Japanese and Nikkei at Home and Abroad: Negotiating Identities in ...

store than a Japanese one. Such stores became meeting places for these workers from abroad. Also, these returnee Japanese Brazilian dekasegi—and other Latin American dekasegi—workers gathered at a Catholic church, even though some were Protestants and Buddhists. They did not always share a common language. Not all of them spoke Japanese, but Portuguese and Spanish are similar enough that a new blending of the two languages—which Reyes-Ruiz (chapter 7) says is called Portuñol—developed as a means of communication.

Eric Hobsbawm (1983, 1) argued that traditions are actually invented, constructed, and formally instituted rather than just appearing ad hoc or ahistorically. “Invented tradition” is taken to mean a set of practices—normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules, and of a ritual or symbolic nature—that seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by reception. This automatically implies continuity with the past. For example, in chapter 3, I show that by using a native Japanese belief—respect for nature and farming—the leaders of a group of Japanese migrants in Brazil re-created Japan, Brazilian style, when they established the Kubo Commune in São Paulo. By using the principles and philosophy of Nhon-shugi (agriculture first), they invented a kind of traditional Japanese lifestyle, but one that probably never really existed in Japan. The Nhon-shugi philosophy was reformulated by the founding leader of Kubo in order to unite the members when they faced various crises in their new lives in Brazil.

Reyes-Ruiz shows in his chapter how a sense of Pan-Latin American ethnicity is formed though creating the “same” Latin American culture in Japan. Under this emergent ethnicity, these Latin Americans strengthen their social relationships in a new foreign nation through their shared social positions and contemporary experiences. Reyes-Ruiz's and my studies ask that we reconsider how ethnicity emerges depending on social circumstances.

The Complexity of Human Feelings

Eriksen (1993) states that race and ethnicity are not types, but human relations; that is, the idea of a shared ethnicity emerges in people's