Futures Lost, Futures Found: Pentecostal Conversion as the Making of New Future, or Why Nikkei Brazilian Migrants Convert in Japan

• In Event: Envisioning the Future In, Through, and Against “Japan”: Interdisciplinary and Heterolingual Approach to Hope

Abstract

Pentecostal Christianity has been the fastest growing branch of Christianity for the last few decades and, in its process of global expansion, reached one of the most unlikely places: Japan. While Christians barely make up 1% of the Japanese majority, Pentecostalism has been flourishing among Brazilian migrants – the country’s fourth-largest group of foreign residents. This paper argues that future is a key concept in the analysis of Pentecostal conversion among the migrants. In doing so, it will also engage larger issues, such as racialization of identity, national kinship, and transnationalism.
The majority of Brazilians in Japan are second- and third-generation Japanese descendants. As “return migrants” to the supposed ancestral homeland, they have grappled with the images of the past, present, and future in complex ways. I will illustrate the ways in which conversion addresses common concerns regarding time among the migrant converts, such as the “loss of future” in their post-migration life, “putting aside living” for the future in Brazil, and restoration of “modern minority” status in Japan. Pentecostal conversion in this context is often experienced as an act of re-envisioning the new future in spiritual terms. That is, spiritual fellowship mediated by Pentecostalism helps migrants transcend racialized ethnicity delineated by the “Japanese blood,” past-oriented national kinship, and world of national boundaries where they have long been place in in-between space of hyphenated identity. I will conclude with an observation that the experience of living “between” nations has sensitized Nikkei migrants to the vision of “transnational transcendence.”

Author

• Suma Ikeuchi, Emory University