Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora
By Suma Ikeuchi 池内須摩
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After the introduction of the "long-term resident" visa, the mass-migration of Nikkeis (Japanese Brazilians) has led to roughly 190,000 Brazilian nationals living in Japan. While the ancestry-based visa confers Nikkeis' right to settlement virtually as a right of blood, their ethnic ambiguity and working-class profile often prevent them from feeling at home in their supposed ethnic homeland. In response, many have converted to Pentecostalism, reflecting the explosive trend across Latin America since the 1970s. Jesus Loves Japan offers a rare window into lives at the crossroads of return migration and global Pentecostalism. Suma Ikeuchi argues that charismatic Christianity appeals to Nikkei migrants as a "third culture"—one that transcends ethno-national boundaries and offers a way out of a reality marked by stagnant national indifference. Jesus Loves Japan insightfully describes the political process of homecoming through the lens of religion, and the ubiquitous figure of the migrant as the pilgrim of a transnational future.
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Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora 1st Edition
by Suma Ikeuchi (Author)
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After the introduction of the "long-term resident" visa, the mass-migration of Nikkeis (Japanese Brazilians) has led to roughly 190,000 Brazilian nationals living in Japan. While the ancestry-based visa confers Nikkeis' right to settlement virtually as a right of blood, their ethnic ambiguity and working-class profile often prevent them from feeling at home in their supposed ethnic homeland. In response, many have converted to Pentecostalism, reflecting the explosive trend across Latin America since the 1970s. Jesus Loves Japan offers a rare window into lives at the crossroads of return migration and global Pentecostalism. Suma Ikeuchi argues that charismatic Christianity appeals to Nikkei migrants as a "third culture"―one that transcends ethno-national boundaries and offers a way out of a reality marked by stagnant national indifference. Jesus Loves Japan insightfully describes the political process of homecoming through the lens of religion, and the ubiquitous figure of the migrant as the pilgrim of a transnational future.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Transnational migrants find spiritual sustenance in Suma Ikeuchi's careful, sensitive ethnography. In showing how Pentecostalism grants meaning to a bleak existence, Ikeuchi opens new vistas in our understanding of Japanese Brazilians residing in Japan. She offers fresh insights to all interested in identity puzzles, self-making, religious conversion, and global movement." -- Daniel T. Linger, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology ― University of California, Santa Cruz
"Suma Ikeuchi's nuanced fieldwork among Japanese Brazilians (Nikkei) employed in Japan exposes the flawed hemato-logic of government and corporate officials who believed that ancestry ('blood') alone would make Nikkei more assimilable than other foreign guest workers. This book demonstrates the primacy of culture over 'blood' as a cipher for ethnicity." -- Jennifer Robertson ― author of Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation (2018)
"This is a remarkable book about a remarkable situation. Through wonderfully vivid ethnography, Ikeuchi documents the lives of Brazilian Pentecostal converts in Japan as they negotiate identities as migrants, homecomers, pilgrims, and believers. In the process, the book becomes an anthropological meditation on time, belonging, sincerity, and the multiple meanings of making connections through blood." -- Simon Coleman, Chancellor Jackman Professor ― University of Toronto
"Focusing on the migration of Nikkei between Brazil and Japan, Suma Ikeuchi's brilliant ethnographic work shows how the Japan that Nikkei Pentecostals believe Jesus loves, a thoroughly hybridized one (biologically, culturally, and nationally), is not only befitting of and appropriate to the many tongues uttered by those transnational devotees, but is also consistent with the fluidity and plasticity of the emerging postmodern era. Pentecostalism, a movement depicted historically as a premodern spirituality bubbling up amid and in resistance to modernity's so-called iron cage of rationality, thus remains, through this anthropological study, a viable symbolic frame more than a century later and under drastically different social conditions." -- Amos Yong, Professor of Theology & Mission ― Fuller Theological Seminary
"Jesus Loves Japan is a fascinating study of the roles played by religion in a diasporic community....In this remarkably well-researched and well-written monograph, Ikeuchi introduces readers to the little-known Nikkei Brazilian Pentecostals and unpacks the never-ending process of subject-making of a diasporic group that is simultaneously spatial and moral." -- Taku Suzuki ― The Journal of Asian Studies
"Jesus Loves Japan exhibits a fine balance between historical narration, theoretical reflection, observation of place and setting, and first-person commentary from the informants and from the author herself....Ikeuchi comments that 'ethnography illustrates the particular to illuminate the universal.' In accomplishing this aim, Jesus Loves Japan is a brilliant success." -- Michael McClymond ― Pneuma
