Category Archives: migration

by | 11 September 2007 · 6:17 pm

The Oaxaca Diaspora’s Protestant Ethic

My rule of thumb is to try to blog no more than about a page per chapter (depending on the lengths of the chapters) from the books I buy and read, but the following excerpt is from my favorite chapter so far in a book where I can hardly resist “reading aloud” every few pages. I was undecided about which of three thematic passages to cite: on Mexico’s Okies (the victim angle), Oaxacan self-help (the agency angle), or religion (the spiritual angle). I ended up concatenating two of the three. So I’ll have to do hard penance by biting my tongue through several other chapters. From True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2001), pp. 102-103, 110-111:

Mexicans generally view the border and those who live there as only semi-Mexican—too close to the gringo, where too many of his ways are imitated. In truth, that is what shaped the [San Quintín] valley. With drip irrigation farmers saw the potential of growing for both the United States and Mexico and dropped subsistence farming for a very American capitalist ethic. Acres under cultivation went from two thousand in 1980 to almost twenty thousand in 1990. Nighttime electricity came to San Quintín. Then a few stores, a couple of motels, a movie theater, satellite television.

“I have uncles in the state of Zacatecas who grow chile,” says Ruiz Esparza, “They harvest the crop, but only apart of the profits goes back into the fields. They’re afraid of risking it all. Here, it seems they’re a little crazy. They risk it all every year. People here aren’t interested in having money in their wallet. Everything they have goes back into the fields.

“I look at the farmers of Oceanside, Bakersfield, Oxnard battling against the city, high water prices, taxes, and I see them keep going. They’re very brave. I think having those people before us as examples inspires us to do the same. If they can do it, why can’t we?”

From the north, San Quintín had its market, and from there it imported machinery, capital, and an entrepreneurial spirit. What the valley of San Quintín had never had was abundant labor. And that came from the south.

The Dust Bowl in all this became the states of Guerrero and, above all, Oaxaca, both states with enormous Indian populations who retain the customs and languages of their ancestors. Like the northerners with whom they now live, they are considered somewhat less than Mexican, disdained as “dirty Indians.” It was a strange yet perhaps appropriate pairing: two outcasts coming together to create something in the dust of the northern Mexico desert.

Agriculture in Oaxaca, like that in Oklahoma during the Depression, is a limp and stagnant thing. Inefficient farming and the division of land into ever smaller slivers have bequeathed the state a withering poverty, bloody feuds over land ownership, and generations of uneducated children. Hundreds of thousands of Oaxacan Indians—Mixtecos primarily, but also Triquis and Zapotecos—have been leaving home for four decades now. They are Mexico’s migrants, the cheapest labor in a cheap-labor country. “They provided labor that was easily exploited,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Human Rights Center in Tijuana. “They were docile, didn’t speak Spanish, would accept almost any treatment and work hard.”…

But in Tijuana, migrant Indians also discovered San Quintín’s almost unquenchable thirst for cheap labor. Through the late 1970s and 1980s the valley evolved into a major stop on the Indians’ migrant trail, part of what came to be known informally as “Oaxacalifornia”—the diaspora that starts in San Quintín and runs through North San Diego County and up the state. Entire families came to the valley to live in labor camps designed for transient men. The camps teemed, and the work was tough in the hot sun and choking dust. But it was work, which was something Indians had never had in Oaxaca….

Indians transformed their new home when they came here to live. But just as profoundly, their new home changed them. And the clearest distillation of all those changes is the Protestant Church. “If you take a poll, you’ll find that 80 or 85 percent of those who are established here now are Protestant,” says Meza. That number might be high. But Protestant churches—especially of the more fundamentalist bent—proliferate in the valley. Indians here have become Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, and scads of obscure denominations to which Luther’s Reformation gave rise. The new churches are symbols of economic success, of modernity, of the monumental power and attraction of the United States. The adoption of a Protestant faith is almost standard issue in leaving Oaxaca for a future.

And that process is best told by one man who, now in his late forties, stands clapping in unison with the rest of the Apostolic Assembly of the Faith in Christ Jesus. Twenty years ago Luis Guerrero took his family and left his Oaxacan Indian pueblo and its traditions, moved to the valley of San Quintín, and hasn’t yet looked back in fondness.

Guerrero, a Mixtec Indian who speaks halting Spanish in a thick Indian accent, faced a brutish dead-end life as a subsistence farmer, depending on unpredictable rains, in the village of Santa María Asuncion, where landholdings were no longer measured in acres but in meters.

In 1972 Guerrero was among fifteen people who had to pay for the village’s traditional party for its patron saint, the Virgin of Asuncion. It was the custom: every year a few people had to become deeply impoverished to throw the three-day party for everyone else. His job was daunting: he had to give 2,000 pesos—the equivalent of two and a half years’ local wages at the time—to buy food and alcohol for everyone, fireworks, candles, and more. The responsibility almost broke him. He borrowed the money at high interest rates, then left his young family and pueblo for that year to pick tomatoes in Sinaloa to pay it back.

In 1974 he began migrating to San Quintín with his family. Finally in 1978 they moved here to live, leaving Oaxaca forever.

