Introduction: Looking for Home in All the Wrong Places

Is home a place or a state of mind? Is it both? Does a person have multiple homes or just one? Can home change rapidly, like the weather, or is the process of homemaking andhomebreaking a constant one?The authorswhohave contributed to Searching for Home Abroad analyze these questions by examining a rarely studied but extraordinary case of transnational homemaking, breaking, and transforming: the migration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese to Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century, followed by themigration of hundreds of thousands of Brazilians to Japan in the last decades of the same century. The termsused todescribebothmovementsarehighlycontested.Were Japanese citizens who went to Brazil believing they would build a ‘‘New Japan’’ immigrants or imperialists? Are Brazilians who qualify for special labor visas because of their ostensible Japanese descent involved in a ‘‘return’’ to Japan, a classic labor migration, or something altogether different? Does the term Nikkei, now regularly used by scholars of ethnicity to refer to people of Japanese descent, have much meaning when notions of gender, class, generation, national identity, and subethnic identity are introduced? By approaching these questions from a number of perspectives, this volume expands a discussion of ethnicity by introducing significant, and complicating, nuances into notions of modernity, globalization, diaspora, and transnational identity. Some of the essays examine Japanese immigrant and Japanese Brazilian life in Brazil while others analyze the so-called dekassegui (or, in the Japanese romanization, dekasegi ) movement of Nikkei and their often non-Nikkei spouses and ‘‘mestiço’’ children to Japan. All contextualize Brazilians as part of a broader minority