Transnational Japanese Diaspora: Preserving the Brazilian Nikkei Literary and Cultural Heritage

FAIN: HC-279973-21

Stanford University (Stanford, CA 94305-2004)
Kaoru Ueda (Project Director: December 2020 to present)

The digitization, preservation, and public access of the leading pre-WWII Japanese language immigrant newspaper, the Burajiru Jiho, published in São Paulo, Brazil.

Much of the scholarship to date on Japanese Brazilian Nikkei, and other Nikkei communities in the Americas, has been primarily concentrated in the social sciences. By making application to NEH, this project seeks to develop and nurture research into the transnational Japanese diaspora from the multifaceted perspectives of the humanities. This proposal calls for the preservation and digitization of the Burajiru Jiho newspaper is coupled with a virtually based, international symposium designed to introduce the latest research on Japanese Brazilian literature in both Japanese and Portuguese languages. In so doing we seek to capture the narratives that have defined 112 years of history and cultural heritage between Japan and Brazil from 1908 to the present day.  

Associated Products

Transnational Japanese Diaspora: Preserving the Brazilian Nikkei Literary and Cultural Heritage (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Transnational Japanese Diaspora: Preserving the Brazilian Nikkei Literary and Cultural Heritage
Abstract: A virtual half-day international symposium was held in 2021. “Transnational Japanese Diaspora: Preserving the Brazilian Nikkei Literary and Cultural Heritage” was a bilingual event in Portuguese and English designed to introduce the latest research on Japanese Brazilian literature in Japanese and Portuguese languages and was free and open to the public.
Date Range: November 5, 2021
Location: Virtual hosted by the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Primary URL: https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/japanesediaspora/symposium
Primary URL Description: This virtual international symposium is designed to introduce the latest research on Japanese Brazilian literature in both Japanese and Portuguese languages, in conjunction with the recently digitized Burajiru Jiho newspaper, held at The Historical Museum of Japanese Immigration in Brazil in São Paulo and now available on the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection. This virtual symposium is free and open to the public.

Notícias do Brasil (Burajiru Jihō) (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Notícias do Brasil (Burajiru Jihō)
Author: The Japanese Diaspora Initiative
Abstract: One of the outcomes of the project was to preserve and digitize important, rare, and historical Japanese Brazilian newspapers. With guidance from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, the Museu Histórico da Imigração Japonesa (the Historical Museum of Japanese Immigration) in São Paolo, Brazil, conserved and digitized their three major Japanese-language newspapers: the Notícias do Brasil (Burajiru Jihō), Nippak-Shimbun (Nippaku Shinbun), and Diário Nippak (Nippaku Mainichi Shinbun). After the Library & Archives completed describing the materials and creating the metadata, the newspapers were made available in the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, providing researchers around the world with access to more than 35,000 pages of new materials from Brazil.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://hojishinbun.hoover.org/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=buj&e=
Primary URL Description: The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection is currently the world’s largest online archive of open-access, full image Japanese American and other overseas Japanese newspapers in Asia and South America. Image content in this collection is accompanied by OCR-generated text where possible, thus rendering the text searchable. The holdings of each title are browsable by date, title, and publication place, with each title cross searchable with other titles on the platform. The nature of the newspapers varies significantly from community-focused to political or military propaganda depending on the political conditions and target readership.
Access Model: Open access

The Japanese-Language Newspaper Novel Abroad (Article)
Title: The Japanese-Language Newspaper Novel Abroad
Author: Edward Mack
Abstract: This article presents initial findings about the history of the publication of serialized novels in Japanese-language newspapers published in North and South America. An under-studied publishing venue for literature to begin with, even less is known about the serialization of novels in these diasporic communities despite them being the most widely circulated fiction. Focusing on what can be reconstructed of the history of these works and their publication, this study focuses on five newspapers and their serialized novels during the 1930s, with a particular focus on the novel Constellations Ablaze by Ozaki Shirō and the lesser-known author Nakagawa Amenosuke. This preliminary survey suggests an industry that navigated international copyright law, reader’s tastes, and the interconnection of different local readerships.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060158
Access Model: Open access
Format: Journal
Publisher: Humanities

Intelectuais Nipo-Brasileiros nos Jornais em Língua Japonesa do Pós-Guerra. (1946-1970) (Book Section)
Title: Intelectuais Nipo-Brasileiros nos Jornais em Língua Japonesa do Pós-Guerra. (1946-1970)
Author: Monica Okamoto
Editor: BIONDI, L
Editor: LUCHESE, T.
Editor: GUIMARÃES, V.
Abstract: The objective of this work is to measure the action of some Nikkei intellectual journalists who worked in the Japanese-Brazilian press in the early post-war period and, concomitantly, entered other social fields (academic, economic and political) as spokespersons for a group still numerically restricted at the time: the Nikkei intellectual elite of the city of São Paulo. Hideo Onaga, José Yamashiro and Hiroshi Saito are just some of the significant names that emerged during this period and who played a central role in shaping the mentality of the Nikkei community. Thus, we believe that the publications São Paulo Shimbun (Jornal São Paulo 1946-2018) and Paulista Shimbun (Jornal Paulista 1947-1998), idealized by these Nikkei intellectual journalists, stood out in this foray.
Year: 2023
Publisher: Editora da UNESP
Book Title: Mediações Transnacionais e Imprensa Estrangeira Publicada no Brasil

