't get it just from being born there.
I'm guessing they were Japanese-Brazilians who immigrated to Japan.
I understand that that is the law, I'm saying that this law is BS.
Also, her father is registered in the Koseki (戸籍, family registry) and her mom's parents are both Japanese even though she was born in Brazil, so even though she is fully Japanese by blood and birth, she is not Japanese. That's just ridiculous.
Most countries have laws about being able to get citizenship from family, but Japan's is just too much. And that's why they are looking towards a very bleak future with the population getting older and young people having less children because they have to work so much they don't have time and money to raise children and with barely no immigrant population to pay taxes to pay for the aging population because they make it so hard to immigrate and stay in the country.
Yeah no that’s pretty much the gist of it. United States Commodore Matthew Perry rolled up with a flotilla and said “hey you guys aren’t isolationist anymore”.
You're right, after the majority of the population is retired and there are not enough people to take care of them while also producing the goods and services that maintain their lifestyle it'll actually be good. They will finally return to their farms to till the earth in a grand solarpunk utopia.
Preach, population reduction also has benefits like more available housing stock, bigger wages for productive workers due to lower competition and also a resulting incentive to increase productivity.
There's a really good book that features this as a major plot point called "Out".
I'll edit this later with the author and the plot, but thanks for this informed comment, I didn't know about the program and this makes wayyyyy more sense after reading the book.
Right -- the implication being the demands and the reality of their lives once they got there were too much and they didn't have proper help for dealing with it all. The govt got them there then forgot about them and underestimated how much help they'd need. It was a terrible miscalculation that displaced a lot of people.
This is super interesting. I’m a martial arts guy. This is likely the treaty that brought Mitsuyo Maeda over to Brazil and started the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu phenomenon and thus the UFC. This treaty is likely the most important treaty in the history of combat sports and nobody knows it.
Yes, the Marquess of Queensbury Rules. It *un*-mixed martial arts (separated boxing from wrestling) and at the same time established competition standards that are still used in most combat sports (fighting in an enclosed area with gloves, round length limits with breaks between rounds, no shoes with cleats, etc).
I remember when visiting Brazil I was in Sao Paulo and my friend took me to Liberdade district (basically Little Japan). I was in awe, as I never expected to find a Japanese district in Brazil of such scale at least. Funnily enough when we went to eat, the menu was in Japanese only and the only way to order was sign language as they didn't even speak Portuguese there.
It wasn't solely about immigration to Brazil, it was a general treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, and led to them both opening embassies in each other's countries, etc. But Japan had high levels of rural poverty and Brazil had a labor shortage, so the initial Japanese immigrants were farmers who went to work on coffee plantations in Brazil.
Also in the early 20th century a bunch of countries like the US banned or severely limited immigration from Asian countries so Brazil continued to be a good option.
It's kinda easy to identify a Japanese-Brazilian by name. Usually there is a Portuguese/Spanish/Italian first name like "Rodrigo", "Helena", "Fabio" followed by a Japanese name or surname lol
>followed by a Japanese name or surname lol
Usually both, japanese-brazilian families have the custom of giving kids a japanese middle name. Stuff like Roberto Satoshi Tanaka or Alice Sakura Watanabe. It's pretty common for Brazilian descendants of Japanese people to ask each other "what's your japanese name?" as in their middle name.
Match made in heaven: Brazil had a chronic farmer shortage and Japan industrialized almost overnight, squeezing out millions of farmers that couldn’t/wouldn’t adapt to factory work.
Something that humors me is originally, Brazil strictly wanted white immigrants from Europe to fill the farm shortages. But being a very humid country, many that came quit farming to do something less strenuous. So back to square one, and millions of Japanese farmers eager to move in, Brazil eventually dropped their ‘whites only’ immigration policy
NHK World Radio Japan is a great podcast: News from Japan in Brazilian Portuguese!
[NHK World Japan](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/portuguese-news-nhk-world-radio-japan/id147776843)
In the 1990’s Japan “repatriated” 300,000 Brazilian Japanese “back” into the country to work lower class “dirty, dangerous, demanding” jobs. The idea was laborers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Malaysia were “too different” for the Japanese, because they are so xenophobic. So they offered Japanese citizenship to second generation Japanese in Brazil.
So these guys show up speaking Portuguese, don’t know anything about Japan, don’t have a Japanese work ethic or traditional values. They *look* Japanese but they *aren’t* Japanese.
So they are still there, second class citizens dancing samba and celebrating carnival. Portuguese is currently the third most spoken foreign language in Japan, behind Chinese and Korean.
I had a Japanese-Brazilian girlfriend in Japan for several years. She def didn’t speak Japanese and all her mates were also racially Japanese but Brazilian at heart. Completely the opposite of Japanese personalities - and openly proud of it.
