Sentiment, Language, and the Arts: The Japanese- Brazilian Heritage (Intimate and the Public in Asian and Global Perspectives, 11)

Sentiments, Language, and the Arts: The Japanese-Brazilian Heritage explores the complex feelings of Japanese immigrants in Brazil, focusing on their yearning for “home” as a way of interpreting the shifting nature of their identity. To understand the immigrants’ lives and feelings from their own perspective, Hosokawa looks closely at their poetry, linguistic activities such as the borrowing of Portuguese words, amateur speech contests, and a fantasy about the shared origins of Japanese and the Brazilian indigenous language Tupi. He also examines the issue of group identity through the performing arts, analyzing the reception of Japanese sopranos who sang the title role in Madam Butterfly, participation in Carnival parades, and the oral storytelling of their history in popular narratives called rôkyoku. Translated from Japanese by Paul Warham.

Shuhei Hosokawa (Ph. D., musicology), is Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. He has published extensively on Japanese-Brazilian culture, as well as popular music in Japan, including Karaoke around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing (coeditor, 1998).