Anthropology Through a Double Lens. Daniel Touro Linger
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person at ease, to assure her that her point of view is valued. I encourage her to think things through and to speak with candor. I try to ask questions that are pertinent, responsive to issues she herself raises. My efforts to elicit frankness, to avoid imposing my own perspective, and to listen carefully sometimes fail, but often I gain some insight into another’s concerns and ways of thinking. People also appreciate the chance to reflect out loud and to be taken seriously. I used to be surprised when informants thanked me for talking with them, but no more.
In underscoring the advantages of person-centered ethnography, I do not mean to discard Missing Persons approaches, which are always valuable and sometimes irreplaceable. The representational environment, past or present, here or there, deserves close attention. And where persons are in fact missing one must employ Missing-Persons methods: without a time machine one can hardly interview residents of ancient Athens.
My aim here is simply to put Missing-Persons approaches in their place. They invite us to situate ourselves, with our own particular biographical, emotional, and conceptual baggage, among unfamiliar representations, and to make sense of them. The interpretive technique resembles, at worst, a projective test. At best, practiced by a sensitive, informed observer adept at leaps of imagination, it can undoubtedly yield insightful and provocative speculations about the propositions with which others are bombarded.
But nothing can substitute for verbal give-and-take with those who inhabit an alien representational environment.3 Oral explorations of life histories, thoughts, and sentiments provide checks on interpretive conjecture and shed light on the personal meaning-making and subjective diversity missed by analyses of public symbols. A successful person-centered interview creates a space where the interviewee can verbalize and hammer out her understandings of the world and herself, bringing to life the generative dialectic between public representations and personal experience.
From Japan to Brazil to Japan
Before moving to Oscar Ueda’s reflections, let me sketch the historical context of his journey from Brazil to Japan.4 Beginning in 1908, Japanese migrants, recruited and assisted by a Japanese government eager to export its surplus population, traveled to Brazil in large numbers to work on the coffee and cotton plantations of São Paulo and other southern states.5 Most of the migrants (isseis) intended to return to Japan after a short stay, but they rarely did.6 Instead they scraped together some money and bought farms or started small businesses. Their children (nisseis) and grandchildren (sanseis) spoke Portuguese and, for the most part, adopted Brazilian lifeways, even as they often identified as, and were labeled, japoneses. Members of the later generations also began to marry “Brazilians” at increasingly high rates, raising mestiço (mixed-blood) children.7 Brazil’s current nikkei (Japanese-descent) population has grown to one and a half million, the largest in the world.
But for well over a decade now Brazilian nikkeis have been flooding back into Japan. This so-called return migration was triggered initially by a labor shortage in Japan that coincided with hard times in Brazil.8 Through the boom years of the 1980s, small and middle-sized Japanese factories found it difficult to recruit unskilled labor. Younger Japanese increasingly shunned menial, relatively low-paying jobs. Accordingly, some firms began to hire illegal workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other less affluent regions of Asia. This practice partially alleviated the labor shortage, but produced (in the view of many Japanese citizens and, especially, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party) a new, acute social problem: the entry of foreigners considered to be alien and unassimilable.9
In 1990 the Japanese government responded with a law permitting foreign nationals of Japanese descent, supposedly preadapted to Japanese language and customs, to live and work in Japan. The result was a huge influx of Latin Americans, most of them from Brazil, which had a large nikkei population and was at the time suffering a severe economic crisis. Although generally well-educated and prosperous by Brazilian standards, Japanese Brazilians could earn many times their Brazilian incomes by taking jobs in Japanese factories.10 At first most of the migrants were men, but increasingly women and families, including minor children, also settled in Japan.
By the mid-1990s, Brazilian migrants, scattered throughout Japan, numbered about 200,000.11 More resided in Aichi prefecture, my field-site, than anywhere else in the country. In Aichi, Brazilians work in a range of occupations, but mostly as unskilled laborers in the auto parts plants that supply the great manufacturers. As we shall see, by and large the Brazilians’ sojourn in Japan has met neither their expectations nor those of their Japanese hosts. Most Brazilians speak little Japanese (and read less), do not in the main adhere to Japanese customs, and find the country somewhat inhospitable. In a nutshell, Japan ended up with people who look Japanese but are not, and Japanese Brazilians experienced not a homecoming but a kind of exile. Some Japanese local governments have responded by hiring a few college-educated, bilingual Brazilians, such as Oscar Ueda, as counselors and teachers serving the growing Brazilian population.
During my stay in Japan I lived in Toyota City, in a public housing complex that was home to about 1,600 Brazilians. Toyota City, seat of Toyota Motors and many of its suppliers, lies close to the eastern city limit of Nagoya, the capital of Aichi prefecture and one of Japan’s largest cities. I visited those places where Brazilians had a marked presence: ethnic restaurants and bars, company-run apartment buildings, public offices, factories, and schools. I read Portuguese language newspapers published in Japan and collected posters and leaflets aimed at and produced by migrants. I surveyed Japanese and Brazilian national representations: laws, narratives, treatises, popular formulations. But my most productive technique was person-centered interviewing, for I was interested primarily in how the migrants reconceived themselves while living in Japan. My interview with Oscar Ueda therefore focused on questions of ethnicity and nationality, eliciting from him wide-ranging reflections on Brazil, Japan, and a host of moral and philosophical issues entangled with his sense of self.
Oscar Ueda
At the time of my conversation with Oscar Ueda, I had known him and his partner, Márcia Komatsu, for over a year. Unlike most nikkeis in Japan, Oscar and Márcia held white-collar jobs. Graduates of the University of São Paulo, Brazil’s most prestigious university, both worked for the Aichi prefectural government as bilingual advisers to foreign workers. I often visited them at their respective offices to tap their expertise and exchange observations, and I developed a cordial relationship with each of them.
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