"Jesus Loves Japan is an exemplary work of new scholarship....This is an eminently readable book, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and it should be welcomed by readers interested in the productive intersections between religion and migration in a globalized world." -- Joshua Tan ― Reading Religion
"Suma Ikeuchi presents a compelling case study of a diaspora community trapped between cultures....Jesus Loves Japan is an excellent ethnographic work that proves useful to a wide variety of readers." -- Timothy Smith ― Nova Religio
"[Jesus Loves Japan] provides some thought-provoking and unexpected conclusions which warrant serious consideration both from the points of view of religious studies scholarship and legislation. It is a recommended text to readers of religious studies on any level who wish to find out more about the workings of Christianity in East Asia and Japan." -- Lehel Balogh ― Religious Studies Review
"Ikeuchi has produced, as far as I know, one of the most complete and perceptive ethnographies made about a single religious Brazilian group in Japan." -- Rafael Shoji ― Journal of the American Academy of Religion
About the Author
Suma Ikeuchi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Product details
Publisher : Stanford University Press; 1st edition (June 18, 2019)
Language : English
Paperback : 256 pages
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Top review from the United States
JohannaGlory
5.0 out of 5 stars Jesus loves Japan
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2022
As a Chinese Christian who speaks in tongues, I believe that God has wonderful plans for the Japanese Brazilian Christians there. I'm impressed that they will have prayer meetings until 3am. I believe that those prayers are remembered in Heaven. Pray that the fire of the Holy Spirit will fall on Japan and more Japanese people will know the love of Christ for them on the cross, and Christ as their Redeemer and the hope of glory.
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Suma Ikeuchi Wins Francis L. K. Hsu Book Prize for Jesus Loves Japan
Our newest faculty member, Assistant Professor Suma Ikeuchi, has just been awarded the Francis L. K. Hsu Prize for the best book in the anthropology of East Asia by the American Anthropological Association’s Society of East Asian Anthropology. The prize is named for the late Francis L.K. Hsu (1909-2000), renowned cross-cultural anthropologist and former president (1977-78) of the American Anthropological Association. Book submissions from all four fields of anthropology as they relate to East Asia, as well as books that venture beyond standard ethnographic modes of writing are considered for this prestigious prize. Professor Ikeuchi is the first in the history of the Department and UC Santa Barbara to receive this prize.
Professor Ikeuchi’s book is titled Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2019). Here is the prize committee’s citation:
In this remarkable book, Suma Ikeuchi presents a captivating ethnography of Japanese Brazilians (Nikkei) at the intersection of Asian return migration and Latin American Pentecostalism. Situated in the factories, neighborhoods, and churches of Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture, Ikeuchi’s study explains how the political, economic, and psychological dimensions of mobility and belonging shape this transnational community and its increasing number of Pentecostal converts. Although Christians account for only about 1% of Japan’s population, the emphasis on religion in this book is crucial for understanding the specific community it seeks to depict and also significantly expands the analytical approach to studying Asian return migration beyond the more common ethnoracial categories of identity and belonging. The book is accessibly and elegantly written, but it does not shy away from complexity. Ikeuchi worked with and among a group that is truly “betwixt and between” in terms of the contradictions of race, nation, religion, and even social class in Japan. The multiple intellectual frameworks required to make sense of the ethnographic situation, and the author’s ability to pursue and explain it with great detail, intimacy, analytical precision, and coherence, are a testament to its anthropological contribution beyond Asian Studies.
Congratulations, Prof. Ikeuchi, on this magnificent achievement!
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JESUS LOVES JAPAN: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora | By Suma Ikeuchi
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. xvii, 235 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-0934-1.
Suma Ikeuchi has eloquently written a theoretically and conceptually engaging book about Japanese descent (Nikkei) Brazilians who “return” migrate as unskilled workers to Japan, their country of ancestral origin. Although they are admitted on preferential visas because of their Japanese ancestry, according to Ikeuchi, Nikkei Brazilians do not feel they belong in their ethnic homeland and convert to Pentecostalism as a respite from their difficult everyday lives. This book is a welcome addition to the literature, since the religious lives of Nikkei Brazilians in Japan remains a relatively unexplored topic. As an anthropologist, Ikeuchi conducted extensive fieldwork and skillfully employs a wealth of ethnographic observations and interviews while drawing conceptual and theoretical insights from anthropology and religious studies. As a result, I consider this the best book on Nikkei Brazilian migrants in Japan that I have read, despite some of its structural and conceptual shortcomings.
