Jeffrey Lesser is Winship Distinguished Research Professor of the Humanities, Professor of History, and Director of the Program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Emory University. His books include Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese-Brazilians and Transnationalism and Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil, both also published by Duke University Press.

A Discontented Diaspora

Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960-1980By Jeffrey Lesser

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4060-7

Contents

Illustrations and Tables………………………………………………………………………………………………ixPreface and Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………xiAbbreviations………………………………………………………………………………………………………..xvPrologue The Limits of Flexibility…………………………………………………………………………………….xviiiIntroduction The Pacific Rim in the Atlantic World………………………………………………………………………11. Brazil’s Japan Film and the Space of Ethnicity, 1960-1970……………………………………………………………..252. Beautiful Bodies and (Dis)Appearing Identities Contesting Images of Japanese-Brazilian Ethnicity, 1970-1980…………………473. Machine Guns and Honest Faces Japanese-Brazilian Ethnicity and Armed Struggle, 1964-1980………………………………….744. Two Deaths Remembered………………………………………………………………………………………………1085. How Shizuo Osawa Became “Mrio the Jap”………………………………………………………………………………122Epilogue Diaspora and Its Discontents………………………………………………………………………………….148Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….153Glossary…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….183Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………191Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….215

Chapter One

Brazil’s Japan

Film and the Space of Ethnicity, 1960-1970

* * *

Prior to 1960, Nikkei did not appear in many Brazilian movies. Yet as they became increasingly visible in So Paulo’s urban landscape, this changed. In the sixties, a generation of Japanese-Brazilians began to seek more mainstream outlets for their artistic impulses, just as non-Nikkei filmmakers became enthralled by the countless Japanese films shown in So Paulo, from samurai epics to art films to soft-core pink movies (pinku eiga). These films reinforced a strong imaginary of Japan which was made more volatile by the city’s large population of Japanese-Brazilians.

Beginning about 1960 dozens of Brazilian films included Asian or Asian-Brazilian characters in story lines that used ethnicity as a critical component of national identity formation. While viewers tended to see the characters as confirming their essentialist ideas about Nikkei, actors and actresses viewed their participation as a break with the closed ethnic communities of their immigrant parents. These artists sought to be understood as “Brazilian,” an idea as essentialized as that of the “Japanese” identity that they struggled against.

Brazilian films that included Nikkei characters varied widely in style and theme. Some, like Walter Hugo Khouri’s Noite Vazia (Empty Night, 1964) and Tizuka Yamasaki’s Gaijin: Os Caminhos da Liberdade (Gaijin: The Roads to Freedom, 1980) competed at the Cannes Film Festival. Others, like Carlos Reichenbach’s O Imprio do Desejo (The Empire of Desire, 1980), had limited international exposure but were renowned in Brazil. Still others were part of a popular erotic genre, including Reformatrio das Depravadas (Depraved Girl’s Reform School, 1978), Ninfas Diablicas (Diabolical Nymphets, 1978), and O Bem Dotado: O Homem de Itu (Well Endowed: The Man from Itu, 1979). A number of documentaries explored issues of acculturation in the Nikkei community.

My goal in this chapter and the next is to use motion pictures-the stories, the images, the publicity, the characters, the actors and actresses, and the filmmakers-and the public discussions about them, to examine how ethnicity related to changing notions of nation in So Paulo. Films both promoted and reflected a new sense of So Paulo as a uniquely “Japanese” city and are examples of the “identities in motion” concept explored by Daniel Linger in his anthropological work on Brazilians in Japan and by Peter X. Feng, a scholar of Asian-American film in the United States. For Feng, “The continual repetition of history by cinema reveals anxiety about historical truth: that is, history must be continually repeated so as to persuade us to the legitimacy of the status quo, but the continued repetition suggests that history is actually a construction that can be contested.” In the city of So Paulo, I propose, identities did not just repeat and move, they simultaneously sprinted and ponderously ran the marathon. Nikkei identities as imagined by the majority and as practiced by the minority were filled with the oppositions of Brazilianness and foreignness. Characters were iconic and written to be “pure Japanese” even while the actors and actress imagined themselves as representing “pure Brazilians.” Thus the artists’ statements to me about their intent were often at variance with the films’ apparent themes. Japanese-Brazilian characters or themes rearmed and challenged identities just as new questions about the nation emerged during Brazil’s dictatorship and clashed with equally vibrant concerns resulting from generational change among Nikkei.

The six very different films that I examine represent a variety of genres and chronological moments. Two were released in 1964, the first year of the dictatorship, while the others appeared in the late seventies and early eighties, as the military regime began its “abertura” or political opening. One is a classic art film, one is a popular comedy starring a beloved Brazilian comic actor, and one is a well-known and highly regarded “ethnic film” that continues to have an impact on how Nikkei are seen and how they see themselves. Two others are in the erotic category and use sexual stereotypes to focus on ethnicity.

