Abstract
Dirty Hearts investigates the discriminatory treatment of the Japanese immigrant community in Brazil during World War II and in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat and unconditional surrender. In contrast to the internment camps and compulsory military service that characterized the Japanese American wartime experience, it traces the rise to power of Shindō Renmei, an ultranationalist secret society that was formed in response to the anti-Japanese measures enacted under Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo. Based in São Paulo, the group used terrorism, propaganda campaigns, and conspiracy theories to violently enforce its narrative of Japan’s victory. These traumatic events nevertheless brought about a permanent transformation in the Japanese Brazilian community from a largely insular colony with close ties to its imperial homeland to its new identity as an ethnic minority in postwar Brazil’s fraught racial democracy.
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Notes
- 1.
Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (1992).
- 2.
Ignacio López-Calvo, Japanese Brazilian Saudades, 155.
- 3.
Decree 383 on April 18, 1938 barred foreigners from political activities or speaking foreign languages in public. Radio broadcasts in foreign languages were prohibited, and publishing in foreign languages was technically only permissible when done in bilingual editions. Most improbable of all was that the first language taught to children had to be Portuguese, despite the fact that many recent Japanese immigrants neither spoke the language adequately nor had access to schools where their children might receive suitable instruction.
- 4.
Takashi Maeyama, “Ethnicity, Secret Societies, and Associations: The Japanese in Brazil,” 601.
- 5.
His name is also sometimes spelled Ademar de Barros. He was a veteran politician so famous for extravagant promises and graft that the popular Brazilian expression rouba mas faz, “he steals but gets things done,” was coined to describe his governing style.
- 6.
Jeffrey Lesser, A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980 (2007).
- 7.
Rogério Dezem, “Hi-no-maru Manchado de Sangue: A Shindo Renmei e o DEOPS/SP,” Imigrantes Japoneses no Brasil: Trajetória, Imaginário e Memória, 244. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise noted, the translations are my own.
- 8.
Ibid., 244.
- 9.
In an interview on January 22, 2017 on the US political talk show Meet the Press, presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway coined this phrase in reply to a demonstrable lie about the size of the inaugural crowd told by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Moderator Chuck Todd swiftly responded, “Alternative facts are not facts; they’re falsehoods.” See Aaron Blake, “Kellyanne Conway Says Donald Trump’s Team Has ‘Alternative Facts.’ Which Pretty Much Says It All,” Washington Post, November 12, 2020.
- 10.
Flynn first made these spurious claims on Twitter on December 1, 2020 and then repeated them when the far-right media outlet Newsmax interviewed him on December 17, 2020.
- 11.
Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Harper’s Weekly, November 1964.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Emma Colton, “Chris Wallace Compares Ted Cruz to Japanese Soldier Still Fighting WWII After He Questioned Election Results,” Washington Examiner, November 8, 2020.
- 14.
Robert McFadden, “Hiroo Onoda, Soldier Who Hid in Jungle for Decades, Dies at 91,” New York Times, January 17, 2014. Suzuki, who is better described as an amateur explorer, famously declared he was searching for “Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the yeti, in that order.” He succeeded in finding a panda in the wild, but died in an avalanche in the Himalayas on his quest for the yeti in November 1986.
- 15.
“Marcos Extols Japanese Straggler, Returns Sword,” in New York Times, March 12, 1974.
- 16.
Jordan Williams, “GOP Lawmaker Compares Japanese Internment to Alleged Fraud That Cost Trump Election,” The Hill, December 11, 2020. Higgins also inflated Trump’s popular vote count by 777,000.
- 17.
Japanese American Citizens League, https://jacl.org/statements/representative-clay-higgins-fails-to-understand-the-gravity-of-claiming-a-loss-of-constitutional-rights. Accessed Sept. 1, 2021.
- 18.
Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling, 50–51.
- 19.
Aaron W. Moore, Writing War: Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire, 272.
- 20.
Dekasegi, which literally means “working away from home,” has become an internationally recognized term for the hundreds of thousands of Nikkei Latin Americans, primarily from Brazil, who find work in Japan. I adopt the term “3D” from the corresponding “3K” (kitsui, kitanai, kiken) in Japanese.
- 21.
