A Glimpse Of Paraguay's Japanese Community

December 18, 2019 11:29 PM

Ricardo Nagaoka's photographs focus on the Japanese community in Paraguay When he returned for a month last year, he made these images while visiting the small towns, called colonias, where the Japanese initially settled, recontextualizing Japanese people within the Latin American setting.

"I like making images that challenge what we initially believe."

Ricardo Nagaoka's website and more photography

posted by jj's.mama (4 comments total)

Oh, how cool! Here in San Francisco we just had COPANI, the Convención Panamericana Nikkei - I didn't attend but helped put on a mixer for young professionals, and I was too busy during it to really talk to many of the attendees in depth, but we had Japanese descended folks from Canada, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay, Mexico, and it's so wild having that bond with someone who you barely share a language with. And then seeing the differences - we were on a budget and got a bunch of rice donated, so we decided to do a spam musubi making workshop, but in the chaos we forgot to explain WHAT spam musubi was and the poor Paraguayan girl who had volunteered to help got halfway through slicing the spam before turning to me and asking "so... what IS this shit?" Whoops. (Once the musubis were made, though, they were a hit.)

And the next convention is going to be held in Paraguay!
posted by sunset in snow country at 7:57 AM on December 19, 2019 [6 favorites]

My ex-gf's grandmother immigrated from Japan to Brazil, her mother immigrated from Brazil to the USA and she was born in the USA. Culturally her family identifies as Brazilian more than anything else, which caused lots of confusion because even here in wordly Boston. People had a really hard time with somebody who LOOKS Japanese, but really ... isn't. We went to an asian food potluck once where she was press ganged into rolling Sushi. I think many USAians have internalized our national mythology (true or not...) about being THE country that welcomed immigrants AND being the BEST COUNTRY EVAR that they can't even imagine that people would choose to migrate to any other countries. The fact that Sao Paolo has more Japanese people living in it than any other place on earth besides JAPAN or the existence of the high German speaking colonias of Paraguay or the Welsh communities of Argentina makes peoples brains explode. My Italian relatives left Italy for America, but "America" is a wide range of possibility and half of them ended up in Argentina.
posted by youthenrage at 9:38 AM on December 19, 2019 [13 favorites]

I was in Shanghai once years ago, wandering around Old Town, and came across a tour group of Chilean descendants of Chinese immigrants. Matching t-shirts, the tour guide with a flag, the full monty. As it happened, I needed directions, so I approached the tour guide and a conversation in Spanish ensued about where such-and-such was (or likely to be). It was amazing and a little surreal, actually.
posted by jquinby at 10:02 AM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

This is a very cool share! Thanks jj’s.mama! Great photographs and a really cool article!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 10:23 AM on December 19, 2019