ABSTRACT
Today, three million Nikkei1 – people of Japanese descent who were born and raised overseas – are found throughout the world. In addition, hundreds of thousands of Japanese reside outside of Japan permanently or temporarily. This volume examines these dispersed Japanese populations: their histories, the diverse contemporary communities they have formed, and the political, economic, social, and cultural pressures they have faced. In contrast with other groups of migrants – notably African, Jewish, Chinese, and Irish – Japanese and Nikkei have received little attention from anthropologists, sociologists, and historians. Nor does much of the existing literature consider them as members of a “diaspora.” For example, the term diaspora hardly appears in the most influential works on Japanese Americans such as those of Ronald Takaki (1983, 1998) or Yuji Ichioka (1988), nor do we find it in the growing literature on Japanese in Latin America such as that of Harvey Gardiner (1981) or Joshua Roth (2002). When it does appear in these monographs, authors are often “cautious about using” the word as it is such a “slippery term” and not clearly defined (Azuma 2005: 219).
