You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Original research
Saudades de ser nihonjin: Japanese-Brazilian identity and mental health in literature and media
  1. Yuki Bailey
  1. Presence Center, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, USA
  1. Correspondence to Yuki Bailey, Presence Center, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA; ybailey{at}stanford.edu

Abstract

Brazil is currently home to the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. In Brazil today, Japanese-Brazilians are considered to be successful members of Brazilian society. This was not always the case, however, and Japanese immigrants to Brazil endured much hardship to attain their current level of prestige. This essay explores this community’s trajectory towards the formation of the Japanese-Brazilian identity and the issues of mental health that arise in this immigrant community. Through the analysis of Japanese-Brazilian novels, TV shows, film and public health studies, I seek to disentangle the themes of gender and modernisation, and how these themes concurrently grapple with Japanese-Brazilian mental health issues. These fictional narratives provide a lens into the experience of the Japanese-Brazilian community that is unavailable in traditional medical studies about their mental health.

  • film
  • literature and medicine
  • mental health care
  • gender studies
  • medical humanities

Data availability statement

Data are available in a public, open access repository.

https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-011950

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Data availability statement

    Data are available in a public, open access repository.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors YB developed the research idea and wrote the research manuscript.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.