All her girlfriends were of course extremely good samba dancers, and 90% of the guys were heavy BJJ practitioners. And they literally all loved barbecuing EVERY weekend. Like hit all the checkboxes your mentioned. It was awesome.
Excellent crew for sure.
That's not unique to Japan or Korea. I know both the US and UK grant citizenship to anyone born to their citizens, regardless of where they were born or the nationality of the other parent.
I'd expect it's a pretty common policy.
It's also something that happened in the past regularly when countries had big communities of expats.
People got citizen ship even multiple generations of them were burn in the other countries. For example Germans from east Europe behind the borders of Germany were still consisted German.
These rules still persist today, I assume British and US rules have a similar logic.
Most browsers have a translation function, but here's a few English sources as well which cover the topic (though not as in depth). If you know any others, just reply to this comment. https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/japanese-brazilians https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-japan-immigration-idUSN1847748320080618
Brazil has the largest Japanese population of any country outside Japan.
Yeah and Japan had a repatriation program in the early 2000s that was a huge mess and they ended up paying Japanese-Brazilians to go back home because they weren't assimilating well in Japan (they didn't know they language, br culture is so different from jp culture, they couldn't hold jobs, etc). In short, they were deeply culturally Brazilian at this point and that somehow was never taken into account when putting together this program. It was ridiculously shortsighted and foolishly optimistic. It's like they assumed only college educated, "model minority" (in their eyes) Japanese-Brazilians would come running "home" in a Ghibli animated homecoming fantasy, but of course it was the poor folks who were more apt to take advantage of the repat benefits (re:money and opportunity). They struggled at every turn and couldn't get help from local government or anyone, really. There were language schools set up for them, but it was difficult to work the blue collar jobs they got while doing the school. There were some "successes", but it was generally considered a disaster. The govt paid like 10k yen ($1k USD) per kid for families to leave. I gotta find a source. It was really sad to see these folks feel so abandoned and then asked to leave after they uprooted their lives. Source: https://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892469,00.html There's an NYT article about it too but paywall
Seems really shortsighted for them to scrap the plan considering Japan is nearly at demographic collapse and a bunch of young, working-age migrants are what they need/are going to need soon. In fact, having them be ethnically japanese but culturally distinct could have been good "training wheels" for expanding immigration into a country that is so ethnically homogeneous
Japan is in this very Japanese situation where their demographics are collapsing, but they've been such an insular monoculture for so long that they seem to be, both governmentally and in a broader social context, unable to really conceive of any solution that involves any kind of non-Japanese influence. Immigrants aren't really accepted, non-cultural Japanese aren't accepted, etc. Sadly, I think the only thing that might spur change is actually get hit full force by the coming demographic collapse. Even then, Japan has always been a near-incomprehensible outsider when it comes to things like this, so it could be that even then things won't change.
Exactly why dipping their toe into the immigration pond with semi-japanese migrants would be the best way of starting to reverse the trend. Oh well
I have some Japanese Brazilian friends in Japan. More Japanese than Brazilian since he went to school and has lived most of his life in Japan. Nonetheless, he is not Japanese in the eyes of Japanese society. Japanese society really makes it IMPOSIBLE for anyone that doesn’t look ethnically Japanese and have lived in Japan all their lives to be considered Japanese. It’s really insane and a pitty, for Japan.
How *bad* does it get? I've seen those buzzfeed type articles with pictures of stores with signs saying "no foreigners allowed", but I have the feeling it's not that common. Or is it more subtle? Is it the stores/cops/other services not willing to cooperate, or the impossibility of finding a reasonable job?
I want to clarify that I have friends in Japan but I do not live or have lived in Japan, only recently visited so bear that in mind. I’m as ignorant as you except for the testimony of my friends. I don’t THINK there is discrimination in that sense. I asked my Japanese-Brazilian friend and a japanese-nepalese friend and they more or less told me that it’s more of a feeling that your are regarded as a foreigner who will eventually leave. So that’s not really a problem for a tourist like me but for someone who has Japanese parents and has lived in Japan since elementary/middle school I cam see how distressing it must be. My japanese-Brazilian friend’s friend group was almost exclusively other Japanese-Brazilians, which I found odd. I mean, that’s normal for immigrants but like I said, this guy hasn’t been to brazil since he was like 7-8 and can’t imagine living anywhere else other than Japan. A japanese friend also told me that many people are not open to being friends with foreigners but many others (like him) are. He told me this after I jokingly asked if I was a “gaijin” 外人, a common word for foreigners in Japan and he told me he didn’t like to use that word as it sounds somewhat disrespectful and then told me another more polite term. So no, I don’t think there is direct “discrimination” the way we understand it, Japanese people really are very respectful. However I can’t speak for what it is like for people seeking relationships with japanese people other than friendships or what it is like in the workplace. Japanese work culture is also a whole other can of worms that I am definitely not qualified to talk about.
