An Enclave of Brazilians Is Testing Insular Japan
TOYOTA CITY, Japan — Facing labor shortages back in 1990 but ever wary of allowing in foreigners, Japan made an exception for Japanese-Brazilians. With their Japanese roots, names and faces, these children and grandchildren of Japanese emigrants to Brazil would fit more easily in a society fiercely closed to outsiders, or so the reasoning went.
Nicholas Wada, right, and classmates at West Homi Elementary School, where about half the students are Japanese-Brazilians.
Rita Okokama, right, at her shop in Toyota City, Japan. She says she has been treated well in her 18 years in Japan.
Many immigrant workers have settled in Toyota City.
In the two decades since then, despite periodic economic downturns like the current one, the number of Japanese-Brazilian workers in Japan has kept growing. They are clustered in industrial regions dotted with factories supplying familiar companies like Honda, Sanyo and Toyota, whose headquarters gave this city in central Japan its name.
But perhaps nowhere in this country do Japanese and Japanese-Brazilians rub shoulders with such intensity as in a public housing complex here called Homi Estate. Built in the 1970s for young Japanese families, Homi has a population of 8,891 that is now nearly evenly split between Japanese, at 52 percent, and foreigners, at 48 percent.
“To be honest,” Toshinori Fujiwara, 69, a Japanese community leader, said, “I never imagined in my wildest dreams that this would ever become a multiethnic neighborhood.”
A generation from now, more Japanese are likely to be making similar comments as Japan’s population ages and its work force shrinks. Recently labor shortages have spread from factories to farms, fishing boats, hospitals and other areas, prompting Japan to open its doors to temporary workers from China and elsewhere in Asia.
As the demographic squeeze grows tighter, Japan may have to open itself further to immigration, experts say, if it is to have the workers it needs to remain a major industrial power. A homogeneous and insular nation, however, Japan is notoriously unwelcoming to immigrants; Koreans who came here during World War II are still treated as second-class citizens.
To make itself an attractive destination for immigrants, the experts say, Japan will have to undergo a difficult cultural transformation for which the Japanese-Brazilians pose an elementary test case. If even they cannot gain acceptance, what chance will there be for immigrant groups that may be ethnically, racially, religiously and nationally different from native Japanese?
Immigration is an unpopular and politically delicate topic. But the country’s 317,000 Japanese-Brazilians — whose children are growing up in Japan and, in many cases, coming of age here — effectively make up Japan’s largest immigrant population. Of the total, nearly 94,400 have acquired permanent residence, while the others can stay in Japan indefinitely. Children born in Japan of foreign parents do not automatically get citizenship.
A city within a city, Homi Estate — 40 apartment buildings, detached houses, schools and shops — looks like any other Japanese housing complex from afar. But, on closer inspection, street signs are in Japanese and Portuguese. In the community’s shopping complex, restaurants serve Brazilian dishes; a convenience store displays Brazilian magazines. A Japanese supermarket was replaced by a Japanese-Brazilian one last year, reflecting Homi’s shifting demographics.
Other differences are more subtle. Some elevators are covered with scratches, a kind of vandalism rarely seen in Japan. And parking lots contain cars retrofitted into low-riders and painted purple, while Japanese tend to stick to white or gray.
In the beginning, the Japanese did not understand why the Japanese-Brazilians played loud music, failed to sort their trash perfectly and did not seem bothered about arriving late to appointments. For the Japanese-Brazilians, their grandparents’ or parents’ often rose-tinted image of Japan seemed outdated at best, and they felt unwelcome.
“I’ve been lucky because the Japanese have been kind to me,” said Rita Okokama, 40, a Japanese-Brazilian who has been here 18 years and owns Padaria, a small sandwich shop. “But others have faced prejudice. For example, Japanese shop owners will follow around Japanese-Brazilian customers because they think they’ll shoplift.”
A decade ago, Japanese-Brazilians even clashed with Japanese right-wing groups singling out foreigners. But the situation began improving five years ago as the Japanese and the Japanese-Brazilians learned to co-exist and organized joint events, like barbecues, said Kunikazu Ihara, 65, a local ward leader. Another reason for the improvement in relations may be that Japanese unwilling to live next to Japanese-Brazilians simply moved.
“If they were surrounded by foreigners, especially those in rental apartments, some Japanese just got out,” Mr. Ihara said.
By contrast, the Japanese who stayed appeared committed to getting along.
“Japanese tend to be insular and build shells around themselves,” said Kimio Yamamoto, 71, a retired Japanese engineer who has become a familiar face at Homi’s Japanese-Brazilian-run fitness club. “And foreigners can feel that right away.”
