Transpacific Connections: Literary and Cultural Production by and about Latin American Nikkeijin

Transpacific Connections: Literary and Cultural Production by and about Latin American Nikkeijin is a cross-cultural work combining Latin American and Japanese studies. It contains original research on social and cultural relations between Japan and Latin America, ranging from Japanese inspirations in one of the Mexican most renowned poets, Brazilian dekasegi (temporary workers in Japan) described in a variety of testimonials, Japanese community in Brazil and its literary production, and a Mexican telenovela, inspired by the Japanese culture to European inspirations in a Nikkei Peruvian writer, Higa Oshiro.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839984068

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Transpacific Connections: Literary and Cultural Production by and about Latin American Nikkeijin

Transpacific Connections: Literary and Cultural Production by and about Latin American Nikkeijin

Edited by Maja Zawierzeniec

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© Maja Zawierzeniec editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932215

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-404-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-404-X (Hbk)

Cover Credit: Image of estratos/Jorge Vera Tenorio

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Japanese Community in Brazil and its Literary Production: The Functioning of Death in Matsui Tarô’s Literary Fiction

Nora Juurmaa

Chapter 2. Contested Modernities: Representations of the Brazilian Dekasegi and the Nipponization of Brazil in Nikkei Cultural Production

Ignacio López-Calvo

Chapter 3. When Gustave Flaubert Meets Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: Corazón Sencillo by Augusto Higa Oshiro. The Short Story of a Peruvian Nikkei Writer

Barbara Mauthes

Chapter 4. Japanese Prints in Tablada’s Writings: Cultural and Media Transposition in ‘El poema de Okusai’

Luyue Wang

Chapter 5. The Telenovela Oyuki’s Sin (El Pecado De Oyuki): Las Realidades Del Otro or Mexico through A Japanized Lens

Maja Zawierzeniec

Index

Notes on Contributors

Maja Zawierzeniec, Ph.D., is a Polish Mexicanist, translator, TEDxWarsawWomen speaker and TEDxMarszalkowska organizer, and a trilingual poet who has collaborated with a number of renowned Polish and foreign universities and other institutions as a lecturer and in a variety of cultural, social and artistic projects. She has published La mujer en el mundo latinoamericano. Literatura, historia, sociedad – el caso de México (2015), Las voces sordas. El capital creativo del narco México contemporáneo (1985-2015) (two editions: 2016 and 2018), and El glosario esencial del lenguaje del narco en el México contemporáneo (2018), as well as four poetry books and several research articles (on Mexican culture and literature, narcoculture and narcoliterature, and relations between Mexico and East Asia and linguistics).

Nora Juurmaa defended her Ph.D. in Asian and Asian Diaspora Studies at Jean Moulin – Lyon III University. Her thesis proposed an analysis of the function of death in the literary fiction of Matsui Tarô (1917–2017), a leading author in Brazilian Japanese-language literature, and a comparison was carried out with the oeuvre of Andrei Ivanov (1971– ), a key author in Estonian Russian-language literature. During her doctoral studies, she conducted research while studying at São Paulo University and several universities in Nagoya and Tokyo. Her research interests include Japanese-Brazilian literature and minority literatures. She is a member of the Estonian diplomatic corps, currently working in Cairo, Egypt.

Ignacio López-Calvo is Presidential Chair in the Humanities, Director of the Center for the Humanities, and Professor of Literature at the University of California, Merced. He is the author of more than one hundred articles and book chapters, as well as nine single-authored books and seventeen essay collections. He is the co-executive director of the academic journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, the Palgrave-Macmillan Book Series Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, and the Anthem Press book series Anthem Studies in Latin American Literature and Culture Series. His latest books are The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, Performance (forthcoming); Saudades of Japan and Brazil: Contested Modernities in Lusophone Nikkei Cultural Production (2019); Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Tusán Literature and Knowledge in Peru (2014); The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru (2013); and Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety (2011).

Barbara Mauthes, Ph.D., investigated the poetry of José Watanabe and Doris Moromisato at the University of Cergy-Pontoise and graduated with a master of Japanese in the INALCO (National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations). She participated in academic conferences about the cultural encounters between East and West and East and the global South, and published articles about Peruvian or non-Peruvian writers dealing with Japanese heritage and orientalism, like Anna Kazumi-Stahl (Argentina), Mario Bellatin (Mexico), José Watanabe Varas (Peru) or Augusto Higa Oshiro (Peru). Currently she is investigating Fernando Iwasaki Cauti. She has also worked as a Spanish teacher at the University of Cergy-Pontoise and various Parisian Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles for business schools, and as a translator from Spanish and Japanese in the private sector.

Luyue Wang holds a BA in Hispanic Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University and an MSc in Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh. In her Ph.D. project, Intermediality and Interculturality in José Juan Tablada’s Poetry: East Asian Culture and the ‘Visual Turn’, she explored the concurrence of intermediality between the poetic text and visual art and interculturality between cultures of East Asia and Mexico. Her current research interest focuses on word-and-image relationship, linguistic influence in (visual) poetry writing, and Japonisme in Latin America.

Introduction

Maja Zawierzeniec

¿Cómo se acuerda con los pájaros

La traducción de sus idiomas?

—Pablo Neruda

The topic of the culturally and ethnically complex Latin American identity has always been of utmost importance in the field known as Latin American studies: in historical, social, and literary works. Moreover, a vast body of psychological research indicates that analyzing and understanding the experiences of individuals representing multiple cultural backgrounds are vital to analyzing and understanding the communities and societies they belong to. Studying life narratives of individuals and communities, whether in purely historical or literary context, enriches and enhances the understanding of pluricultural nations: the otherwise compartmentalized experiences or unstable identities get woven into the big picture of a given world region or nation. Moreover, analyzing the fusion of different ethnicities that gives rise to new cultural phenomena, new values, and new social quality expands the more traditional view of Latin American studies.

