By Julia Veres
With a rapidly globalizing world comes the clashing and mixing of cultures and Suma Ikeuchi has spent her years of scholarship exploring the effects of this in Japan.
Ikeuchi is a newly-hired assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara and has just been awarded the Francis L. K. Hsu Prize for the best book in the anthropology of East Asia by the American Anthropological Association.
After a year of fieldwork in Toyota City, Japan, Ikeuchi wrote her book Jesus Loves Japan, which tells the experience of Japanese Brazilians returning to their ancestral homeland.
In a recent interview, Ikeuchi discussed her experience immersing herself in this group of migrants as well as her interest in hybrid identities across cultures.
Suma Ikeuchi is a newly-hired assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara.
Q: What sparked your interest in Brazilian Japanese return migration?
A: Growing up in Japan in the middle of the diversification of Japanese society, I had some contact with diverse ethnic minority groups and Brazilians, at the time, were one of the fastest growing ethnic minority groups. When the time came for me to pick up a topic for my Ph.D in anthropology, I realized I really wanted to go deeper into this topic of diversity, minority and majority relations, globalization, and migration all in the context of Japan. So, I decided to learn Portuguese, go back to Japan and spend a year with these people to learn more about them.
Q: What did the process of immersing yourself in this community for your fieldwork look like?
A: Once Brazilian Japanese people migrate to Japan on the ancestry-based visa, they typically get jobs in unskilled manual labor— so they get hired by these factories that are mostly subsidiaries of the Toyota Motor Corporation.
Toyota City has the largest Brazilian ethnic enclave in Japan called the Homi Housing Complex. There were about 5,000 Brazilians living in this mammoth housing project. So, I lived there for a year, surrounded by Brazilian neighbors. I worked in one or two factories to get a feel of the workplace and the environment of these migrants. It was really transformative because I went there to learn about them, but they also taught me a lot.
A map showing the location of the Homi Housing Complex where Ikeuchi stayed during her fieldwork in Japan. Map from Google Maps, Photo of complex from Vice Media Japan.
Q: What was your biggest takeaway from your time in Toyota City?
A: The biggest takeaway was that in this interconnected and globalizing world, you cannot take anything for granted. Especially when it comes to people's identities. Meeting the migrants for the first time, you cannot assume what kind of person they are because of the hybridity that they have developed in this century of transpacific diaspora.
There was no one single anything about the people I spent a year with— I just couldn’t label them with one facile word. They are just kind of a crystallization or embodiment of how globalization has been generating this very rich hybridity all over the world. So, I guess that's one takeaway; the beauty, and sometimes the dilemma of cultural hybridity that comes from globalization today.
Q: You write in your book that Pentecostal Christianity serves as a ‘third culture’ for these migrants. How did you discover this?
Suma Ikeuchi was awarded the Francis L. K. Hsu Prize for her book Jesus Loves Japan.
A: Starting this field work, I very soon found a lot of churches that were thriving in these Brazilian migrant communities. So, I decided to have a deeper look into why churches are so popular among these migrants. They [the migrants] have a distrust of nationalist frameworks or ways of belonging because they have always been rejected by them. They are too Brazilian in Japan and too Japanese in Brazil. This is where Christianity comes in, especially renewalist Christianity such as Pentecostalism because it has a very explicit and passionate focus on transcending ethnic and national borders.
Q: It seems like you are very passionate about transnational Japanese topics. Are you planning on doing any more fieldwork in that area?
A: My next project is actually about another migrant group in Japan, Filipino migrants. Japan has the oldest population in the world, and because of that, there has been a care deficit. Filipino migrants have been entering the elder care industry in Japan in the past several decades. This brings up more of these kinds of social tensions about race, ethnicity, and the meaning of family kinship and care.
By looking at Filipino migrants, I’m kind of hoping to tease out this question of how care globalizes and how care is transacted between family and non-family. I was actually supposed to be in Japan right now, but unfortunately because of COVID it has been postponed, until maybe April or May next year, so I hope the situation in Japan has come down somewhat by then so I can carry out the research.
Julia Veres is a fourth-year sociology major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this piece for her Writing Program class, Journalism for Web and Social Media.