Away from the cloistered atmosphere of his Oaxacan village, Luis Guerrero began a religious and secular awakening, one he likes to illustrate by talking about the books he bought.

In San Quintín he bought his first book ever—a Bible. In Oaxaca he had never read a Bible; though the whole village was Catholic, no one owned one. Like everyone else, he depended on a priest to know what it said. “I began reading it and I began to awaken my mind…. I like knowing myself: I went to the Catholic Church, the Apostolic Church, Prince of Peace, Los Olivares, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Open Door—to see how each denomination preached.” He finally settled on the Apostolic Assembly.

Now thirsting for more, he bought his second book—a copy of the Mexican constitution. “In our pueblos in Oaxaca, we didn’t know the earthly law, or how to defend ourselves [legally]. Also we didn’t know spiritual law. So I searched on my own to discover what constitutional law said. I searched on my own to discover what the Bible said so that I myself could understand earthly law and spiritual law.

“Earthly law allows you to speak up for your rights with the police, the bosses. That’s why I put forth an effort to learn it. [In the villages] people don’t have education. The [local] authorities pressure them to fulfill tradition. They want them to put on traditional parties. [In Oaxaca] you can’t give your children education because the little money you earn you have to spend on parties for the saints. Our children have no shoes because of tradition. We came here to leave all that behind.”

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Filed under economics, Mexico, migration, religion, U.S.

by | 5 August 2007 · 3:52 pm

Black Resorts in the U.S., White Resorts in Japan

From Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, by Lawrence Otis Graham (Harper, 2000), pp. 152-153

Even though we’d been going there since I was two years old, such was the arrogance of black privilege on that island that it never even occurred to me that white people had summer homes on Martha’s Vineyard until I was ten or eleven years old. Of course I saw white people at the Flying Horses, at Our Market, and at the tennis courts off South Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs. But I assumed they were just passing through as guests of black people who had homes there, or as unrooted tourists. Just people passing through a place that was ours.

But of course Martha’s Vineyard had white families. The black neighborhoods of Oak Bluffs were dwarfed by the white sections in the town and by the white population that dominated the rest of Martha’s Vineyard. But I was a summer kid who defined the resort by the boundaries of the black neighborhoods and by whole days and evenings spent with our extended black family in our all-black tennis tournaments, all-black yachting trips, all-black art shows, and all-black cookouts, and the white vacationers had no relevance for me.

As I grew older, I saw what my younger and more naive, self-satisfied eyes had missed. As an adolescent, I finally paid notice to the racial lines that long ago had been drawn between blacks and whites on Martha’s Vineyard. I eventually even saw the many hierarchies that existed within the groups of blacks who summered there. But in spite of these changed perceptions and my newfound confrontation with reality, the one unalterable impression that remains today is that when vacationing among our own kind, in places that have been embraced by us for so long, there is a comfort—and a sanctity—that makes it almost possible to forget that there is a white power structure touching our lives at all.

Today, America’s black elite is closely associated with three historic resort areas that became popular as a result of laws that had kept other vacation spots exclusively white. They are Sag Harbor, Long Island; Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard; and Highland Beach, Maryland. In the past, and to some extent still today, blacks also choose Hillside Inn, a black-owned resort in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains; and Idlewild, Michigan, a small town two hundred miles north of Detroit that was a popular escape for the midwestern black elite. In recent years, the elite have built ancillary vacations around the annual Black Summit ski vacation event that brings hundreds of black skiers and their families to resorts in Aspen and Vail, Colorado.

Until I read this book, I had never given much thought to the favorite resorts of America’s black elites, but a lot of what Graham says about Oak Bluffs and Martha’s Vineyard conjures up memories of my own childhood experiences at a couple of the favorite resorts of foreigners long resident in Japan: Karuizawa and Lake Nojiri.

Starting in the 1920s, many missionaries of all denominations from Europe and North America would spend summers in rustic cabins at Lake Nojiri’s Gaijin-mura (“Foreigner-ville”), where they could boat, golf, hike, play tennis, swim, read, relax, and catch up with other missionaries from all over Japan. An earlier generation of missionaries during the late 1800s had helped turn Karuizawa into what’s now a thriving upscale resort where only the very wealthy can afford to buy vacation homes. The Nojiri Lake Association seeks to prevent the same thing from happening to Gaijin-mura by enforcing rustic standards: for instance, by keeping roads and paths unpaved, and by allowing electricity but not indoor plumbing. The last time I was there, in 1975, we had to haul water in buckets from community faucets. It was considered bad form to run a hose all the way into your cabin’s kitchen or toilet.

Our family spent a week or so at Karuizawa in 1957, the same year Japan’s current Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko first met on a tennis court there. We stayed at the rustic cabin of one of my father’s Quaker cronies, Herbert Nicholson, a prewar missionary in Mito who was affectionately known to the postwar generation of Japanese schoolkids as Uncle Goat (Yagi no ojisan) for his relief work after the war.

We couldn’t afford a vacation cabin of our own. We depended instead on the kindness of cronies with different furlough schedules. The next year we spent a week or so at an isolated beach bungalow in Chiba that belonged to a wealthier Japanese American missionary family from Waimea, Kaua‘i. My mother enjoyed the absence of other missionary wives, and we two eldest boys enjoyed playing on a big derelict fishing boat lying on the beach, then watching the fishermen and their often bare-chested wives haul their boats up on shore every day at dusk.

