ABSTRACT
The Nikkei community in Brazil was the door through which Japanese religions entered into that country. In the beginning of the Japanese migration settlements in Brazil, Japanese religious groups attended exclusively to the needs of the Japanese community; they were considered ethnic religious groups and offered a framework in which ethnic identity was effectively expressed. The ethnic Japanese discovered another Japan within the Brazilian domain, through the practice of the Japanese New Religions. After the Second World War, these groups represented a substitute for the emperor cult, though the groups’ strategies to proselytize among the migrants still tended towards a strong nationalism. The groups emphasized the necessity to maintain and preserve the Japanese ethnicity through cultural values,
2 Daniel Linger, No One Home: Brazilian Selves Remade in Japan (Stanford, CA, 2001); Joshua Hotaka Roth, Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan (Ithaca, NY, 2002); Jefrey Lesser, Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism (Durham, NC, 2003); Takeyuki Tsuda (ed.), Local Citizenship in
traditional religious ritual and language.4 Therefore, the Japanese New Religions also offered positive elements to the immigrants to reinterpret their stories and sufferings in Brazil and to proselytize among their compatriots.5
