Nippo-Brazilians and "Japonized" Brazilians

Abstract

The term "Nipo-Brazilian" (Japanese-Brazilian) names the subjects, forms of identification, and the set of sociocultural practices in which two ethnicities and cultures converge simultaneously, Brazilian and Japanese. However, in the field of art, on the one hand, there are Japanese-Brazilian artists, made up of Japanese immigrants and their descendants born and raised in Brazil, and, on the other, Brazilians who do not have Japanese blood ties, but have an intimate relationship with Japanese culture and art, framed in what the anthropologist Igor José de Renó Machado conceives as "Japaneseness": the construction of worldviews formed based on of a common repertoire of signs, regardless of nationality. The concept of “identification”, which bets on the process ─ instead of identity, something defined at birth ─, as well as the notion of “sharing”, which emphasizes the sentimental relationship of values between people, dialogue with such a perspective, which travels in both directions in the consideration of the artistic conjunction between Japan and Brazil. The concepts of the hybridization of Néstor G. Canclini and the transculturality of Wolfgang Welsch will also be important for the investigation. This article presents the cases of three Japanese-Brazilian artists and three other Brazilians of Japanese descent for analysis and reflection on the aforementioned topic, which can also be extended to other plural ethnicities.