The next summer we two oldest boys took a long overnight train trip by ourselves, up the Japan Sea side from Kyoto to Aomori, to visit another missionary family there with boys of the same age. That family brought us back down to the annual Southern Baptist summer mission meeting at Amagi Sanso, up in the mountains of the Izu Peninsula.

The physical environment at mission meetings was very Japanese: each family had its own tatami room, older boys and girls slept in separate group rooms, males and females of all ages bathed in separate public baths, and everyone removed shoes inside the buildings. But the cultural environment was very American: from Southern fried chicken, Kool-Aid, and 12-oz. cans of Coke, to loud talk, boisterous laughter, and emotion-laden church services. I found the unrestrained gregariousness and emotionality rather alien and intimidating. But I can imagine that it was a great relief for the American-raised missionaries to finally let loose after working in a foreign culture for most of the year.

Those missionaries who had dachas at Lake Nojiri would then spend a few more weeks of Euro-American summer vacation before returning to the stress of work and school in the majority culture. My first summer at Nojiri was after 10th grade, when our family borrowed the cabin of another family on furlough. I took a junior life-saving class, went sailing a time or two with friends who had boats, and played the only round of golf I’ve ever played.

At mission meeting that year (1964), I had hung around with an agemate who had arrived in Japan on the same ship I did in 1950. I was painfully shy; she was not. That relationship intensified in the back of the overnight bus full of missionary families en route to Nojiri, but our summer romance ended when my family returned to Hiroshima, hers returned to Mito, and we each returned to our respective high schools in Kobe and Tokyo that fall. (Our next and final date was at her senior prom in Tokyo.)

My next mission meeting’s budding romance was nipped in the bud when neither of us went to Nojiri that year. She was a schoolmate and we had already been to the junior prom together, but my family didn’t get a cabin that year, and her parents didn’t approve of such long vacations. So we spent the rest of that summer at our respective homes in Hiroshima and Osaka, and then found other distractions when school resumed in the fall. Such were the disadvantages of not frequenting the right resorts.

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Filed under family, Japan, migration, U.S.

by | 22 December 2006 · 4:57 pm

The Oldest Mosque in North America

Freelance journalist and journalism professor Michael Judge profiled the oldest mosque in North America in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinion Journal.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa–Not far from the banks of the Cedar River and the concrete silos of the Quaker Oats plant, in a working class neighborhood adorned with Christmas lights and American flags, sits the oldest mosque in North America. Founded in 1934, and admitted to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, it’s not what you think of when you think of a mosque. There is no lofty minaret, no balcony for the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer. There is, however, a place of worship that most resembles a one-room schoolhouse–a single-story, white clapboard box with plain black shutters. If it weren’t for the crescent-topped green vinyl dome and the canopy above the entrance bearing the words “The Mother Mosque of America: Islamic Cultural & Heritage Center,” one might easily mistake it for a modest, if not meager, Pentecostal church, which indeed it was for a brief stint in its history before being abandoned altogether….

“We’ve been here for four and now five generations,” says Imam Tawil, pointing to a panoramic black-and-white photo of dozens of early settlers; the picture dates to 1936 and shows an imam and priest, both of Middle Eastern descent, proudly shaking hands in the center. “We’re as old as the oak trees in Iowa,” he continues. “We’re part of the fabric of this great state. We’re Americans with dreams and aspirations.” Many of the earliest Muslim settlers came to Cedar Rapids in the late 19th century from what is now Lebanon to work the farmland and raise crops of their own. As the community grew, it needed a permanent place to worship. Despite the hard times of the Great Depression, the local Muslim community pooled its resources and the “Mother Mosque” was dedicated on June 16, 1934. Sixteen young men from the Muslim community here served their country in World War II; two of those men never made it home. Since then, Muslim-Americans from eastern Iowa have served their country in nearly every major military conflict. “At least 20 members of the community are currently enlisted in the military,” says Imam Tawil. “Several are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq right now.” Cedar Rapids is now home to Muslims from some 30 countries, including Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia and Iraq. After the 1991 Gulf War, dozens of Iraqi families–mainly Shiites who rose up against Saddam–found refuge here. Today, of the 700 Muslim families who call eastern Iowa home, more than 50 are from Iraq. “Nearly all of these refugees are striving to become U.S. citizens,” says Imam Tawil, who emigrated from Jerusalem in 1983 and became a U.S. citizen in 1990. A Palestinian by birth, he says, “I have never had citizenship anywhere else but America. Every time I vote I feel so proud because I didn’t have this right in my home country.” Around the same time that he became a U.S. citizen, Imam Tawil set out to renovate and restore the Mother Mosque. The building, which had gone vacant after housing a Pentecostal church and a teen center, was purchased in 1990; renovations began in 1991 and a grand opening was held in February 1992. The mosque serves mainly as a cultural and historical center since a modern Islamic Center was completed in 1971.