The English translation of the Jewel Throne Broadcast that appears in Dirty Hearts is taken from the text recorded by the Federal Communications Commission and published in the August 15, 1945 issue of the New York Times . The translation of the Humanity Declaration likewise comes from the January 1, 1946 issue of the New York Times , which cites the translation provided by Allied headquarters.
- 22.
John Dower, Embracing Defeat, 45.
- 23.
Ibid., 48–49.
- 24.
Izumi, Masumi. “Lessons from History: Japanese Canadians and Civil Liberties in Canada.” Journal of American and Canadian Studies 17 (1999): 1–24.
- 25.
Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 6.
- 26.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, chapter X. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt.
- 27.
These comments were made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in the October 26, 1978 issue of The New York Review of Books.
- 28.
See for instance Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996).
- 29.
Heinrich Himmler, “Posen Speech ‘Extermination.’ Trans. Stephane Bruchfield, Gordon McFee and Ulrich Rössler. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/himmler-s-posen-speech-quot-extermination-quot. Accessed Sept. 1, 2021.
- 30.
Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda, 16.
- 31.
Skya elaborates on the severity of political violence, which is worth quoting at length to provide a complete picture of what “government by assassination” entailed:
Three serving prime ministers (Hara Takashi [1865–1921], Hamaguchi Osachi [1870–1931], and Inukai Tsuyoshi [1855–1932]) and two former prime ministers (Saitō Makoto [1858–1936] and Takahashi Korekiyo [1854–1936]) were assassinated between 1921 and 1936. Within the same period, Prime Minister Okada Keisuke (1868–1952) had escaped an assassination attempt while he was prime minister, and Suzuki Kantarō (1867–1948), the man who would become Japan’s last prime minister in the prewar period, narrowly survived an assassination attempt. (The would-be assassin’s bullet remained inside Suzuki’s body for the rest of his life). Had the assassination attempt on Okada been successful, an astonishing six prime ministers or former prime ministers would have been murdered within a fifteen-year period and five of them within final six years of this period. It is also noteworthy that two-time Prime Minister Wakatsuki Reijirō (1926–27 and 1931) had been slated for assassination by terrorists in the “October [1931] Incident.” In addition to all this, we can add the number of related high-profile terrorist “incidents” that occurred between 1930 and 1936, resulting in the murder or attempted murder of leading intellectuals, political figures (including entire cabinets), top military officials, and prominent business leaders (Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shintō Ultranationalism, 229–230).
- 32.
Ibid., 310–311.
- 33.
See Miriam Silverberg’s Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times for a recounting of this episode, including how Chaplin was seen as a high-value target for Japan’s ultranationalists in order to provoke the long-anticipated war with the United States, 1–3.
- 34.
Walter Skya, Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shintō Ultranationalism, 26.
- 35.
Dirty Hearts, 106.
- 36.
Walter Skya, Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shintō Ultranationalism, 323.
- 37.
In an interview with the magazine Manchete on November 11, 1958, now-General Mourão (who also went on to play a key role in the 1964 coup d’état) attributed the name of the plan to Gustavo Barroso, the virulently anti-Semitic Integralist doctrinaire, politician, and three-time president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Barroso’s Paulista Synagogue (1937) was a screed in which he alleged “the voracious Jewish Colony” was behind the scenes controlling Brazilian and international affairs primarily through capitalist machinations. Among the scores of works that Barroso authored and translated into Portuguese were Henry Ford’s The International Jew and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion .
- 38.
Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity, 135.
- 39.
Ibid., 135.
- 40.
Takako Day has found that under questioning by the FBI, Nakane disclosed that “he was more or less a self-styled representative of the Kokuryūkai,” that “he received no compensation and it was just generally understood between the president of this organization and himself that they were working toward the same end,” and that “he was, as well as The Development of Our Own, spiritually joined with the Kokuryūkai because of his contacts made while in Japan.” (FBI Detroit Report 62–709, March 20, 1940, #65–562-43).
- 41.
