Japanese Brazilians: The Japanese language community in Brazil

要旨

This chapter examines Japanese language maintenance and change among contemporary Japanese-Brazilians.Japanese first came to Bra- zil in the early 1900s, and currently over one and a half million people of Japanese ancestry live in the country.Early Japanese settlers were required by the Brazilian government to immigrate as family units and worked on coffee plantations under conditions little different from that of the former African slaves.Gradually, as they acquired some money, Japanese-Brazilians left these plantations and moved to isolated farm areas, living among themselves.To this day, many have maintained the Japanese language and have fostered a strong awareness of their ethnic heritage.Today, however, many Japanese-Brazilians have moved to the cities, as rural Japanese farmers send the smartest children off to the universities to get an education.Instead of returning to the farms, these young people have become professionals, entering the middle classes and associating with non-Japanese.These educated Japanese- Brazilians now even feel some shame about their farming-family background.The Japanese-Brazilians who stayed in farming areas, however, have kept their Japanese customs and still highly respect their parents' traditional ways.In this paper, I will argue that these two types of Japanese-Brazilians have developed distinct styles of the Japanese language, each reflecting different social milieus, economic conditions, and cultural values.'0 To be sure, Japanese food can be found in Canada and the United States.In North America, however, Japanese food is not rooted, but is becoming popular as an exotic cuisine.Although I will not go into details, this difference is very inter- esting when we look at the social status of immigrants in these different societies." Conducted at various times in 1989,

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