CJS Noon Lecture Series | Jesus Loves Japan: Pentecostal Christianity among Nikkei “Return Migrants” from Brazil

Today, there are roughly 186,000 Brazilian nationals living in Japan, the majority of whom are of Japanese descent. While they benefit from the visa policy that confers the right to settlement virtually as a right of blood, they often feel discriminated in their supposed ancestral homeland. In this social context, many have been converting to Pentecostalism, which has exploded in Latin America since the 1970s. Based on a yearlong fieldwork conducted in Toyota, Japan, this lecture tells a story about the Nikkei Brazilians who envision Pentecostalism as the “third culture” that can help them transcend ethno-national boundaries.

Suma Ikeuchi studies the intersection of religion, diaspora, and citizenship with a focus on Global Japan. After obtaining her PhD in Anthropology from Emory University in 2016, she taught Religious Studies at the University of Alabama before joining the Department of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018.

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