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Filed under Islam, migration, religion, U.S.

by | 21 December 2006 · 9:59 pm

Manchuria as Japanese and International Refuge

When we consider the political space of Japanese modernity, Manchuria seems to possess distinctive significance. It is important to remember when considering Japanese modernity that with the exception of only a very small number of people, such as the actress Okada Yoshiko (1903-92) who defected to the Soviet Union in 1938, and the translator and dramatist Sano Seki (1905-66), scarcely any Japanese took refuge abroad. The issue itself of why there were so few Japanese refugees is important, I believe, in understanding the history of Japanese modernity. In modern Japanese history, Manchuria appears to be something of a space for taking quasi-refuge.

The [South Manchurian Railway], too, provided a site accepting of large numbers of leftist converts. In this sense, it was the only asylum in modern Japan. A moment ago, I mentioned a certain image of Manchuria that was invested with ideals and in which was sought that which could not be realized in Japan. I think Shiba Ryōtarō (1923-96), the famed historical novelist, was no different in this regard. He was drawn to Mongolia out of a yearning for the wilderness of Manchuria and Mongolia. It bore the sense for him of an asylum to which one might escape from the space Japan blockaded. This phenomenon was not limited to men, for looking at the memoirs of Japanese women as well we see some who went to Manchuria because they could not develop personally in Japan. For example, there were a certain number of women who had dreams of developing into teachers or who wanted to teach people of other ethnicities.

In this sense, we have two polar images of Manchuria in tandem: the extremely dark image of a Manchuria as a hellish abyss and that of Manchuria as a site for asylum. Whichever extreme would emerge would depend on the person, and the image of Manchuria, then, was inevitably rent asunder. Although this is a bit of personal experience, I became quite close to Professor Matsuda Michio (1908-98). When I was writing Kimera: Manshukoku no shōzō (Chimera, a portrait of Manzhouguo, published in 1993 [the volume herein translated—JAF]), he once said to me: “It’s strange that you’re using your energy on such a thing as this. As far as we’re concemed, it’d be just fine to forget Manzhouguo altogether. It’s bizarre that such a thing ever existed.” I have never forgotten these strong words of his to me. For people who lived through it, Manchuria remained an object to be rejected but which continued nonetheless. I think that this is one of the reasons that evaluations offered by postwar scholarship on Manzhouguo has been split in bipolar fashion….

One additional issue is the existential importance of Manchuria for the Jewish people. Shanghai was the most important Jewish place of asylum in Asia, but second to it was Manchuria. Of course, once the Tripartite Alliance was signed among Japan, Germany, and Italy, they were to be expelled from Manchuria, too, but such schemes as the “Fugu Plan” conceived of a harmony of the six ethnicities—the five initially conjured up and the Jews—and military officers such as Yasue Norihiro (1888-1950) and Inuzuka Koreshige (1890-1965) were actively trying to realize it. “Fugu” or blowfish carried the meaning that, although this kind of fish is delectable, if it disagrees with you, its poison can be especially strong. If Jewish capital could be well used, this scheme envisioned, then it could be of great value. In the sense of using such a plan to control the Jews in the United States, this tactic was an extremely calculated political ploy.

Reading through the memoirs of people who actually lived in Manzhouguo, it appears that places such as Harbin were relatively easy for Jews and White Russians to live in. We know a bit about what happened to White Russian men who graduated from Kenkoku University. We thus need research which will examine what Manzhouguo, or the Kenkoku University, may have meant for White Russians. For not only Jews, but Muslims who had escaped from Central Asia as well, Manzhouguo provided a kind of asylum, as I describe it in my recent book, Shisō kadai to shite no Ajia (Asia as an intellectual task, published 2001), an important site where people who had escaped Soviet oppression could live. It is an undeniable irony of world history that, for people who escaped from Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, Manchuria bore importance as a space for survival. There were many more who traveled through Manchuria en route to the United States, and we need studies which examine this phenomenon.

Needless to say, there is as well the issue of how Manzhouguo tried to use the Jews and Muslims. Research on ethnic groups in Manzhouguo to this point has examined only the “five ethnicities,” but we need to insert into our vision the flows of such world-historical peoples as the Jews and Muslims and consider the place of Manzhouguo in their migrations. We are collecting material in this area now. There is even a recent book about Poles in Manchuria, published in Poland, describing who was there and what they did.

SOURCE: Manchuria under Japanese Dominion, by Yamamuro Shin’ichi, trans. by Joshua A. Fogel (U. Penn. Press, 2006), pp. 233-234, 237-238

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Filed under China, Japan, migration

by | 29 May 2006 · 2:27 pm

Genocide Prevention by Democracies: OIMBY?

And now we arrive at a paradox of genocide prevention. Although one of the best preventives of the genocide of a state’s minority population is the existence of a liberal democratic regime within that state, quite the opposite is true of democracy in bystander states. Here, the desire to be reelected, as in the case of the Allied governments at Versailles, or simply to avoid negative public reaction, may preclude any governmental action on behalf of endangered citizens of another state. Recall … President Roosevelt’s refusal to authorize the bombing of Auschwitz because of the fear of embarrassment, not to mention his earlier narrowing of immigration possibilities for Jews seeking refuge in the United States. Opinion polls had revealed the high level of anti-Semitism in the United States that might make his governing more difficult and, of course, his reelection as well. The British followed a similar path, as did President Clinton more recently in the Rwandan genocide.