In “When Japan Was ‘Champion of the Darker Races:’ Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,” Ernest Allen, Jr. characterizes the utopian vision behind the PMEW as follows: “Torn between the demand for full citizenship rights in the U.S. and the desire for political self-determination through emigration, the PMEW’s line alternatively vacillated between support for a Japanese military invasion of the U.S. with the aim of securing black equality at home, and emigration to Africa, Japan, or Brazil with the presumed help of the Japanese government” (The Black Scholar 24 [Winter 1994]: 26).
- 42.
“Black Dragon Men Arrested in Brazil,” in the May 12, 1942 issue of the New York Times.
- 43.
Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity, 233.
- 44.
“Brazil’s Shindo Renmei Says, ‘So Sorry Please!’” January 4, 1947 issue of The Nisei Weekender, p. 3. No source for the original text is given. For further reading on the postwar Japanese American community in New York, see Greg Robinson’s “Nisei in Gotham: The JACD and Japanese Americans in 1940s New York,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, vol. 30 (2005): 581–595.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
“Honorable Homicide,” in the August 26, 1946 issue of Time (48:9): 34.
- 47.
“Rules for an Ex-God,” August 26, 1946 issue of Time (48:9): 32.
- 48.
Ibid., 6.
- 49.
Martha Nakagawa, ibid., 278.
- 50.
Another example of principled resistance left unmentioned in the novel is the handwritten Japanese-language journal Tessaku (Barbed Wire), which Japanese American dissenters self-published at Tule Lake in 1944.
- 51.
Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy, 145.
- 52.
John Okada, No-No Boy, viii.
- 53.
Ibid., 14–15.
- 54.
Ibid., 22.
- 55.
Ibid., 24.
- 56.
Ibid., 24.
- 57.
Ibid., 98.
- 58.
Emily Wang. “75 Years Later, Japanese Man Recalls Bitter Internment in U.S.,” Associated Press, August 31, 2020. Accessed online: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/75-years-japanese-man-recalls-bitter-internment-us-72739762.
- 59.
These Japanese Americans were either released on parole or transferred to mainland camps. Honouliuli would hold some 4000 prisoners of war and non-combatant laborers consisting of Japanese, including Okinawans, Koreans, and Taiwanese under Japanese colonial rule, as well as Italian and German Americans. It was designated Honouliuli National Monument by Presidential Proclamation by President Barack Obama (who was born and raised in the state) on February 24, 2015.
- 60.
Kelli Y. Nakamura, “Kachigumi,” Densho Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Kachigumi?fbclid=IwAR1zH8cLg1souDsNwirHpAfoeUk8INnTMaCAzdNfHsVWxtEDduwr-q9YCgw#cite_ref-ftnt_ref11_11–0. Last accessed Sept. 1, 2021. I am indebted to Levi McLaughlin for drawing my attention to this connection.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Hidaka claims the flag incident in which the “seven samurai” sought revenge on Corporal Edmundo with drawn swords was pure invention. Curiously, Okuhara never asks Morais to reveal his sources for the famous episode, nor does he question Hidaka how he came into possession of the customary paraphernalia—the ritual dagger, “suicide note,” four pistols, and Wakiyama’s address—if he had no association with the secret society that killed or wounded scores of others using the same methods.
- 63.
Queiroz served in the Chamber of Deputies representing the Communist Party of Brazil from 2011 to 2015. He was fired from the Federal Police for abuse of power relating to a financial crimes investigation whose convictions were annulled due to Queiroz’s authorization of illegal wiretaps. He fled the country upon losing parliamentary immunity and received asylum to Switzerland in 2016.
- 64.
In 1998, the Jornal Paulista merged with another Japanese Brazilian newspaper, the Diário Nippak, to become the Nikkey Shimbun. It remains in circulation today.
- 65.
José Yamashiro, Trajetória de duas vidas, 195.
- 66.
Aracy Amaral, Um Círculo de Ligações: Foujita no Brasil, Kaminagai e o Jovem Mori, 237.
- 67.
Kōji Sasaki, “Moral Mobility: Return in the Japanese Community in Brazil 1908–1955,” The Newsletter 50:6 (2009).
- 68.
Takashi Maeyama, “Ethnicity, Secret Societies, and Associations: The Japanese in Brazil,” 602.
- 69.
Ibid., 603.
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Jacobowitz, S. (2021). Critical Introduction to Dirty Hearts. In: Dirty Hearts. Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70562-6_1
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