| Japanese immigration to Brazil began in 1908 when Japanese arrived to provide labor for the coffee plantations. Today, Brazil has the largest diasporic population of Japanese descendants. This dissertation explores the literature of the Japanese-Brazilian jun-nisei, people who were born in Japan and who immigrated to Brazil as children. I examine aspects of their dual-cultural, liminal identities by focusing on memoirs by self-identified jun-nisei immigrants Kiyotani Masuji, Hironaka Chikako, and Okuyama Kotaro; short stories published by jun-nisei writers such as Onodera Ikuko and Yajima Kensuke (penname of Umezaki Yoshiaki); selections from Koronia sh osetsusen.shu (Selected Anthology of Colonia Short Stories, 1975--1996); and poetry from the tanka anthology Koronia man'yosh u (Colonia Man'yoshu, 1981). I first discuss the historical and cultural contexts of Japanese immigration, as well as an overview of Japanese language literary production in Brazil. I then examine the public and private expressions of jun-nisei cordiality on which jun-nisei base their memories of life in Japan and Brazil. These memories are rooted in the external and internal moments of oppression that caused some jun-nisei writers to reject Brazil as homeland. When the Japanese immigrants were finally able to accept their status as permanent immigrants in Brazil, they began the process of adaptation. Exploring this process of adaptation, I discuss the jun-nisei writers' depictions of the new Brazilian landscape, in terms of their cultural and linguistic hybridity, analyzing representations of colonia-go, a mixture of Japanese and Portuguese, interracial marriages and biracial children. Through an examination of memory, victimization, and adaptation, I argue that jun-nisei identities articulate the in-between cultural spaces of child immigration literature, being, at once, both Japanese and Brazilian. The dual-cultural, liminal identities of the jun-nisei emerge in the writers' short stories, memoirs, and tanka poetry. |