At the Evian immigration conference in 1938 …, the only state to open its borders to Jewish immigration was the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo, a dictator who was among the least responsive to public opinion. The Western democracies were extremely uncooperative in opening their borders. To be sure, public outcry on behalf of a threatened population potentially may reach a larger audience in a democracy than in an autocracy, if allowed, but on the whole the presumption in democracies, almost universally accepted, is that the electorate will be far more responsive to issues directly concerning its own perceived well-being than to the concerns of “alien” people….

Democracy, therefore, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, its spread will make the lives of minorities more secure within states that democratize successfully. This conclusion is suggested by the findings of Rudolph Rummel and Barbara Harff. On the other hand, populations threatened with genocide may find fewer islands of refuge within democratic states. Recent restrictions on the granting of political asylum in European countries, not to mention greater difficulties generally in immigrating to Europe, and all of this even after the European Holocaust experience, suggest the importance of this distinction.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 392-394

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Filed under democracy, migration, war

by | 26 September 2005 · 11:19 am

A Visit to Japan’s "Little Brazil"

Recently, we set out from Ashikaga for 大泉 Ōizumi, Japan’s “Little Brazil” in neighboring Gunma Prefecture’s fanhandle to our southwest. At 太田 Ōta (‘Widefield’), we transferred to a 2-car, 2-stop, infrequent shuttle train running back toward the southeast to Higashi Koizumi (‘East Littlespring’). There we had to transfer to yet another 2-car, 2-stop, infrequent shuttle train running back southwest to the end of the track at Nishi Koizumi (‘West Littlespring’). The fare adjustment official at Ōta described Nishi Koizumi as the most bustling (にぎやか) of the three Littlesprings (East, Middle, and West) that make up Bigspring.

Well, wherever the bustle was, we didn’t see it. The tracks ended where the single platform ended at Nishi Koizumi. We walked straight south from the train station, crossed over a highway busy enough to warrant a pedestrian overpass, past a small fountain (maybe the ‘littlespring’ itself) that marked the beginning of a very long and pleasant walkway and bikepath (the Izumi 緑道 ‘Greenway’) shaded by a great variety of trees and bushes, most of them labeled, so that I repeatedly stopped to punch the katakana names into my little electronic dictionary to find the English equivalents.

To our right ran the kilometer-long fence punctuated by gated driveways enclosing a quiet but huge Sanyo electronics factory. To our left ran sleepy Hanamizuki-dori ‘Dogwood Avenue’, which hosted occasional trucks and vans making deliveries. Hardly anyone but a few stressed-out middle managers was making use of the jogging path. Across the road were a variety of smaller enterprises: a few stores, a few restaurants, and a preschool teacher-training school followed by Santa Clara (聖クララ) preschool.

The name of the school and the distant sounds of Portuguese rather than Japanese coming from its parking lot were among the few signs of the town’s large Brazilian population. Other clues were: a cardboard sign next the train ticket vending machine at the station that listed all the destinations in a Portuguese-friendly transcription; a small shop near the station that sold goods imported from Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia; and the Primavera Restaurant, which we noted for our return. It was nearing lunchtime.

Primavera was an interesting oasis, like a midwestern truck stop in many ways. The kitchen help spoke mostly Japanese, the customers spoke mostly Portuguese, and the menus and wait help were bilingual in Japanese and Portuguese. The music was mostly Country & Western in style, but with the lyrics in Portuguese. The featured buffet (バイキング [Viking] = smorgasbord) was discounted from ¥1600 to ¥1000 because it had run out of most of the grilled meats–and also the feijoada, I discovered after I ordered it. My wife went for just the salad bar portion. At the register, I asked the European-looking owner (in Japanese) how long he had been in Japan. He said 2 years this time, but 5 years in all. (Nikkei Brazilians can easily get work visas for 3-year stints.) His soft-spoken Japanese was even more limited than mine. He estimated the local population was at least 10% Brazilian, maybe 15%.

On our way back to the station, we stopped in at the small import shop, whose owner greeted all his customers with “Tudo bem?”–followed by “Konnichi wa!” if they looked Japanese. He looked to be Nikkei, and his Japanese was very fluent. He said he had been in Japan 7 years in all. He said the local population was 15% Latin American, with 10% from Brazil alone.

When we got back to the sleepy station, we found that we had a 45-minute wait until the next train, so we east headed down the line of shops beside the main highway (National Route 354), finding nothing at all. When we stopped to ask, we were directed to the Mos Burger, with its American southwestern decor, and sipped our tall ice coffees until it was time for the zigzag sequence of short train hops back home.

There are no doubt many North American equivalents of Nishi Koizumi, but it reminded me of the hidden charm and factory-sequestered bustle of an Austin, Minnesota–the Hormel company town that hosts the Spam Museum–especially if Austin had a little larger Hispanic population.

