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Much has been published on the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, Japanese Brazilians in Brazil, and Japanese Brazilians’ “return” labor migrations to Japan (known as dekassegui). Yet none has gone beyond and above the essentialized categories of “the Japanese” in Brazil and “Brazilians” in Japan. This book demonstrates that Japanese Brazilian identity has never been a static, fixed set of traits that can be counted and inventoried.  Rather it is about being and becoming, a process of identity in motion responding to the push-and-pull between being positioned and positioning in a historically changing world.  The book is based on the author’s painstaking research in Brazil and Japan between 1997 and 2013, involving extensive life history interviews (and follow-ups) with 116 Japanese Brazilians of several generations and diverse social backgrounds, in combination with substantial archival research and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork.  This book examines Japanese immigrants and their descendants’ historically shifting sense of identity that comes from their engagement or experience of historical changes in socioeconomic and political structure.  Each chapter illustrates how Japanese Brazilian identity is in formation, across generation, across gender, across class, across race, and in the movement of people between nations.

Homing Diaspora Koreans revolves around the experiences of legacy migrants—later-generation diaspora Koreans who have migrated to South Korea—from China, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the United States. This book is based on interviews with sixty-three legacy migrants and thirty secondary informants. In Part I, I provide insights on how diaspora subjectivities formed through the sociohistorical and political specificities of each diaspora and were further shaped by diasporans’ efforts to embody inherited images of Korea/n even as they negotiated belonging in their countries of diaspora. Part II is devoted to four intangible “borders”—social spaces, citizenship, Korean language, and family—and how each border shapes the affective conditions of legacy migrants. It goes on to demonstrate how their evolving psychoemotional responses, which I call “affective topography,” contribute to the (re)making of Korean peoplehood. Diaspora Koreans who migrate to Korea must navigate belongings that are situated in the nexus between ethnic nationalism and neoliberalism and mediated by how their affective topographies shift as expectations meet reality. Through this process, they form different degrees of “affective investment,” which, in turn, contributes to a Korean peoplehood that is still evolving.