JP,

In every part of the world, people of the country side don’t have a reputation of being very open minded you know. Thus making this news a non-news and a bad attempt to bash the Japanese again.

To me, to ‘bash’ you gotta have a hostile intent in your criticism, be consistent in and voice your anti-whatever views on a suject without presenting a rationale for them and be a general dickwad.

I don’t see JP or the site doing this.

I don’t see how pointing out that a law could mean very little – that, in essence, the law is nothing more than a flimsy piece of paper that has no meaning beyond a limp-noodle pertetual warning, is bashing.

Too bad if it happens in Japan; this is, after all, the focus of the site.

JP’s not a journalist. This isn’t a journalism-based site and the quote you gave is by JP.

I dunno… perhaps there’s a ‘bias’ (though I don’t agree with ‘big’ and I use the word ‘bias’ in the neutral term) because, you know, if this is happening to a *3rd generation* Japanese-Brazilian, imagine what kind of prejudice gormless gaijins have faced, will face (not to mention their Japanese-gaijin kids) and are still going to have to face from people like these “neighbours.”

I’m still trying to figure out what, exactly, a 3rd generation Japanese-Brazilian is, though… . We talkin’ 1/8th Brazilian (i.e. one Brazilian grandparent) or 1/2 Japanese/Brazilian with lots of Brazilian/Japanese intermarrying parents and grandparents but born and raised in Japan?

The article noting his quote that he “able to speak Japanese” throws me off. Why *wouldn’t* he speak and write Japanese after being a third generation?

Obviously, I’m missing something here… .

A Brazilian-Japanese is usually someone of more or less pure Japanese blood who is born to a family that emigrated to Brazil before the war, when conditions seemed nicer there than Japan, and the US wasn’t letting them in. As such it’s not too bizarre that he speaks the lingo, and would probably look ‘Japanese’. So I wonder how the neighbours even knew he was Brazilian.
Original article here, btw: http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0627/TKY200706270336.html

“Please name a country where being in your right means that you have 100% chance of obtaining your adversary’s punishment.”
The point of the article was that there is no law against discrimination (though suits have successfully been brought using UN laws Japan signed: the Anna Bortz (sp?) case with the jewellery shop being relevant here) so it’s not a case of getting the legal system to work, it’s a case of getting it to start in the first place.

Bay Guy?..that should be Bad Guy!!..

*remora you are hopeless.*

The Japanese immigration to Brazil in 1910 is an interesting story. Basically, facing a crop failure in a number of rural areas, the Japanese government encouraged a number of farmers and workers to take up the Brazilian government’s offer of ‘free land’ (which never materialised once they fled Ehime for Santos). The Abe government has apologised for its predecessor’s complicity in this failure.

If you want to see for yourself how they prospered in Brazil then visit Liberdade in Sao Paulo, the largest Japanese community outside of Brazil. In general they didn’t marry out over the three generations so the women are darker and the men stockier but it’s strange to see street signs in kanji in the middle of Sao Paulo. The Japanese food there is terrible though.

So, in a nutshell, a government lied to people, people moved half-way across the world and now they’re coming back (as is their legal right). Is it because of the crime rate in Brazil that they’re naturally predisposed towards criminality? If so, can we argue the other Japanese possess 100% law-abiding tendencies? If so, I look forward to community associations vetoing the business activities of known crime syndicates, after all their criminality is a lot easier to assert.

Remora: well quite. I was alluding to the inevitability of the government lying to those people in 1910 as a means of pointing out that Japanese-Brazilians are only so because of it. In the same way that if the Irish potato famine had been averted then the make up of New York City would have been much different, if there hadn’t been a concerted effort to shift rural workers from Japan then these people would have been Japanese. As I also pointed out, it’s notable that three generations on the Japanese Brazilians have by and largely retained the much sought ‘racial purity’ by certain people, even if their absence from Japanese soil has rendered them a little too pragmatic, friendly and non-heirarchical (AKA ‘criminal’).