Posted by giveawayboy on April 28, 2004 at 12:18:02:
In Reply to: It's been a long time posted by John Kathy McGee on April 27, 2004 at 21:04:41:
Well John, Congratulations! You make me believe in my dreams by walking yours out before me. Thanks for leaving Turtle Island and going to Japan. This means alot to me. Hopefully you'll see lots of crows there. O.K. Well, if you were selling a small fold-up Japanese car I'd buy it from ya. Sorry but I'm not in the market for a truck. But if I run into anyone who is I'll tell them.
Also, I wanted to mention an article I read recently about the struggles faced by the nikkeijin, Brasilians of Japanese descent, who are return emigrants to Japan. The nikkeijin returned to Japan because many factory jobs were made available to them. Koreans and Chinese had taken many jobs from Japanese. So, Japan decided it would make these jobs available to Japanese people who had been living abroad. In the factories, they are treated as foreigners, which indeed they are, although they have Japanese pedigree. They wear blue uniforms while the traditional Japanese wear white. They are culturally isolated and tend to live and work in the same villages and factories. It is interesting to see the way they have been treated by native islanders. In Brasil, these nikkei were also 'other' usually called japnoes. Still, they were citizens of Brasil, members of a culture which was inclusive of many cultural expressions. Overall theirs has been a legacy of dislocation and confusion. One thing that holds them together is their Brasilian cultural heritage. Its interesting to see clunky samba parades in Oizumi. If I were in Japan right now I'd most likely want to meet some nikkeis. I think it would be interesting to see how they live and act compared to other Japanese. Of course Brasilians are a mixed race with alot of influences: Portuguese, African, Native American, Polish, German, Italian, Japanese....etc. etc. So, I'm sure that the nikkei communities will display this. Hopefully there will be something authentically Japanese and Brasilian that will grow up together through the next few generations and form an identity all it's own. I think that the children are more resilient and able to bring this kind of organic harmony about. But the return of these families, whose children were never raised in Japan, was not met with a warm welcome.