Open Access Collection (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Open Access Collection
Title: Foujita Discovers the Americas: An Artist's Tour
Year: 2021
Publisher: Discovery Nikkei
Author: Seth Jacobowitz
Author: Greg Robinson
Editor: Greg Robinson
Abstract: The name of Léonard Foujita (AKA Tsuguharu Foujita) has lost much of its luster today. However, in his heyday in Paris in the 1920s, Foujita was not only the most celebrated Japanese artist in the world, but (along with Hollywood star Sessué Hayakawa) arguably the most famous living person of Japanese ancestry.
Primary URL: https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2021/1/7/leonard-foujita-1/
Primary URL Description: Discover Nikkei is a community website about Nikkei identity, culture, and history. The goal of this project is to provide an inviting space for the community to share, explore, and connect with each other through diverse Nikkei stories, experiences, and perspectives.
Type: Other

Fujin ran (Female Column) in Burajiru Jihô (Article)
Title: Fujin ran (Female Column) in Burajiru Jihô
Author: Monika Setsuyo Okamoto
Abstract: In this paper I analyze the social condition of Japanese immigrant women in Brazil based on the articles by Fujin Ran (Column for Ladies), which were published between 1917 and 1924 in the Japanese-Brazilian newspaper Burajiru Jihô (Brazil News 1917-1941). I examine how this press tried to resume social control by redirecting the thinking and behavior of these women for the benefit of the male immigrants and the Japanese government. Jihô’s effort to subdue Japanese immigrant women, however, culminated in a process of bilateral social influence. It is necessary to point out that the approach of this research is not exclusively oriented to gender relations or other articulations in this sense. In effect, this study focuses on Japanese immigrant history and the role of Nikkei newspapers in addressing issues of the female universe.
Year: 2022
Format: Journal
Publisher: Federal University of Pernambuco

The Continuum of Immigration and Imperialism in Prewar Japan (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: The Continuum of Immigration and Imperialism in Prewar Japan
Abstract: In keeping with the theme of transgression for the 2023 Terasaki Center Graduate Student Conference, this presentation introduces the continuum of immigration and imperialism in prewar Japanese expansionist discourse, particularly from the perspective of modern literature. Although it is often taken for granted that settler colonialism in the Empire of Japan and Japanese mass migration to the Americas represent distinctive historical trajectories and must be studied in isolation from one another according to different academic disciplines and methodologies, this presentation will attempt to complicate tidy narratives of national, immigrant, and imperial belonging. By focusing upon literary works that were largely serialized in prewar Japanese-language immigrant newspapers published in Brazil and pro-expansionist magazines from Japan proper, I seek to disclose the surprisingly intimate and intersectional discourse regarding what it meant to be Japanese in the world.
Author: Seth Jacobowitz
Date: 04/17/2023
Location: Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA
Primary URL: https://www.international.ucla.edu/japan/#

South America Bound: Settler Colonist Fiction of the Meiji Era (Book Section)
Title: South America Bound: Settler Colonist Fiction of the Meiji Era
Author: Seth Jacobowitz
Editor: Pedro Iacobelli
Editor: Sidney Xu Lu
Abstract: This chapter investigates the origins of settler colonist fiction that began in the Meiji era and constituted one of the most tangible forms by which modern literature participated in the Empire of Japan’s broader expansionist aims. Contrary to the conventional wisdom which takes for granted that this genre was exclusively set in Japan’s burgeoning empire in Asia, from 1908 until the onset of World War II settler colonist fiction expressly promoted emigration overseas to sovereign nations in South America as an essential part of its diversified strategy to alleviate the burdens of overpopulation in the home islands. The earliest identifiable work of settler colonist fiction is Horiuchi Shinsen’s “South America Bound” (Nanbei yuki), which appeared in the inaugural May 1908 issue of the journal Colonization World (Shokumin sekai), by Tokyo-based magazine publisher Seikō Zasshi Sha. Although largely forgotten today, both text and genre attest to the pressures confronted by the rural communities marked in Japanese national-imperial discourse as “surplus population” (jinkō kajō), including those whose seasonal labor “working away from home” (dekasegi) temporarily brought them into the cities. Enduring for only five issues between May and September 1908, Colonization World nevertheless set in motion production of a lowbrow, but ideologically potent, literary corpus in pro-expansionist and general interest magazines that grew well into the early 1940s. It operated within a feeder system that promised a degree of state sponsorship and oversight, while maintaining the primacy of ambition, skill, and luck in navigating the perils of earning one’s fortune abroad.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/the-japanese-empire-and-latin-america/
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

A Construçāo das Relaçõoes: Seis Artistas Nipo-Brasileiras" (The Construction of Relations: Six Japanese Brazilian Artists) (Book Section)
Title: A Construçāo das Relaçõoes: Seis Artistas Nipo-Brasileiras" (The Construction of Relations: Six Japanese Brazilian Artists)
Author: Michiko Okano
Editor: Christine Greiner
Abstract: The article deals with the study of Japanese Brazilian (or Nikkei) art as a dialogic connection between two different and distant spatialities: the country of origin and the country of displacement. The interaction of the relationships developed (GLISSANT, 2021), also considering the interrelation of men and spaces, (KAUFFMAN, 2004), is always procedural. The reflection on Orientalism is developed in dialogue with the lives and works of six Japanese Brazilian women artists: Tomie Ohtake (1913-2015) and Alina Okinaka (1920-1991), both pre-war immigrants; Sachiko Koshikoku (1937-2019) and Shoko Suzuki (1929- ), post-war immigrants; and Erica Kaminishi (1979- ) and Yukie Hori (1979- ), who are Japanese descendants born and raised in Brazil.
Year: 2022
Publisher: Anna Blume

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