ABSTRACT
For Brazilians1 it is difficult to find karaoke bars in Liberdade since many of them don’t put up a sign in Portuguese. Obviously evening strollers notice them easily because of the sounds drifting outside. Such ‘Japanese’ karaoke bars are also found in various cities around the world where Japanese businessmen are more or less concentrated. What specifically characterizes the karaoke culture in Brazil is the high occurrence of Japanese immigration (especially issei or the generation born in Japan). Unlike America and Canada, where Japanese immigration was stopped in the middle of the 1920s owing to the Anti-Asian immigration laws, Brazil continued to receive them until the beginning of the 1970s when the Japanese economy had completely recovered from the wartime damage and Brazil in turn no longer needed immigrant workers (the immigration flow was of course interrupted in the 1940s because of Brazil’s alliance with America and post-war confusion). It is precisely due to the the fact that they were not allowed to enter North America that the ships with Japanese immigrants aboard headed for South America. In the case of Brazil, migration peaked in the mid-1930s and the late 1950s. Therefore the first generation, for all its drastic diminishment during recent years, is still culturally visible and very influential in the Japanese-Brazilian community. The karaoke scene, as we will examine, is evidence of their presence.
