ADAPTING TO EAT, EATING TO ADAPT: FOOD, CLASS, AND IDENTITY OF NIKKEI BRAZILIANS IN JAPAN

Abstract

This study uses food as a medium through which to explore the nuanced lives and experiences of ethnically Japanese Brazilian nationals who currently live in Japan. Japan and Brazil have been intimately linked since the late-nineteenth century, when manual labor shortages in Brazil coincided with Japan’s rapid industrialization, prompting some 248,000 Japanese to emigrate to Brazil between the 1880s and the 1970s. Roughly a century later after this migration began, in the early 1990s, Japan’s own manual labor shortage prompted the provision of preferential employment visas to Japanese descendants living abroad. Thereafter, Japan’s number of Brazilian nationals of Japanese ancestry [known as Nikkei Brazilians] drastically increased, with most working in factories located in Japan’s industrial centers. Today, there are about 207,000 Brazilian nationals residing in Japan, comprising the fifth-largest non-Japanese resident population in Japan. This dissertation examines social, cultural, and economic aspects of life for Nikkei Brazilians in Japan, who have been mostly characterized in academic literature as dekasegi, or temporary factory workers. Qualitative, in-depth interviews with over 70 Nikkei Brazilians of widely varying social and cultural backgrounds reveal that they come to Japan not only to work in manual labor, but for education, career opportunities, professional development, and family ties. By focusing on food choices and taste, the dissertation explores the sociological concepts of habitus, capital, social class, and taste, and challenges how they apply to a transnational population such as Japan’s Nikkei Brazilians. Food and foodways are particularly useful avenues for exploring values, upbringing, culture, family, work, and identity within Nikkei Brazilians’ everyday lives, which have not been discussed in existing scholarship. Food-focused interviews centered on notions of taste reveal that Nikkei-Brazilian food preferences are shaped by their social class, geographic location, and social and cultural environment. Specifically, the relation between class and taste is more nuanced among Nikkei Brazilians who have experienced class shifts and occupational changes in moving between Japan and Brazil. The interview data also show that eating evokes personal and shared memories and feelings of nostalgia that facilitate sociocultural ties and a sense of belonging when in unfamiliar spaces. Moreover, “Brazilian food,” as it relates to “food from home” cited by Nikkei Brazilian interviewees, is drastically different from the mainstream Japanese imagination of Brazilian food that is appropriated and capitalized by Japan’s restaurant industry. Lastly, the study shows that contemporary Nikkei Brazilians navigate an “in-betweenness,” as being both Japanese and Brazilian, which ultimately helps them cope with their treatment as “foreigners” in Japan and “Japanese” in Brazil.