| Chapter 1: | Reconsiderations of Race, Ethnicity, and Identity: Transnational Migrants in Post–World War II Global Society |
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Japan and their changing self-confidence and autonomy, they still perform according to their expected roles in Japan (and after returning to Brazil, for that matter). As a result, their relationships with local people are different than those of men, and their ethnic image is hidden beneath the public's image of the men. Stanlaw and Yamamoto show that work roles and gender affect the formation of relationships with local people in host nations, and that such experiences affect their lives even after they return home. Current technology and economic conditions provide more people with greater opportunity to have new social and cultural experiences around the world. In a newly global society, different social status and circumstances, life stages, and gender all contribute to how local relationships are constructed and created.
Institutionalization of Local Identities
How does local ethnic identity connect to global ethnic identity? Okamura (chapter 4) explores this question by looking at how concepts of ethnic identity are developed by Nikkei children in Düsseldorf, Germany. She argues that improved information and transportation technologies have changed our sense of social distance. As a result, the essential element of ethnic identity is no longer based on nationality or home or origin, but is based on the concept of “we-ness”—the idea that group identities are produced through people's relationships by way of interpersonal communication. Ethnic identity, in her view, then, is not based on geography but on language efficiency. Communication skills of the children of Japanese transnational migrants are often closely monitored as they go through the educational system. Thinking of their children's future, parents send them to supplementary schools to study the Japanese language and other subjects. Those subjects are based on the Japanese national curriculum and instructors are often sent by Japanese agencies in Japan. In other words, even though ethnic identity is defined and created locally, efforts are made to keep up with the standards of the Japanese national Ministry of Education.
Locally based ethnic identities do not only connect to broader universal ethnic identities through education, they also do so via the economy and media. In the 1990s, a group of several hundred people in Seville,