In order to understand why so many Nikkei Brazilians in Japan have turned to Pentecostalism, the first four chapters of the book provide background on their past migration histories as well as their immigrant labour and ethnic experiences in Japan. A well-known history of Japanese migration to Brazil and the return migration of their Nikkei Brazilian descendants to the ancestral homeland of Japan is complemented with some interesting material about the accompanying migration of religions between the two countries. Although Nikkei Brazilians are positively regarded as modern Japanese “model minorities” in Brazil (despite some negative images), when they migrate to Japan, they become a “backward” Latino minority who are treated as Brazilian foreigners (40–43). Not only do they experience a decline in socioeconomic status as marginalized migrant factory workers, they are ethnically stigmatized as low class, lazy, and prone to criminal delinquency. As a result, Brazilian Nikkei do not feel like they live in Japan as they toil away in factories where they must endure tough conditions and long working hours.
Despite initial plans to stay only temporarily, Nikkei Brazilians have become a permanent immigrant presence in Japan as many migrate back and forth, unable to establish a middle-class life in either Japan or Brazil, while becoming subject to both global economic forces and changing national migration policies. As a result, they are rendered rootless and feel suspended and trapped between both countries, often with uncertain future hopes and illusions of return to Brazil. Many obtain permanent residence visas in Japan not simply to settle there, but to facilitate their continued transnational mobility as a thoroughly Brazilianized minority who cannot become authentically Japanese. As they live in a state of cultural limbo with in-between identities, Nikkei migrant families (previous based on perceptions of “Japanese discipline”) have become disorderly and strained through separation, infidelity, divorce, emotional estrangement, and generational cultural and linguistic gaps.
In response, Nikkei Brazilian migrants convert to Pentecostalism in order to engage in a higher type of spiritual work and modern subjectivity that transcends their mundane factory work. Ikeuchi argues that this is a return to the present (the here and now) that enables them to renew their lives through a charismatic temporality (instead of focusing on past regrets or uncertain future hopes). Through the sacrificial blood of Jesus, they cultivate a sense of spiritual kinship and belonging with other Nikkei Pentecostal believers. This transcends the material, ethnic kinship of Japanese blood/descent, which has been insufficient to confer on them a sense of national belonging in Japan because of their lack of Japanese linguistic and cultural competence.
The book then provides us with ethnographically rich and theoretical-informed analyses of how Nikkei Brazilians engage in specific Pentecostal church rituals, namely the renewal of marriage vows and declarations of love as a transcendent emotion, as well as baptism and prayer. In fact, the last two chapters (before the concluding chapter) are less about the actual migratory and religious experiences of Nikkei Brazilians in Japan and more a general, theoretical, and even philosophical examination of religious faith with relevant ethnographic illustrations. Ikeuchi insightfully analyzes examples of individuals engaging in Pentecostal and Catholic religious practices that do not necessarily reflect their authentic inner selves because of diverging private beliefs or rote obedience to (sometimes nonsensical) external forms without personal understanding. Through an interesting comparison with Japanese religious life, Ikeuchi’s conclusion seems to be that such divergences between external practices and inner states can still be religiously sincere if based on relational commitments to social others (a moral, “accompanied self”) (170–175).
While the shortcomings of this book do not detract much from its overall quality, readers will find it hard to figure out where the book is headed because its overall narrative structure remains unclear until the end. There is no summary of the book at the beginning (only in the concluding chapter); the chapters and section titles are very short and abstract (“Contested,” “Of Two Bloods”); and the chapters cover various topics with no transitional paragraphs or sentences. Although the author actually worked in two factories for five months, none of this participant observation appears in the book. The relationship between Nikkei Brazilian and mainstream Japanese is never really explored despite the fact that the latter are being recruited by Nikkei Pentecostal churches in Japan and the religion itself stresses a transnational moral universalism that transcends national and ethnic boundaries (a peculiar omission for an author who is Japanese living in the United States). Although modernity is a dominant concept in the book, it is utilized too broadly. According to Ikeuchi, Pentecostalism constitutes modern spiritual subjects whose experiences contrast with traditional Japanese religions and arranged marriage practices. However, it also incorporates traditional familial gender roles that are morally compatible with Japanese cultural values. In terms of the temporal aspect of Pentecostal modernity, it not only represents what is recent (the present or here and now), but also what is ancient (patriarchal Christian gender roles); its signature emotion of modern love is also ancient and timeless. If the concept of modernity is deployed too broadly to encompass both the West and the rest, the modern and traditional, and the contemporary and ancient, it may lose its conceptual power.
Takeyuki Tsuda
Arizona State University, Tempe
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