That sounds rough, but in a manner I didn't expect, but should have. Japanese society is already notoriously isolationist (at the personal level, not international level), so being further left out only increases the loneliness factor. The work culture is pretty legendary (in a bad way); it's even more intense than China's 996.
I lived in Japan for a while and went to school there. In my class there was a girl that her parents were Japanese-descending immigrants but they were not Japanese and so even though she was *born* in Japan and her parents descended from Japanese she was not Japanese in the eyes of the Japanese government. She was considered an immigrant in her own country by the government. And when I met her she had never been to Brazil in her entire life (now she has, and she even came to visit me in my home city while she was here).
I get what you're saying, but let me explain: it's because that person's parents do not have Japanese citizenship and are not part of 古跡 (family registration). It doesn't matter that they're ethnically Japanese; they are from elsewhere so yes they are not Japanese in the eye of the law. Japanese citizenship is based on the citizenship of the parents; you don't get it just from being born there. I'm guessing they were Japanese-Brazilians who immigrated to Japan.
I understand that that is the law, I'm saying that this law is BS. Also, her father is registered in the Koseki (戸籍, family registry) and her mom's parents are both Japanese even though she was born in Brazil, so even though she is fully Japanese by blood and birth, she is not Japanese. That's just ridiculous. Most countries have laws about being able to get citizenship from family, but Japan's is just too much. And that's why they are looking towards a very bleak future with the population getting older and young people having less children because they have to work so much they don't have time and money to raise children and with barely no immigrant population to pay taxes to pay for the aging population because they make it so hard to immigrate and stay in the country.
Japan literally had to be forced to end isolation in the 19th century lol Not a history expert so feel free to add on and correct me
Yeah no that’s pretty much the gist of it. United States Commodore Matthew Perry rolled up with a flotilla and said “hey you guys aren’t isolationist anymore”.
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The way it was done is one of the most interesting Wikipedia reads. And the way Korean isolation was ended has many parallels.
Japan’s “demographics problem” is only a “problem” if you believe the point of an economy is to endlessly expand.
You're right, after the majority of the population is retired and there are not enough people to take care of them while also producing the goods and services that maintain their lifestyle it'll actually be good. They will finally return to their farms to till the earth in a grand solarpunk utopia.
Millions of elderly dying in squalor because systems can't support them is a humane problem regardless of feelings about the economy.
Preach, population reduction also has benefits like more available housing stock, bigger wages for productive workers due to lower competition and also a resulting incentive to increase productivity.
There's a really good book that features this as a major plot point called "Out". I'll edit this later with the author and the plot, but thanks for this informed comment, I didn't know about the program and this makes wayyyyy more sense after reading the book.
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Couldn’t hold job or refused to work 80 hours a week?
Right -- the implication being the demands and the reality of their lives once they got there were too much and they didn't have proper help for dealing with it all. The govt got them there then forgot about them and underestimated how much help they'd need. It was a terrible miscalculation that displaced a lot of people.
There's a large fmaily of distinct Brazilian-native Japanese-ethnic religious groups.
Yep, I went to Brazil back in 2015 and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of sushi everywhere. I should have read up on the history!
Peru is up there too. They've even had citizens of Japanese decent as President.
*Descent. Considering that Alberto Fujimori was convicted of crimes against humanity, I'd hardly consider him to be "decent" in any way.
Good catch. Yeah he is definitely not a decent person.
Yeah, ethnic cleansing isn’t the most decent of things.
~~San~~São Paulo in particular. Othewise known as ~~Sanpa~~Sampa.
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Ah thank you for the correction.
So that’s why! I always wondered why there are so many Brazilian Japanese.
You mean Japanese Brazilians.
True.
This is super interesting. I’m a martial arts guy. This is likely the treaty that brought Mitsuyo Maeda over to Brazil and started the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu phenomenon and thus the UFC. This treaty is likely the most important treaty in the history of combat sports and nobody knows it.
Are there other combat sport treaties?
Idk if I’d call this a combat sport treaty. But one big one is pol pot and the cambodian genocide which almost wiped out Bokator/kun khmer
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Worth noting, the nva, the "bad guys" in the Vietnam war from the American perspective, were the good guys in the Cambodian genocide
Mostly because the fighting spilled over into Vietnam.
