Acting Brazilian in Japan: Ethnic resistance among return migrants

This article examines the performative enactment of a Brazilian nationalist identity among Japanese-Brazilian return migrants in Japan as a form of autonomous ethnic resistance against Japanese assimilative pressures. By appropriating and reconstituting Brazilian nationalist symbols abroad and by intentionally acting Brazilian, the Japanese-Brazilians assert their cultural differences in Japan, thereby engaging in an active struggle for ethnic recognition as a distinct minority group that cannot be subsumed under racially essentialized Japanese assumptions in which shared descent is understood to produce cultural commonalities.