Papers by Hiroyuki Shibata
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2023
Why and how do migrant youths' pathways in early adulthood diverge widely, including varying assi... more Why and how do migrant youths' pathways in early adulthood diverge widely, including varying assimilation paths into the host society and return paths to parental homelands despite sharing group characteristics? Research has documented key factors that affect the social mobility of youths such as family socioeconomic status, institutional contexts, and cultures of mobility. However, they tend to conflate migrant youth's agency with these institutional and cultural contexts. Consequently, the interaction between the contexts and the agency of migrant youth is undertheorized. Drawing on the notions of life-course agency and possible selves, this study develops a process-oriented approach focusing on agentic mechanisms by which the youth choose divergent pathways over time. Based on life-history interviews, this study compares four distinctive life trajectories among 28 Brazilian Nikkei youths in Japan. Findings show that Nikkei youths develop varying social identities, interacting with intra-family and school contexts. During the transition period, their life-course agency links their social identities to possible selves and motivates them toward different pathways in a transborder context. This study contends that the dynamic interaction between migrant youth's reflective agency and contexts over the life course produces variations in their pathways even when group characteristics are shared.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2023
Why and how do some migrant groups demonstrate greater engagement with homeland politics than oth... more Why and how do some migrant groups demonstrate greater engagement with homeland politics than others at particular historical moments? Research has examined both individual-level factors such as migrants' resources and institutional factors such as contexts of incorporation. Less theorised, however, are the ways in which factors are mediated by temporal contexts such as timing and sequence. Drawing on the notion of path dependence, this study analyses how the temporal orders of four institutional factors-1) the socioeconomic context of reception, 2) incorporative policies of the receiving state, 3) diaspora policies of the sending state, and 4) migrant networksresulted in divergent levels of diasporic engagement between Italian and Japanese migrants in early 20th century Brazil. My findings show that the socioeconomic context of reception provides the initial condition on which migrants develop their networks. Second, the timing of when diasporic policies-relative to incorporative policies-reach out to migrant networks affects the breadths of social class involvement in diasporic engagement. This study contends that timing plays a critical role in producing divergent levels of diasporic engagement at the group-level.
Journal of the Japanese Overseas Migration Museum, Mar 2022
In the immediate aftermath of WWII, many Japanese migrants in the state of São Paulo claimed Japa... more In the immediate aftermath of WWII, many Japanese migrants in the state of São Paulo claimed Japan had won the war while others accepted it had lost. This eventually resulted in intra-group conflicts known as Kachi-make conflicts. Why and how did the conflicts occur? Earlier studies have provided cultural accounts to this question, arguing that those with a strong patriotic attachment to the homeland attacked those without. However, the cultural argument cannot explain the different levels of the conflicts between Japanese communities. By comparing two rural communities, Bastos and Registro, I argue that the disjuncture between local economic and organizational bases weakened the community’s associational legitimacy, which led to the conflicts. In the long run, communal organizations of Japanese migrants gradually dissolved. However, Bastos and Registro demonstrated two different courses of the dissolution: Bastos saw violent conflicts among the residents because of the widening gap between the two bases whereas Registro did not see the violence because it sustained coherence between them.
Ph.D. dissertation , 2021
This dissertation explores the varieties of Brazilian Nikkei’s – Japanese emigrants to Brazil and... more This dissertation explores the varieties of Brazilian Nikkei’s – Japanese emigrants to Brazil and their descendants – transnational lives throughout a century of their migration history. I propose an interactive process approach to migrant transnationalism to understand the divergence of Brazilian Nikkeis’ transnational lives between their two homelands, Japan and Brazil. First, I focus on the four macro-institutional contexts: 1) positions and development patterns of sending and receiving states within the international state system; the infrastructural power of states, more concretely 2) the diasporic bureaucracy of sending states and 3) the incorporative power of receiving states; and 4) the mobilizing capacity of migrants’ networks and associations. I argue that the interactions among them yield varying modes of migrants’ transnational ties with the homelands over time. Second, I also draw attention to the processual nature of migrants’ agency that produces further variations of transnational lives. I conceptualize migrants’ agency as the dynamic relationship between a) social belonging that represents one’s sense of belonging to the relevant subcultures and b) possible selves that inform future pathways. Interacting with meso-level institutional contexts over time, migrants’ agency can generate variations in transnational lives even under the same configuration of macro-institutional contexts. In short, this dissertation shows how the interactions among the four macro-institutional contexts and the agentic dynamics over time produce varieties of Brazilian Nikkeis’ transnational ties and lives between Japan and Brazil. I claim that the analytical framework developed through the case of Brazilian Nikkeis in this dissertation can be helpful to guide other studies on migrants’ transnationalism and assimilation.