Furthermore, the cultural, social, and political relations between Latin America and Asia are a tricky and complex topic. If you google Asia and Latin America, you get almost 6 billion results. They address various issues related, among others, to business relations (strategic partnerships vs. competition, Latin American investments in Asia and vice versa and its social and political implications, like the growing importance of Asian-Latin American relations on the global level) and cultural and literary relations (connected to migration and cultural exchange), both from the historical point of view and in the context of shaping future relationships.

The Asian immigration to the Americas dates to the sixteenth century. The Asians participated in the Galeón de Manila trade with Spain and Portugal in the 1500s, and over the next centuries thousands of people from different Asian countries left their homes to find new life opportunities across the ocean and constituted an important labor force in the region. Nevertheless, commonly, and despite the historical and contemporary presence of the Asian communities, the multiculturalism and Latin American miscegenation have been mostly defined as the mixture and cohabitation of the European, autochthonous, and African substratum, frequently leaving aside the Asian element, either marginalizing it or treating it as a mere curiosity. Moreover, till a few decades ago non-European immigrants in general have been omitted in traditional historiography. Nevertheless, ignoring the social importance and the cultural production of the Asian diaspora in the Americas also means ignoring an important part of their multicultural richness. Instead, incorporating the Asian angle into Latin American studies encourages us to rethink and reanalyze what is considered Latin American history and multiculturalism and explore the silenced, neglected, or excluded cross-cultural connections.

At present Asians are considered the fourth root (la cuarta raíz) in the multicultural spectrum of Latin American ethnic groups. They are more visible than at any other time in the past, both on a sociopolitical and a cultural level. In addition, in the last 15 to 20 years we have witnessed significant advances in Asian-Latin American studies in different parts of the world: a diverse bibliography on Asians in the Americas demonstrates their importance in the region and numerous and highly diverse works on the topic are regularly being published, particularly in the United States and western Europe. Moreover, numerous lectures, workshops, symposia, and conferences have been dedicated to the topic in the recent years. All of them shed light on how the ancestral heritage has been combined over decades with the cultural and social attachments to the societies the Asians have come to form part of, as well as the everyday struggles they have experienced.

In addition, apart from various academic journals specializing in Latin American studies or Asian and Pacific studies published in Asia, Latin America, and the United States, there are some that focus solely on Asian-Latin American relations, including Revista Asia-America Latina (http://www.asiaamericalatina.org/) and the Pacific Historical Review (https://online.ucpress.edu/phr). Furthermore, specialized academic programs that focus on Asian-Latin American relationships have been established—for instance, Diplomado en Estudios Sobre Asia, as a part of Programa Universitario de Estudios sobre Asia y África at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Undoubtedly, Asia is a varied and highly complex and multifaceted continent. And so is Latin America. Therefore, while advancing Asian-Latin American studies it might be recommendable to approach one country or one region at a time. Thus, the present volume focuses on intercultural and social interactions between one of the most fascinating and multidimensional Asian states, Japan, and selected Latin American countries: Brazil, Peru, and Mexico. The direct inspiration for this publication, Transpacific Connections: Literary and Cultural Production by and about Latin American Nikkeijin, was the 11th Conference on East–West Cross–Cultural Relations, organized by Prof. Ignacio López-Calvo, one of the authors, and the editor, Maja Zawierzeniec, in three Polish cities, Warsaw, Cracow, and Bielsko-Biala, in 2019. It was attended by several scholars from all over the globe who share a passion for exploring Asian and Latin American realities and identities. At the same time, it was the first conference—and the only one so far—in Poland and in Central Europe in general on the topic.

When we refer to people of Japanese descent whose home countries are elsewhere than Japan, the term Nikkeijin (日系人) or simply Nikkei (日系), borrowed from Japanese, is used. Commonly, it is used to include all generations of the people of Japanese origin who settled elsewhere, that is, issei (first generation), nisei (second generation), sansei (third generation), etc.

Most chapters cover topics that have not been analyzed much so far in a comprehensive way in academic work, and the majority of them present original research. The multidisciplinary perspective and the meticulous analysis of the presented research make it a useful tool both for undergraduate and PhD students, as well as for scholars interested in thoroughly exploring some understudied angles of Latin American and Asian studies, focusing on Japan.

As is well known, there has been significant ethnic Japanese presence in the Americas—both Latin America and the United States and Canada—since the end of the nineteenth century, when Japan lifted its Sakoku (鎖国, closed country) politics (which meant that on most occasions non-Japanese could not enter Japan and the Japanese could not leave it) after the Meiji government (1868–1911) replaced the Tokugawa regime (1603–1868). Of course, emigration from Japan also took place much earlier (as early as the fifteenth century to the Philippines), but it did not become a mass phenomenon until the Meiji period.

There were three particularly important periods of immigration to Latin America: the early period, from the late 1800s; the increased immigration from the 1920s caused by the US desire to limit Asian immigration, which caused Japanese to move instead to Latin America; and a wave following World War II produced by the destruction of Japan during the war. The largest number of people of Japanese descent found their new home in Brazil, especially in the area of São Paulo, where they formed a semienclosed neighborhood, Bairro Liberdade, in 1912. They remained rather sheltered within their own communities and were able to transmit the Japanese values and habits to their descendants, generating what might be called a double-layered identity. Currently, the Nikkei population in São Paulo, of over 1.6 million, is larger than in the entirety of Peru, which has the second largest ethnic Japanese population in Latin