2023/1/17

A book titled “An Immigrant’s Perspective on Immigration: A Historical Narrative on Tomo’o Handa and the Japanese Brazilian Community” written by Assistant Professor Felipe Motta of the Faculty of Foreign Studies’ Department of Brazilian and Portuguese Studies was published.

Title: “An Immigrant’s Perspective on Immigration: A Historical Narrative on Tomo’o Handa and the Japanese Brazilian Community”
Publisher: Osaka University Press
Date: December in 2022
Format: A5 size / 318 pages
ISBN: 978-4-87259-759-2 C3020
Price: 5,500 yen + tax

A history of immigration written by an immigrant: how the Japanese immigrants in Brazil recorded their lives

This book traces the artistic work and philosophy of Tomo’o Handa (1906-1996), an artist and intellectual on immigration who immigrated to Brazil as a child and continued to think about the Japanese Brazilian community throughout his life. The book utilizes a variety of primary sources that have not been referenced in the past and delves into how the historical phenomenon of immigration has been discussed in the Japanese Brazilian community. And by focusing on Handa, an intellectual on immigration, this book aims to break new ground in research related to the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil. The Japanese immigrants has contemplated about their existence and confronted their own history way before researchers of migration began to pay attention. As someone whose research relies on their documents, I would like to respect their accumulation of historical records as I think about this topic. This book aims to help update the historical narrative of Japanese immigration in Brazil through the eyes of an immigrant by examining written discourses about immigration, thus unraveling the history of immigrants by focusing on the documents written by the immigrants themselves.

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