This dissertation employs case-oriented comparisons and focuses on three prominent episodes in Brazilian Nikkeis’ transnational history over a century. Chapter 1 compares Italian and Japanese migrants in early 20th century São Paulo and how the form and breadth of diasporic supports to the homelands differed between the two migrant groups. Chapter 2 compares two Japanese migrant communities in the hinterland of São Paulo and how they differently reacted to Japanese defeat in World War II. Finally, Chapter 3 compares four Brazilian Nikkei youths in contemporary Japan and how their life trajectories diverged widely including both an upwardly mobile incorporation into the mainstream Japanese society and an upwardly mobile return to Brazil. These case-oriented comparisons across the cases and each case along the way enable me to carefully analyze the divergence dynamics of migrants’ transnational lives working both at macro-institutional and micro-agency levels.
Jinmonken, 2019
This study compares the different patterns of migrants' transnational connections with Japan and ... more This study compares the different patterns of migrants' transnational connections with Japan and Italy in the state of São Paulo in the early 20th century. Both Italian and Japanese immigrants in São Paulo responded to the their homelands' war efforts respectively in the mid 1930s but by different extent. Why did the two groups show different extents of transnational engagement in the homelands' politics? Guided by this empirical question, this paper seeks to theoretically contribute to the debate on the causes of migrants' transnational attachments to the home countries. In particular, I argue that the three institutional factors considerably affect the varying degree of transnational connections maintained by immigrants, namely, 1) the developmental pattern of host society's national economy, 2) infrastructural power of sending and receiving states, and 3) the orientation of ethnic organizations. In the end, this paper seeks to formulate a state-centered institutional approach for the studies of migrants' transnational connections.
Conference Presentations by Hiroyuki Shibata
LASA/Asia 2022 Congress Paper, 2022
This paper compares the different levels of diasporic engagement with the homelands of Italian an... more This paper compares the different levels of diasporic engagement with the homelands of Italian and Japanese migrants in early 20th century Brazil. Both Italian and Japanese migrants organized diasporic donation campaigns for homelands' war efforts on the eve of World War II, but with different breadths of class involvement. Class division characterized the Italian campaign: well-off Italians actively participated in the campaign while the worse-off didn't. In contrast, crossclass participation characterized the Japanese campaign. Why did the two migrant groups demonstrate the different levels of diasporic engagement? Guided by this empirical question, this paper aims at contributing to the theoretical debate on migrants' transnational political engagement.
There are two major approaches to migrants' transnational engagement: agency-oriented and context-oriented approaches. The former pays attention to factors such as migrants' self-interest and resources whereas the latter emphasized various contextual conditions such as the contexts of reception of the host society. The comparative case of Italian and Japanese migrants poses an inconvenient puzzle to the existing approaches because they cannot explain the different levels of diaspora engagement between the two cases fully and coherently. Building upon the context-oriented approaches, I develop an interactive process approach that considers the dynamic interaction between sending and receiving contexts and migrant groups over time. I argue that their varying conjuncture better explains the comparative case of this study and the interactive process approach can be helpful for theorizing migrants' diasporic engagement with careful attention to the temporal configuration of contexts.