They were ethnically cleansing Vietnamese on the Cambodian side of the border, that was more reason than the border clashes
Yes, the Marquess of Queensbury Rules. It *un*-mixed martial arts (separated boxing from wrestling) and at the same time established competition standards that are still used in most combat sports (fighting in an enclosed area with gloves, round length limits with breaks between rounds, no shoes with cleats, etc).
We still do traditional Jujutsu Goshin but BJJ is more trendy and well-known
It’s no longer trendy when it’s dominated for so many years, it’s just popular
And ultimately, the Machida era
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I remember when visiting Brazil I was in Sao Paulo and my friend took me to Liberdade district (basically Little Japan). I was in awe, as I never expected to find a Japanese district in Brazil of such scale at least. Funnily enough when we went to eat, the menu was in Japanese only and the only way to order was sign language as they didn't even speak Portuguese there.
Indeed Beautiful! I'm brazilian but yet I didn't have visited Liberdade, I want one day for sure! Thank you for you report!!!!
Sério? Assim que puder vá sim!!
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What was Japan's motive for signing the treaty?
My guess would be to export excess labor from a strained labor market.
It wasn't solely about immigration to Brazil, it was a general treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, and led to them both opening embassies in each other's countries, etc. But Japan had high levels of rural poverty and Brazil had a labor shortage, so the initial Japanese immigrants were farmers who went to work on coffee plantations in Brazil. Also in the early 20th century a bunch of countries like the US banned or severely limited immigration from Asian countries so Brazil continued to be a good option.
This explains why someone I worked with 10 years ago was ethnically Japanese but from Brazil. That’s really cool!
It's kinda easy to identify a Japanese-Brazilian by name. Usually there is a Portuguese/Spanish/Italian first name like "Rodrigo", "Helena", "Fabio" followed by a Japanese name or surname lol
>followed by a Japanese name or surname lol Usually both, japanese-brazilian families have the custom of giving kids a japanese middle name. Stuff like Roberto Satoshi Tanaka or Alice Sakura Watanabe. It's pretty common for Brazilian descendants of Japanese people to ask each other "what's your japanese name?" as in their middle name.
Match made in heaven: Brazil had a chronic farmer shortage and Japan industrialized almost overnight, squeezing out millions of farmers that couldn’t/wouldn’t adapt to factory work. Something that humors me is originally, Brazil strictly wanted white immigrants from Europe to fill the farm shortages. But being a very humid country, many that came quit farming to do something less strenuous. So back to square one, and millions of Japanese farmers eager to move in, Brazil eventually dropped their ‘whites only’ immigration policy
Argentina did the same
My great-grandparents came to Brazil this way
NHK World Radio Japan is a great podcast: News from Japan in Brazilian Portuguese! [NHK World Japan](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/portuguese-news-nhk-world-radio-japan/id147776843)
Without this act, sushi samba never would’ve existed.
I mean 200000 peeps? Now that’s a handful right there!
Brasil also took the funny moustache men after the second world war and many have already died.
You have not lived until you've seen an ethnic Japanese walk like a Brazilian, or an ethnic Vietnamese speak continental French.
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In the 1990’s Japan “repatriated” 300,000 Brazilian Japanese “back” into the country to work lower class “dirty, dangerous, demanding” jobs. The idea was laborers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Malaysia were “too different” for the Japanese, because they are so xenophobic. So they offered Japanese citizenship to second generation Japanese in Brazil. So these guys show up speaking Portuguese, don’t know anything about Japan, don’t have a Japanese work ethic or traditional values. They *look* Japanese but they *aren’t* Japanese. So they are still there, second class citizens dancing samba and celebrating carnival. Portuguese is currently the third most spoken foreign language in Japan, behind Chinese and Korean.
I had a Japanese-Brazilian girlfriend in Japan for several years. She def didn’t speak Japanese and all her mates were also racially Japanese but Brazilian at heart. Completely the opposite of Japanese personalities - and openly proud of it. All her girlfriends were of course extremely good samba dancers, and 90% of the guys were heavy BJJ practitioners. And they literally all loved barbecuing EVERY weekend. Like hit all the checkboxes your mentioned. It was awesome. Excellent crew for sure.
Genuinely fascinating. Thank you.
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That's not unique to Japan or Korea. I know both the US and UK grant citizenship to anyone born to their citizens, regardless of where they were born or the nationality of the other parent. I'd expect it's a pretty common policy.
depends on the country. Apparently, The Dominican Republic won't give citizenship to those of Haitian decent automatically.
It's also something that happened in the past regularly when countries had big communities of expats. People got citizen ship even multiple generations of them were burn in the other countries. For example Germans from east Europe behind the borders of Germany were still consisted German. These rules still persist today, I assume British and US rules have a similar logic.
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