In spite of the stylistic and thematic differences, these films are easy to link. All show the tension between the traditional notion of So Paulo as a melting pot and the increasing assertions of ethnic pluralism that began in the 1960s. As the children and grandchildren of Japanese immigrants became a familiar part of the human landscape, Nikkei characters were normalized. These images were reinforced in other areas of visual culture such as advertising and telenovelas (television soap operas). Portrayals of So Paulo often included Nikkei and were broadcast throughout Brazil. O Grito (The Scream), shown on the Globo television network in 1975 and 1976, included fashion model and cover girl Midori Tange, who also appeared in a number of other widely watched telenovelas. Harumi Ishihara, another model, appeared in Salrio Mnimo (Minimum Wage, 1979). Perhaps the most prominent roles for Nikkei were in the Bandeirantes network soap opera Os Imigrantes (The Immigrants, 1981), which ran for 333 episodes and, not surprisingly, had an entire story line about Japanese immigrants and their children.

During the sixties and seventies Nikkei also became an important trope in cinematic visions of So Paulo. Actresses like Tange, who played good girls in small parts on television, got the chance to play bad girls in bigger parts in films like Belinda dos Orixs na Praia dos Desejos (Belinda dos Orixs on Desire Beach, 1979) and Desejo Violento (Violent Desire, 1978). Clia Watanabe went from a model on whom a viewer’s gaze briefly fell in print advertisements to an actress whose every movement was explored in film.

Films including Japanese-Brazilian characters brought the Discontented Diaspora to the surface. Filmmakers were surprised that Nikkei actors and actresses did not know how to “act Japanese.” The players were unhappy with characters that were insufficiently “Brazilian.” Non-Nikkei Brazilian filmmakers looked to Japanese film for inspiration and began to link Japanese art (from Japan) with their own Brazilian art that included “Japanese” (from So Paulo). “Japan in Japan” became “Japan in Brazil” as homages to Japanese cinema were contextualized by many directors’ experiences with Brazilians whom they often considered to be authentic Japanese. By the mid-1970s Nikkei had become a comfortable and regular part of So Paulo’s cinematic landscape.

Portrayals of Japanese-Brazilians were not simply consumed by the majority. Nikkei performers were deeply engaged in film and, in many cases, so was the Nikkei viewing public. Film created a forum for militant debate of the disjunction between Nikkei and non-Nikkei interpretations of identity. This was especially the case with female roles. Reviewers tended to see Japanese-Brazilian women as uniquely beautiful and sexy. Viewers wondered how the images of bad girls on screen were related to those of good girls in real life. Actresses and actors saw their participation, especially in sexual scenes, as part of a battle against stereotypes. The generation born in Brazil and educated in the city of So Paulo rejected an internal ethnic community insistence on chaste “non-Brazilian” sexual attitudes. Nikkei community leaders publicly hailed the entertainers as ethnic heroes who were winning a fight against discriminatory majority attitudes that had previously kept Japanese-Brazilians out of the mainstream media.

Brazilian films portrayed a particularly potent Japanese sexuality of “competing and sometimes contradictory sexual stereotypes based on nationality.” Directors and screenwriters constructed Brazilian Nikkei men as “Oriental” and sexless while portraying Japanese-Brazilian women as “Oriental” and especially available and kinky. Such images had circulated in elite circles throughout the Americas prior to the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants in Brazil in 1908. But Japan’s post-World War II reconstruction as a technological leader, and global changes in both forms and speed of information transfer, meant that by the sixties new kinds of transnational ideas about “the Orient” were strongly felt in Brazil. So Paulo became a South American location of what Steven Heine calls “the butterfly syndrome,” his term for the many films made in the United States in the fifties and sixties that dealt with Americans in Asia, often focusing on “love affairs between American men and Asian women, usually Japanese, who were alternately put on a pedestal and scorned.” Brazilian filmmakers, like the public more broadly, accepted the idea that “Japan” was in “Brazil,” and thus So Paulo was portrayed as both a Brazilian and a Japanese city. While American men traveled for love to an Asia an ocean away, So Paulo’s men traveled to an Asia just across town.

A sharp division of gender portrayals meant that the few Japanese-Brazilian male roles focused on samurai-like individuals for whom honor, and not sexual activity, was paramount. Yet most portrayals were of women. A global fetishizing of Asian women and a concern that “Brazilian” women no longer played conventional sexual or homemaking roles led some men in So Paulo to imagine that the hundreds of thousands of Nikkei women in the city would be geisha-like in their attitudes. Beginning in the sixties, magazines frequently contained articles in which “Brazilian” men expressed their desires for Nikkei women.

Portrayals of Japanese-Brazilian women often combined the two classic types that Renee Tajima identifies as oppositional in U.S.-made films, the Lotus Blossom Baby (China doll and geisha girl) and the Dragon Lady (prostitute). Japanese-Brazilian female characters were “passive figures who exist to serve men-as love interests for white men” even as their hidden sexual aggressiveness separated them from the open sexual boredom of many Brazilian female characters. The model and actress Harumi Ishihara complained that “the cinema portrays an image of the stereotypical Japanese woman for people, who can only accept her in this way.” Actress (and now university professor) Misaki Tanaka was born in Japan and moved to Brazil as a child. She played many “geisha” roles and told me in language more vehement than Ishihara’s that “the label that the Brazilian, the Occidental, places on a Japanese woman is that she is submissive…. stick a kimono on and you are Japanese … and men have the idea that Japanese women will do anything for you, different from a `Brazilian’ woman, whom you have to please.”

