ARI Working Paper Series

Studies of Brazilian Nikkeis (Japanese emigrants and their descendents) living and working in Japan tend to focus on the role of ethnic and national identity concerns in the shaping of everyday migrant experiences. Excluded from Japanese society these migrants, it is argued, find a sense of belonging in the collective shelter of a displaced Brazilian community. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, this article provides an understanding of migrant life that transcends a focus on individual and collective identity concerns. Inspired by Lidia, Diana and Kátia’s positioning in a web of past, present and imagined future relations, I consider the shifting, evolving and entangled influence in their lives of parents, ex-lovers and husbands, migrant friends and imagined ‘future families.’ Whilst Lidia and her two friends may appreciate living an independent life in the company of an ‘imagined family’ of close friends in Japan their lives continue to be shadowed by memories of lost love and increasing pressure to fulfil obligations in relation to aging parents in Brazil. Recognition that these friendships and relations with parents do not last forever serves as a reminder that what these three single migrants really want in their lives is a family and a future with family to call their own. Caught between a ‘family past’ shaped in Brazil and an unknown ‘family future’ Lidia, Diana and Kátia struggle to make sense of who they are as human beings and how this ‘loss of selfhood’ filters into perceived future relations with people and places. What emerges is a particularly Brazilian tale of kinship and personhood that nevertheless reflects a broader, human experience of engaging with a range of hopes, fears and dreams in transnational social spaces.