Homeless Diaspora: The Impact of Return Migration on Latin American Japanese Communities

Currently more than 2.5 million Americans living on the South and North American continents are Nikkei or descendants of Japanese migrants. The history of their forefathers’ emigration has attracted considerable scholarly attention. Their interest in issues of living in the diaspora, the meaning of ethnicity and citizenship has been renewed by the recent wave of sojourner migration by Latin Americans of Japanese origin into Japan. Virtually nothing is known so far about the impact of “return migration” and the “returnees’ remigration” on the diaspora in Latin America. To what degree have ideas of ethnic or political loyalty, of national and cultural identity been shifting one way or the other due to the increased proximity to their ancestors’ place of origin and the influx of material and immaterial goods from Japan? And how have narratives on the experience of hostile or discriminatory treatment by the Japanese impacted on the collective image of the Nikkei in Latin America? The Nikkei experience of living abroad bears the potential for rethinking the meaning of diaspora. As the Nikkeis’ return home migration, to the land of their ancestors, has not fulfilled the postulated ‘negation of a diaspora’ (Clifford 1994), it has squared the sensation of being diasporic in the sense of being displaced twice and having multiple relationships with distinct nations which are neither just homeland nor hostland. Based on multi-sited fieldwork in Japan, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay, I argue that the Nikkei are entangled in a squared diaspora in which the juxtaposition of homeland and hostland itself becomes questionable, instable and fluctuating.