Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2021. xx, 256 pp. (Figures, coloured photos.) US$109.00, cloth. ISBN 9783030644871.
I will refer to Hispanics who have lived in Japan from the 1990s to the 2010s as being part of the overseas “Hispanic diaspora,” during which time there has been a great deal of positive Hispanic cultural development. At the same time, Hispanic immigrants in Japan have had some negative experiences with transculturation. However, the discrimination Hispanics have experienced pales in comparison to the experiences of oppression toward the Asian diaspora in the West. In A Cultural History of Spanish Speakers in Japan, Araceli Tinajero highlights some of the most emblematic cultural processes inherited by Japan in the past three decades.
Tinajero has been active in the development of Hispanic cultural heritage and identity in Japan. For her study, she interviewed Spanish-speaking intellectuals, musicians, and writers about their diverse artistic and cultural activities in Japan between the 1990s and 2010s. For Tinajero, the last three decades are key to analyzing Hispanic culture in Japan through its mother tongue of Spanish. However, as she mentions, she leaves aside the intersections between Japanese locals and the Hispanic community residing in Japan. These intersections are part of a new era in which global technology crosses international borders, configuring an interactive Hispanic community with the digital world through a process of Japanization. Tinajero gives the reader not only a glimpse of the seemingly distant “other” Hispanic world of Latin America and Spain from the 1990s to 2010s, but also shows how deeply alike these Spanish speakers were in their alignment with the archipelago’s cultural processes before the Internet, blogs, and social networks.
A Cultural History of Spanish Speakers in Japan is organized into six chapters that summarize the various cultural processes of the Spanish-speaking population in Japan. The author provides a short introductory chapter briefly explaining the cultural ties between Japan and the Spanish-speaking world and provides an explanation of why she chose not to explore those cultural ties in the book. She provides testimony to the challenges of her research project as an ambitious personal endeavour. In the second chapter, “Intellectuals,” Tinajero approaches the most noteworthy Spanish-speaking intellectuals in Japan. She interviewed these Hispanic intellectuals to learn about their assimilation into the cultural and academic worlds of Japan, Latin America, and Spain.
The Spanish language becomes an essential part of the cultural interactions between Spanish-speaking immigrants and locals in Japan. Spanish becomes ingrained in multiple aspects of cultural production—appearing in films, television, music, and literature. Various institutions and intellectuals, including Montse Watkins and Elena Gallego Andrada, have translated Japanese literature into Spanish and made the Spanish language more prevalent in Japan. The same has happened in the other direction. For instance, the works of prominent Latin American writers such as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Juan Rulfo, have gained a wider readership after being translated into Japanese. This increased exposure to literature in Spanish has created a cultural connection between Japanese readers and culture in Japan.
The second chapter, “Media,” is divided into three sections. The first is “Newspapers,” which focuses on the International Press, one of the first weekly newspapers to cover news and cultural events in Spanish. The second section “Magazines,” describes a large number of cultural magazines such as Revista Mercado Latino, Revista Kodai, Revista Mujer Latina, and Revista Wakaranai, among others. Finally, section three is “Radio,” which recounts the vast series of radio stations featuring Spanish-speaking announcers and Spanish-language music from the 1990s to the 2010s. Radio played an especially important role in informing Spanish speakers in Japan about any natural disasters that were occurring. In this chapter, Tinajero shows how the different communication platforms became essential to creating community bonds between the various Spanish-speaking groups. The Hispanic diaspora in Japan has also helped Hispanic immigrants living on the archipelago in the most difficult moments of environmental catastrophe that occurred in the 1990s and 2010s.
In chapter 3, “Music, Dance, Festivals, and Associations,” the reader learns about the importance of Spanish musical genres in Japan. Readers also have the opportunity to read fragments of lyrics from salsa, tango, flamenco, mariachi, and reggaeton written in both Spanish and Japanese. Each year in Japan there are a number of cultural events and festivals where Spanish speakers from different Latin American countries perform. Some of these events are organized by cultural centres and embassies. In chapter 4, “Literature and Libraries,” Tinajero shares some fictional stories of Latin American origin about the experience of living in Japan as a Spanish-speaking immigrant. The last chapter, “Blogs and Other Emerging Digital and Physical Intersections Between the Spanish-Speaking World and Japan,” introduces new horizons for the ongoing cultural processes of Spanish speakers in Japan.
A Cultural History of Spanish Speakers in Japan tells precisely the process of establishing these cultural histories. The book illustrates how Japanese and Spanish-speaking cultures merged, and how this fusion has been implemented in certain sectors of Japanese society such as academics, libraries, musicians, dances, blogs, and artists. On the surface, Latin American and Spanish cultural development may seem possible only in distant regions where Spanish is the primary language spoken. This book is key in educating Western audiences about how Japanese society cultivates Latin American and Spanish cultural development. The cultural history of Spanish speakers transcends the Spanish language. Additionally, this book will reveal how immigrants residing in Japan may feel more connected to the international Hispanic community than to their national identity in the Western world.
Edgar Javier Ulloa Luján
Georgetown University, Washington, DC