the 2017 Congress of Latin American Studies Association, 2017
By 2015, over 170,000 Brazilian migrants are living in Japan. For their children, basically two o... more By 2015, over 170,000 Brazilian migrants are living in Japan. For their children, basically two options are available in terms of school education: Japanese pubic school and Brazilian school. How does ethnic schooling affect migrant children’s experience in the host society and their future planning? How are the experiences of migrant youth in ethnic school different from their counterpart in public school and what do they share in common? Public schooling has been considered a major avenue for migrant incorporation into the host society. However, when migrants form their own educational institutions, which are not fully compatible with the host country’s formal institutional framework, new social constraints and opportunities emerge for their children. Based on over 40 interviews with Nikkei (descendants of Japanese ancestry) Brazilian youth and relevant persons in Tokai area, Japan, this paper examines the ways in which they experience social lives and form their future plans throughout the sending country-oriented Brazilian schools. Ultimately my paper argues that, combined with the segmented labor market predominated by labor brokers, the semi-formal ethnic schooling provides social conditions for an enforced transnationalism for the Nikkei Brazilian youth in Japan.
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Papers by Hiroyuki Shibata
This dissertation employs case-oriented comparisons and focuses on three prominent episodes in Brazilian Nikkeis’ transnational history over a century. Chapter 1 compares Italian and Japanese migrants in early 20th century São Paulo and how the form and breadth of diasporic supports to the homelands differed between the two migrant groups. Chapter 2 compares two Japanese migrant communities in the hinterland of São Paulo and how they differently reacted to Japanese defeat in World War II. Finally, Chapter 3 compares four Brazilian Nikkei youths in contemporary Japan and how their life trajectories diverged widely including both an upwardly mobile incorporation into the mainstream Japanese society and an upwardly mobile return to Brazil. These case-oriented comparisons across the cases and each case along the way enable me to carefully analyze the divergence dynamics of migrants’ transnational lives working both at macro-institutional and micro-agency levels.
Conference Presentations by Hiroyuki Shibata
There are two major approaches to migrants' transnational engagement: agency-oriented and context-oriented approaches. The former pays attention to factors such as migrants' self-interest and resources whereas the latter emphasized various contextual conditions such as the contexts of reception of the host society. The comparative case of Italian and Japanese migrants poses an inconvenient puzzle to the existing approaches because they cannot explain the different levels of diaspora engagement between the two cases fully and coherently. Building upon the context-oriented approaches, I develop an interactive process approach that considers the dynamic interaction between sending and receiving contexts and migrant groups over time. I argue that their varying conjuncture better explains the comparative case of this study and the interactive process approach can be helpful for theorizing migrants' diasporic engagement with careful attention to the temporal configuration of contexts.
This dissertation employs case-oriented comparisons and focuses on three prominent episodes in Brazilian Nikkeis’ transnational history over a century. Chapter 1 compares Italian and Japanese migrants in early 20th century São Paulo and how the form and breadth of diasporic supports to the homelands differed between the two migrant groups. Chapter 2 compares two Japanese migrant communities in the hinterland of São Paulo and how they differently reacted to Japanese defeat in World War II. Finally, Chapter 3 compares four Brazilian Nikkei youths in contemporary Japan and how their life trajectories diverged widely including both an upwardly mobile incorporation into the mainstream Japanese society and an upwardly mobile return to Brazil. These case-oriented comparisons across the cases and each case along the way enable me to carefully analyze the divergence dynamics of migrants’ transnational lives working both at macro-institutional and micro-agency levels.
There are two major approaches to migrants' transnational engagement: agency-oriented and context-oriented approaches. The former pays attention to factors such as migrants' self-interest and resources whereas the latter emphasized various contextual conditions such as the contexts of reception of the host society. The comparative case of Italian and Japanese migrants poses an inconvenient puzzle to the existing approaches because they cannot explain the different levels of diaspora engagement between the two cases fully and coherently. Building upon the context-oriented approaches, I develop an interactive process approach that considers the dynamic interaction between sending and receiving contexts and migrant groups over time. I argue that their varying conjuncture better explains the comparative case of this study and the interactive process approach can be helpful for theorizing migrants' diasporic engagement with careful attention to the temporal configuration of contexts.