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Filed under Brazil, Japan, labor, migration

by | 18 September 2005 · 8:12 pm

A Visit to International Ota City

Ota City (太田) in Gunma Prefecture is just two train stops southwest from Ashikaga City on the private Tobu line. Ota English School‘s website brags that

Ota itself is quite an international town. The neighboring town [Ôizumi] has one of the largest Brazilian populations in Japan. Ota itself has one of the largest Asian communities outside of Tokyo. This means that, as well as all the usual non-Japanese restaurants (Italian, French, Chinese) there are many Indian, Pakistani and Brazilian restaurants a short walk or drive from the school.

Purdue University‘s The Exponent Online is rather more modest when it compares Ota City to Lafayette, Indiana.

The populations are almost the same, both cities were changed from agricultural centers to industrial centers, both cities are on a river, and for the most part, both are flat cities.

What moved a Purdue student reporter to compare Lafayette and Ota? Well, West Lafayette, Indiana, is home to Purdue’s main campus as well as to Subaru-Indiana Automotive, Inc. Fuji Heavy Industries and Subaru are among the largest employers in Ota, a commercial cluster development center dating back to the days of textiles and then military aircraft.

So, is Ota really as international a city as these websites suggest? The Far Outliers got a skewed impression when we set out to find a Brazilian restaurant to eat dinner at last Saturday evening. We headed south from Ota train station zigzagging between the two widest streets we could find, asking policemen, passers-by, shopkeepers, and even employees at the main post office (open on Saturdays) if they knew of any Brazilian restaurants in the city. No luck. Even those who took the trouble to look through the restaurant listings in the telephone book couldn’t find any Brazilian restaurant. A few people recommended we go instead to neighboring Ôizumi–Japan’s “Little Brazil.” (Been there. Done that. More later.)

We did find a few tiny Filipino restaurants (none yet open) scattered along one of the longest strips of seedy strip joints, hostess bars, and member clubs that I’ve seen in a while. (I’ve never been to Las Vegas.) It went on for at least a full kilometer. It was still early when we walked its length, encountering no more than a few bouncers loitering outside a few doorways. When we retraced a portion of the strip on our way back to the station later that night, there were a lot more drunken males and leggy females on the sidewalks. Judging from the streetside advertising, some portion of Ota City’s international Asian population would seem to be women from China and the Philippines. (A Japanese customer I was chatting with at a yakitori shop in Ashikaga last week demonstrated his few words of “French” by saying Magandang gabi! That’s Tagalog for ‘Good evening!’)

After the trail went cold in that direction, we headed back for the station on a main drag with more vehicle traffic. It was a much more family-oriented strip mall, with a huge shopping center, and plenty of parking, car dealers, tire shops, and the most amazing site entirely dedicated to weddings that I’ve yet seen, the Royal Chester Ota (for “The Brilliant European Wedding”). (Again, I’ve never been to Las Vegas.) We saw plenty of chain restaurants, but nothing representative of Ota City’s large foreign community.

We couldn’t find a clue until a couple hours later when, after circling a few blocks north of the station, we asked at Rana, an “International, Halal” food store run by some Iranians. The only other customer was a Nepali who not only owned an Indian restaurant named Darjeeling, but offered to drive us there, and even to drive us back to the station if his place wasn’t too busy by the time we finished eating. We readily accepted, and had a wonderful meal of chicken tandoori, mutton masala, nan bread, and salad vegetables, washed down with a couple of beers unusual for Japan: Everest and Grolsch. The proprietor came to Japan ten years ago, and his restaurant has been successful enough for his elder brother to open a branch in Tokyo.

Except for a few words of English, he and I communicated entirely in Japanese, quite informally and comfortably. Neither of us had done enough formal study to command formal registers very well anyway. After dinner, we insisted on walking back to the train station, and he came out to the street to confirm his earlier directions and we parted in typical Japanese fashion, with bows and thank yous. On the way back, we passed the Civic Center, with a range of social support facilities for both citizens and foreigners, including an office that handled passports and visas.

The 1 May 2005 issue of Pakistan’s Dawn has more about unskilled foreign workers in Ota.

Kimio Matsudaira, an official at Hello Work, a public labour office in Ota city, Gumma prefecture, 60 kilometres north of Tokyo, said there is now a special programme to help and support foreigners working in the area. Ota has a population of about 200,000 people. The irony is that more than sixty per cent of its people are over 60 years of age, in a city where the economy is dependent on manufacturing. Without doubt, Ota really needs foreign workers badly. To support the city’s automobile and electronic industries, Ota is now host to more than 30,000 Japanese Latin Americans, descendants of Japanese who emigrated to South America in the early 20th century seeking a better future. In the late eighties Japan launched a policy of accepting third and fourth generation Japanese Latin Americans to support a labour shortage in its factories stemming from the bubble economy at that time. More recently, Asians, mostly from South-east Asia, have also arrived to work in factories, comprising a total of 45,000 registered workers in Ota city. Matsudaira said foreign workers are vital to the survival of Ota’s economy.