Identity, Cinema, and Space

So Paulo’s filmmakers and film critics (often the same people) spent a great deal of time watching Japanese films in the neighborhood of Liberdade, So Paulo’s “Japantown.” In the sixties and seventies Liberdade was home to five Japanese-language movie houses. They served a moviegoing public that developed in rural areas in the twenties and thirties, when Japanese films were shown on mobile projectors that traveled to the plantations where immigrants labored. The Nippaku Cinema-sha (Nipo-Brazilian Cinema Corporation) was founded in the small city of Bauru (state of So Paulo) in 1929 to bring films to rural areas, but by the mid-thirties it had moved its base to So Paulo to serve the growing Japanese population in the city. By the end of the decade a number of other distributors made Japanese films a regular part of So Paulo’s cultural landscape, including to broad Brazilian audiences in downtown cinemas.

In 1938, just as Japanese films became more widely distributed, a major shift in national cultural policy, called the brasilidade (Brazilianization) campaign, began as dictator Getlio Vargas succumbed to the political pressure of an increasingly vocal nativist elite. Legislation sought to prevent foreign populations from concentrating in residential communities, to force schools to teach “Brazilian” topics in Portuguese, and to dismantle foreign cultural outlets, including newspapers and film showings. The brasilidade campaign reached its height when Brazil entered World War II as an Ally in 1942, and Japanese immigrants and their Brazilian children became targets of discrimination.

Brazil’s “victory” for democracy in World War II helped to topple the undemocratic Vargas regime, and by 1946 the censorship laws had been removed. Japanese film returned in force and by 1950 six different distributors operated in the city of So Paulo. Nikkei traveled to Liberdade to see new releases from Japan, including the Kurosawa tour de force Rashmon (1950), which was first presented in a mainstream So Paulo cinema in 1952, attracting viewers from many backgrounds. The Toho Company, Shochiku Films, the Toei Company, and Nikkatsu, Japan’s principal film producers and distributors, made Brazil a regular part of their distribution networks in 1958, 1959, 1960, and 1962, respectively. Together they brought thousands of films to So Paulo and sponsored film festivals that featured appearances by Japanese stars.

By the end of the 1950s, Liberdade was a location of great cinematic excitement. Viewers flocked to five different cinemas (each linked to a specific distributor), totaling about four thousand seats, to see films soon after their release in Japan. By 1962 Japanese movies were seen in many So Paulo neighborhoods, and Japanese film festivals sold out at the So Paulo Museum of Art (Museu de Arte de So Paulo, MASP) and at the University of So Paulo cinema. Lines of fans at the mainstream Cine Repblica, Cine Coral, and Cine Esplanada kept favorably reviewed films like Heinosule Gosho’s Corvo Amarelo (Kaachan kekkon shiroyo, 1962) and less critically acclaimed ones like Hideo Gosha’s Espada do Mal (Kedamono no ken, English title: Sword of the Beast, 1965) running for months.

In the mid-fifties, a group of non-Nikkei cinephiles began attending showings in Liberdade, often watching the Japanese films without subtitles. One, Ermetes Ciocheti, became an assistant to Walter Hugo Khouri, whose portrayals of Nikkei I will discuss below. In 1963 he and his colleagues appear to have written a study on Japanese film. In the early 1960s critics like Rubem Bifora and Alfredo Sternheim (both directors as well) began writing about Japanese cinema in O Estado de S. Paulo, and Jairo Ferreira did the same for the Folha de S. Paulo. Ferreira also published longer essays on Japanese, Brazilian, and international films in the Portuguese-language section of the primarily Japanese-language So Paulo Shimbun, which became required reading for Paulistanos interested in film. Bifora, whose film O Quarto (The Bedroom, 1968) was highly influenced by Japanese cinema, always “dedicated a few lines to Japanese cinema in his [weekly] column on new releases,” and the non-Japanese-speaking audience grew quickly. Sternheim remembers a call from Toho Film’s So Paulo manager thanking him for writing “enthusiastically” about Tomu Uchida’s Daibosatsu tge (Daibosatsu Pass, 1957 and 1959), released in Brazil as Espada Diablica (Diabolical Sword). According to Toho’s research, Sternheim’s lively reviews in O Estado de S. Paulo led to screenings that were “filled with non-Japanese.” Sternheim remembers going to the fourteen-hundred-seat Niteri Cinema in Liberdade, where he was amazed to “see the whites, the pale faces, the white men [as he called them laughingly in the interview, using the English words] going into that movie house in the Japanese neighborhood.”

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Excerpted from A Discontented Diasporaby Jeffrey Lesser Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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