Not Quite Home: The Story of the Dekassegui

In the small industrial city of Hamamatsu, where rows of factories hum behind pale blue gates, a man named Sidival Pereira once walked the streets collecting scrap metal. He slept rough, scoured bins for food, and sent what little money he could back to his family in Brazil. Years earlier, he had arrived in Japan on a work visa for Japanese descendants—dekassegui, as they’re called. He had come with a plan: save up, send remittances, maybe go home one day. But the global recession of 2008 crushed those dreams. Jobless and homeless, Pereira stayed. “Brazil has no work,” he told reporters at the time. “I’ll survive here. Somehow.”

His story is far from unique.

Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Brazilians of Japanese descent have journeyed to Japan in search of economic opportunity. Many of them came from families whose ancestors had travelled in the opposite direction a century earlier, part of the mass Japanese migration to Brazil in the early 20th century. This modern return was supposed to be a cultural reunion, a bloodline reconnecting with its roots. What it became was a study in displacement.

Today, the experience of these dekassegui workers is a complex, often contradictory story—one of migration and labour, of language and identity, of people caught in the fragile space between two places that both, in different ways, fail to feel like home.

A Legal Door Opens—But to What?

In 1990, amid labour shortages caused by Japan’s booming economy, the government amended its immigration policy to allow second- and third-generation Japanese descendants—mainly from Brazil and Peru—to live and work in Japan. It was a quiet concession to the demands of industry. The new visa categories offered none of the integration support that might have accompanied a true immigration policy. These were workers, not citizens in waiting.

But for many Brazilian families, especially those facing Brazil’s spiralling economic crises in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was a lifeline. By the end of the decade, over 220,000 Brazilians had registered in Japan. At its peak in 2008, the Brazilian population stood at more than 312,000—concentrated in industrial prefectures like Aichi, Shizuoka, and Gunma, where the country’s major car and electronics factories are based.

Most of the migrants were well-educated and middle-class back home. Many had university degrees, teaching experience, white-collar jobs. In Japan, however, they entered a different reality. In the local lexicon, they filled 3K jobs: kitsui, kitanai, kiken—hard, dirty, and dangerous. Assembly-line work in car plants, night shifts in food-processing warehouses, cleaning jobs in factories. For these roles, they were welcomed. Beyond them, they found resistance.

Ethnic Return, Cultural Rejection

At the heart of the dekassegui story is a cultural paradox. In Brazil, many of these families were regarded as Japanese—“the quiet, hard-working ones,” often associated with discipline, order, and economic success. But in Japan, they were viewed as Brazilians first and foremost—no longer Japanese by culture or behaviour. They spoke Portuguese, not Japanese. They were expressive, warm, direct. To many in Japan, they seemed too foreign.

Sociologist Takeyuki Tsuda, who studied return migration extensively, describes this as a kind of ethnic betrayal. “If they have a Japanese face,” one Japanese respondent told him, “we interpret this to mean they are Japanese. But then when we find they are culturally different, we say they are foreigners.” In other words, they looked like they belonged—until they spoke or moved or socialised.

For the migrants, this mismatch could be deeply disorienting. “I thought they’d accept us because of our ancestry,” one woman told Tsuda. “But we’re treated like outsiders. That’s the hardest part.” In Calazans’ 2009 study Life as Dekkasseguis, one respondent put it more bluntly: “We are a people without a homeland.”

Living in Parallel

Many Brazilians settled in clusters around factory towns, supported by networks of labour brokers who helped with housing and job placement. Portuguese-language newspapers, supermarkets, evangelical churches, and Brazilian festivals helped create a sense of community. But this also meant that integration into Japanese society often stalled.

There were few shared spaces. Social interaction with Japanese neighbours was limited. And discrimination—though often subtle—was real: refusals by landlords to rent to foreigners, exclusion from some shops, and widespread assumptions that the Brazilians would “make noise” or “fail to follow the rules.”

In schools, the situation was even more complicated. Brazilian children arriving in Japan faced language barriers, cultural friction, and a lack of institutional support. Public schools rarely had Portuguese-speaking teachers. Brazilian private schools, while culturally familiar, were expensive and not always recognised by Japanese universities. Dropout rates among Brazilian students soared. Meanwhile, children who spent their formative years in Japan often lost their Portuguese, creating linguistic and emotional gaps between them and their parents.

Crisis, Collapse, and Forced Choices

When the financial crash of 2008 hit, it hit the dekassegui community hard. Suddenly, contracts were cancelled. Thousands were laid off with little warning. Some were evicted from employer-provided housing. Shelters filled with Brazilian families. In a move that sparked outrage, the Japanese government offered to pay for flights for unemployed Brazilians to return to Brazil—but only if they agreed not to come back on the same visa.

Critics saw this as a clear signal: these workers were always meant to be temporary. As one migrant put it: “We worked hard, paid taxes, raised children here—and now we’re being asked to disappear.”

Tens of thousands took the deal and left. Many struggled to reintegrate in Brazil, a country they hadn’t lived in for years and whose economy was again unstable. Some returned later. Others never could.

A New Generation, Still Between

Today, the Brazilian population in Japan hovers around 212,000. Nearly half are now permanent residents. Some have lived in Japan for over two decades. A new generation is coming of age—children who speak Japanese fluently, go to local schools, and see Japan as home.

But identity remains complicated.

Many still report being treated as outsiders. Some navigate dual lives—Japanese in the classroom, Brazilian at home. Others feel increasingly distanced from their heritage, unable to communicate fully with their parents or grandparents.

And although Japanese policy has shifted slightly—with new visa categories introduced in 2018 to attract more foreign workers—there is still no national anti-discrimination law. There are few pathways to citizenship. The assumption remains: Japan is for the Japanese.

Rewriting the Narrative

Yet something has shifted. In places like Oizumi and Hamamatsu, Brazilian festivals draw crowds. Portuguese is heard in playgrounds and church halls. Local governments offer language classes and cultural support. A few Brazilian-Japanese young people are breaking into public life—as artists, musicians, and even politicians.

Cultural hybridity is asserting itself, not as a problem to be solved, but as a reality to be lived.

The dekassegui generation may never have found the homecoming they imagined. But their children—navigating between accents, flags, and expectations—are slowly, quietly, reshaping the meaning of belonging in Japan.

They are not simply “Brazilian” or “Japanese.” They are both. And that, perhaps, is the beginning of a new story.