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Filed under Brazil, China, industry, Japan, migration

by | 15 January 2004 · 3:41 pm

The Bonin Islanders: Ethnogenesis and Exodus

A lot of people have heard of Iwo Jima, the subject of a recent bestseller by James Bradley about one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific War. But far fewer people know much about the Bonin (or Ogasawara) Islands, the next cluster to the north in the chain of volcanic islands that comprise Japan’s Nampo (‘southward, austral’) Islands, which stretches between Tokyo and Tinian. (See map). However, Bradley wrote an earlier book, Flyboys, about the air war over Chichi Jima [‘Father Island’], the main island in the Bonins. According to the Book of the Month Club blurb:

As the U.S. prepared for the final assault on Japan one key to success was knocking out the heavily fortified monitoring station on Chichi Jima, an island about the size of Central Park. But in the course of their daring mission, eight flyboys were shot down. Only one pilot could be rescued–his name was George H. W. Bush. His fellow fliers were not as lucky. They were captured and subjected to a fate so horrible that the records had been sealed until now.

Another recent book, Sorties into Hell: The Hidden War on Chichi Jima, is rather more explicit about that horrible fate.

In October 1946, Colonel Presley Rixey arrived by destroyer at Chichi Jima to repatriate 22,000 Japanese who had been bypassed during the war in the Pacific. He discovered that the downed flyers had been captured, executed, and eaten by certain senior Japanese officers. This is the story of the investigation, the cover-up, and the last hours of those Americans who disappeared into war’s wilderness and whose remains were distributed to the cooking galleys of Chichi Jima.

There also appears to have been a long-running cover-up involving U.S. nuclear weapons on Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima during the 1950s and 1960s. But I’d like to focus on the what happened to the first permanent settlers in the Bonins. (The Sino-Japanese characters for Bonin–actually Bunin, now usually pronounced Mujin–mean ‘absence [of] people’.) Here’s one rough summary that bobbles a few details.

The Bonin Islands might have been an American possession if President Franklin Pierce’s administration had backed up Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry. Chichi Jima was first settled from Honolulu in 1830 by two New Englanders — Aldin B. Chapin and Nathaniel Savory — a Genoese [Matteo Mazarro], and 25 Hawaiians [more accurately, Pacific Islanders mostly unnamed on the ship manifest], who made a living raising provisions for sale to passing whalers. Commodore Perry called at Port Lloyd on 14 June 1853, next day purchased for fifty dollars a plot of land on the harbor, stocked it with cattle brought over in U.S.S. Susquehanna, set up a local government under Savory, promulgated a code of laws, and took possession for the United States. He intended to make Chichi Jima a provisioning stations for the United States Navy and American mail steamers. But this action was repudiated by the Pierce administration in Washington. Thus, in 1861 Japan was able to annex the Bonin Islands without opposition. The government did not disturb the American colony, and serious colonization of the group by Japanese did not start until the arrival of Japanese fisherman and sulfur miners in 1887. Kazan Retto was formally annexed by Japan in 1891 and administered as part of the Tokyo prefecture….

Following the loss of the Marianas (Guam, Saipan, Tinian, etc.) in June 1944, Iwo Jima was heavily fortified as part of Japan’s inner ring of defenses. The Peace Treaty of 1951 recognized Japan’s “residual sovereignty”, but the United States maintained its occupation and control from 1945 to 1961 [actually 1968] when the island were formally returned to Japanese control.

The lengthiest, but still sketchy, account of the earliest years is by the Rev. Lionel Berners Cholmondeley, an Anglican prelate whose book bears the quaint, 19th-century title, The History of the Bonin Islands from the year 1827 to the year 1876 and of Nathaniel Savory, one of the original settlers, to which is added a short supplement dealing with the islands after their occupation by the Japanese (London: Constable, 1915). (Kudos to Tom Tyler at the University of Denver for mounting complete Project Gutenberg editions of this and many other early 19th-century nautical works, including Melville’s Moby Dick and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast.)

In June 2003, an Asian studies conference in Japan devoted a panel to Exploring the Rich History and Culture of the Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands. A sampling of the abstracts follows.

Daniel Long (Tokyo Metropolitan University), The Unknown Linguistic Heritage of the Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands – The Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands are unique throughout not only Japan (of which they are part) but indeed throughout the world. They were settled in the early 19th century by a mixed band of settlers speaking European, Polynesia and Micronesian languages (among others). The descendents of these settlers remain on the islands today and speak English (ranging from Standard English to a more local variety) and Japanese as well as a Japanese-English Mixed Language. These linguistic abilities play a large role in the formation of the Bonin Islander identity, and in turn this sense of a unique identity reinforces language usage.

Robert Eldridge (Osaka University), The U.S. Naval Administration of Ogasawara Islands, 1945-1968 – The United States occupied and administered the Ogasawara, or Bonin, Islands from 1945 until 1968, when the islands were returned to Japan…. While the occupation was undertaken for strategic reasons, much like that over Okinawa, there were several differences in the way that the administration was organized. Firstly, the actual direct administration did not begin until 1951. Secondly, the Navy was in charge. Thirdly, only islanders of Western descent were allowed to return to the islands and former residents of Japanese descent were denied permission to return throughout the period. Fourthly, education and local government was undertaken in English (and not Japanese as was the case in Okinawa). Finally, there was a strong effort by some U.S. Naval officials to encourage the permanent separation of the islands from Japan and the adoption of U.S. citizenship by the islanders.

