Tizuka Yamasaki’s Gaijin 2: Japanesity, Japanese Sovereignty and the “Unofficial” Hierarchy Amongst Asian Americans

• In Event: Latin America in Japan and Japanese Immigration in Latin America

Abstract

“Your film has been accepted because you are Japanese Brazilian. Unfortunately, your film is not good enough because it is not truly Japanese.” This is how I interpreted a short review that the Asian Pacific Alumni of UCLA (APA) wrote about Gaijin 2: Ama-me Como Sou (2005) directed by the Japanese Brazilian filmmaker Tizuka Yamasaki. Even though the APA had only chosen a few films shown at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival to review, it deemed Gaijin 2 a weak representative of Asian cinema. In fact, Gaijin 2 had probably been accepted in the festival because it was a sequel to Gaijin 1: Roads to Freedom (1980), a praised film about the first Japanese immigrants to Brazil, and second, because the event was organized by The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), an all-inclusive association that supports Asian films made in the US and elsewhere. However, I propose that there is a bigger issue that the dismissal of Gaijin 2 helps bring to light. I ask: Did the APA see the film as an easy target because of the vulnerability of its condition as a Japanese depiction in peripheral Brazil? Was Gaijin 2 disregarded as an indirect attack to Japanese sovereignty? In my paper, I try to show that, by disregarding Gaijin 2, the APA brings forth the fragile condition of the veneer of equality among Asian Americans.

Author

• Emy Takada, University of Pittsburgh