As he worked on his pectorals, Mr. Yamamoto said the Japanese-Brazilians had immediately made him feel at home at the club. “It’s fun,” he said.
Still, most adults keep a polite distance from one another.
“Children become amigos,” said Mr. Fujiwara, the Japanese community leader, who is taking Portuguese lessons and sprinkles his Japanese with Portuguese words. “But adults, they don’t become amigos.”
At West Homi Elementary, where Japanese-Brazilian children account for 53 percent of the 196 students, supplementary Japanese language classes are offered, as well as help in other subjects. Partly as a result, Japanese-Brazilian children do not drop out, a common problem in other public schools, where foreign children are often bullied.
Because of the growing number of Japanese-Brazilian students, some Japanese parents were wary of letting their own children stay at the school. School officials tried to persuade the Japanese to keep their children here by emphasizing the positive side effects of the Japanese-Brazilian presence.
“This is no longer the era of a homogeneous people, but rather of a multiethnic society,” said Mitsuyuki Shibuya, a school official.
The new era may be symbolized by a 9-year-old Japanese-Brazilian student named Nicholas Wada, who has taken home prizes for poetry and other subjects, which his parents proudly display. His parents, João, 44, and Silvana, 40, came to Japan 18 years ago and also reared a daughter, Veridiana, 22, here.
This year they built a two-story detached house as a sign of their commitment to Japan.
“My son has no image at all of Brazil, so we built this house for him,” Ms. Wada said in the couple’s living room. “Nicholas says he doesn’t want to go to Brazil.”
“He thinks in Japanese,” Mr. Wada, a truck driver, added.
Like most Japanese-Brazilians — indeed, like almost all immigrants throughout the world — the Wadas arrived here intending to stay only two or three years. “Even if you ask us now, we’ll say we’re going back in two to three years,” Ms. Wada said.
Uncertain about how long they will stay in Japan, many Japanese-Brazilians send their children to private Portuguese-language schools or keep them out of school altogether. Going to school is not compulsory for foreigners.
Of the nearly 33,500 Japanese-Brazilian children in Japan between 5 and 14 years old, the ages of compulsory education, about 10,000 are in Japanese schools receiving remedial Japanese lessons, according to government figures. Most of the rest are likely in Portuguese-language schools or not attending school.
Children who do not attend Japanese schools tend to become isolated from Japanese society, said Kiyoe Ito, the chairwoman of Torcida, a private organization that teaches Japanese to Japanese-Brazilian children in Homi. Even if they intend to move to Brazil, their understanding of that country is also limited.
One boy studying Japanese at Torcida one recent morning was Bruno Da Costa, 15, whose Japanese maternal grandparents had emigrated to Brazil. With his parents, Bruno had moved to Japan at the age of 1, but he was unable to express himself in Japanese. He said he understood most of his favorite cartoon on television, “Naruto,” but movies were beyond his comprehension.
“I feel Brazilian because I went to a Portuguese school,” Bruno said. “If I’d gone to a Japanese school, maybe I’d feel differently. But Japan is also my country; I grew up here. Brazil, I think, is a dangerous country. I mean, I’d feel afraid to carry around an iPod or wear a designer T-shirt over there. Japan’s safe.”
Around 5 p.m. on weekdays, buses from nearby factories drop off day-shift workers at Homi and pick up the night-shift crew. Most of the Japanese-Brazilians earn around $12 an hour and work at suppliers to Toyota.
The company Tokai Rika, a seat-belt maker, started by hiring 8 Japanese-Brazilian workers in 1995 and now has 280, or almost a quarter of its factory work force here. In the past year, the company made changes — including offering the foreign workers longer contracts and hiring a Japanese-Brazilian chef in its cafeteria — to retain Japanese-Brazilians who might be lured away by better-paying competitors.
“To be honest, they work more faithfully than Japanese workers,” Hiroaki Ito, a general manager, said, repeating a common complaint among businesses that young Japanese lacked the work ethic of older Japanese and tended to quit easily.
Kouji Buma, the manager of the factory, said simply, “If we consider the future, we just won’t be able to operate this factory without Japanese-Brazilians.”
Tokai Rika officials did not venture an opinion on the country’s immigration policies. But some of Homi’s residents did.
Hiroko Arakawa, 52, a Japanese homemaker who was buying meat at the Japanese-Brazilian supermarket, said her son, now in junior high school, had had Japanese-Brazilian friends since elementary school. And she had enjoyed getting to know the friends’ parents.
Japan should open itself up to immigrants and give them full access to society, she said.
“They become sick and need health insurance just like Japanese,” she said. “If we do right by them, they won’t want to leave.”
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