Junko Konishi (Shizuoka University), The Adoption of Micronesian Song and Dance by Ogasawara Islanders – It was the Oubeikei [‘Euro-American heritage’] Islanders of Ogasawara who brought the Micronesian-Japanese songs and the Nanyou odori [‘South Seas dance’] to Ogasawara. The original forms of these songs and dance were the product of a cultural syncretism between Japanese and Micronesian cultures under the Japanese administration (1914-1945). Oubeikei-Ogasawarans adopted these cultural forms, which reflected the ambiguous identity of the Japanese-educated Micronesians. Soon after it was introduced into Ogasawara in the 1930s, the Nanyou odori spread among Japanese-Ogasawarans as well, and was transformed into its Japanese form with respect to melodic movements, the pronunciation of the lyrics, and body movements. The Micronesian-Japanese songs, on the other hand, were sung mostly in private by some Oubeikei-Ogasawarans until 1988 when a cassette tape of island songs (including these) was released to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Ogasawara’s return to Japan. Songs on the tape, distributed among the villagers, maintained their distinct forms, especially in melodic movements.

If I had presented a paper there, my imaginary abstract would read something like this:

The Bonin Islanders: Ethnogenesis and Exodus – Before the Japanese administration took over the Bonins in 1875, the 70-odd residents there were a motley crew of diverse heritage tracing back to Europe, North America, Africa, and various Pacific Islands ranging from Hawai‘i and Tahiti to Guam and Pohnpei. But, vis-à-vis the Japanese, they abruptly became Bonin Islanders, an ethnic minority subject to the Emperor, like the Ainu in Hokkaido. It was a classic case of ethnogenesis. Until 1945, it behooved the Islanders to identify themselves as Japanese, to intermarry with Japanese settlers, to move to the main islands to pursue educational or business opportunities, even to serve in the military. But when the Americans took over after the war, residual English language skills and non-Japanese heritage conferred more advantage. When the Americans offered them the opportunity to choose U.S. citizenship when the Bonins reverted to Japan, more than a few grabbed the chance and joined the exodus to Guam, Hawai‘i, or California, where they dissolved into the larger population, as did those who remained behind as Japanese. Only subtle traces now remain of their unique, but ephemeral, common heritage.

UPDATE: Prof. Daniel Long of Tokyo Metropolitan University, perhaps the world’s foremost Boninologist, was kind enough to suggest a few corrections and elaborations, which have been incorporated into the text above. He assures me that the farflung former Bonin Islanders hold worldwide reunions every year or two.

I should also have mentioned that Tom Tyler credits Danny Long for his electronic text and reproductions of photographs from Cholmondeley’s work. Prof. Long has also compiled a website on Bonin language and culture that includes a very extensive bibliography of sources (at least when the TMU server is working, which seems to be every other week).

Amritas notes an earlier novel by Hank Searls (author of Overboard) inspired by Bonin history, Kataki: A Novel (McGraw-Hill, 1987), sort of a “Chichi Jima Candidate” tale:

The descendants of 19th century American settlers on one of Japan’s Bonin Islands are caught up in WW II. Though loyal to the emperor, they are suspect. When 12-year-old Matt Bancroft’s mother is killed by a strafing American plane, he vows kataki (revenge). In the confusion of Japan’s collapse, Matt assumes the identity of a dead son of missionaries and is “repatriated” to America. Forty years later, he is manipulated by a rabid Japanese secret society into thinking that Vice-President Bush was the “murdering” pilot.

Gotta watch out for those missionary kids.

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Filed under Hawai'i, Japan, migration, U.S.

by | 21 December 2003 · 9:16 pm

His Majesty O’Keefe

The Micronesian Seminar is an incomparable resource on all things Micronesian. Among its many projects is a compilation entitled Beachcombers, Traders, and Castaways in Micronesia. Here’s what it has to say about His Majesty O’Keefe, the subject of a thoroughly forgettable 1953 movie starring Burt Lancaster, Benson Fong (who had starred in several Charlie Chan films), and Philip Ahn (a Korean American who often played Japanese villains).

David Dean O’Keefe was born in Ireland in 1828 (or 1824). He immigrated to the US in 1848 and made his home in Savannah. He captained ships in the off-shore trade. In 1871, he set sail on the “Belvedere” for Manila. In 1872, he first arrived on Yap aboard the junk “Wrecker”. He worked in Yap until at least 1875 for Webster & Cook of Singapore. After this he began trading on his own. O’Keefe established a string of trade stations on Yap, Palau and Mapia. He acquired several small vessels during this period which he used to visit his stations and bring his copra to Hong Kong. He came to dominate the copra trade on Yap through his strategy of providing Yapese with transportation to Palau for the quarrying of the stone cylinders that were used as money. O’Keefe was married to a woman on Mapia, but his second wife (Dalibu) lived with him on Yap and ran his home and headquarters at Terang Island in Yap Harbor. O’Keefe, always the center of controversy, was charged by other traders with a vast array of crimes, but most of the charges were dismissed by British authorities. O’Keefe had several children, who lived with him on Yap. He died while at sea in a typhoon in 1901, leaving a fortune of at least half a million dollars.

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Filed under cinema, Micronesia, migration