A Mean-Spirited Sport: Japanese Brazilian Croquet in São Paulo’s Public Spaces

A Mean-Spirited Sport: Japanese Brazilian Croquet in São Paulo’s Public Spaces Joshua Hotaka Roth Mount Holyoke College

Abstract In the city of São Paulo, Brazil, one middle class ethnic minority, Japanese Brazilians, is surprisingly visible in the city’s unsecured public spaces. Their presence in these spaces is particularly surprising in light of the extensive scholarly discussion of the death of public space in urban centers throughout the world, and São Paulo specifically. Scholars have highlighted the retreat of middle and upper classes into gated communities and fortified condominiums that keep them insulated from the poor living in urban slums and squatter settlements. This article focuses on one particular activity the game of gateball and the cultural dynamics that make playing this game in public especially meaningful to elderly Japanese Brazilians. This case suggests some of the motivations for middle class residents to remain in public spaces despite prevalent discourses on crime and security. More broadly, it suggests that anthropologists account for spaces that are open or closed to varying degrees, and for the possibility that people often move between various types of spaces on a daily basis despite new forms of residential segregation. [Keywords: public space, urban space, gated communities, ethnicity, Japanese Brazilian, sport, croquet, gateball, elderly]

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apanese Brazilians have remained staunchly visible in many of São Paulo’s unconfined public spaces, even while much of the city has been transformed into a “city of walls” (Caldeira 2000). Since the 1970s, middle- and upper-class fears of kidnappings, assaults, and burglaries, and lack of confidence in the official police forces, have led to the proliferation of high security condominiums within older São Paulo neighborhoods, gated communities on its periphery, and the privatization of security throughout the city (ibid: 256-296). Many middle-class Japanese Brazilians have moved into the new fortified residences and, to that extent, have capitulated to this process that threatens the cosmopolitan character of São Paulo. Yet they have not abandoned public spaces altogether. What motivates middle-class Japanese Brazilians to remain in public spaces despite a pervasive discourse on crime and security? Scholars working in various disciplines have documented the increasing socio-economic inequality and segregation that has accompanied processes of globalization (Davis 1990; Harvey 1989; Sassen 1991). Some have detailed the new spatial arrangements and architectural forms symbolically and materially separating members of different socio-economic classes even as these classes have become ever more dependent upon each other (Caldeira 1996, 2000; Low 2001, 2003; Falzon 2004; Guano 2004; Kuppinger 2004; Czeglédy 2004). Saskia Sassen documents the simultaneous growth of the financial industry and demand for low wage services in the “global cities” of New York, London, and Tokyo (1991). Inequality is even more pronounced in developing countries, where expansive slums have developed around many urban centers (Davis 2006). In both contexts, whether in a first world center such as New York (Low 2003: 111-152), or third world cities such as São Paulo (Caldeira 2000: 19-101), Buenos Aires (Guano 2004), Bombay (Falzon 2004), Johannesburg (Czeglédy 2004), or Cairo (Kuppinger 2004), middle and upper class elites have developed a discourse around crime justifying security measures and architectural designs meant to control or keep away members of the lower-classes. There is little doubt of the significance of these transformations. However, the anthropological literature is curiously quiet about the daily lives of members of the middle- and upper-classes. Much of the research is interview based, or based on the advertising that real estate developers have used to appeal to potential buyers. While very revealing of broad trends, the overall impact of much of this research gives the false impression that all of those who have moved into fortified enclaves either never leave them, or pass as quickly as possible from one fortified space to another, abandoning the public spaces of cities to the lower-classes. Certainly, the reality of violent crime

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in São Paulo cannot be denied, as was demonstrated dramatically one week in May 2006 when drug gangs rioted in prisons and set fire to scores of city buses, leading to the deaths of more than 150 people including 41 police officers and prison guards (Clendenning 2006). At the same time, however, such accounts fail to provide a balanced sense of São Paulo’s urban spaces, some of which continue to be very vibrant. In many neighborhoods, weekly open-air vegetable and fruit markets set up on public streets attract throngs of shoppers. In business districts during the daytime stores and cafes fling open the grates and doors that close them in at night. São Paulo may be a city of walls at nighttime, but during the day many of its public spaces are open and lively, and people move back and forth between secured and unsecured spaces. To some degree, this movement between different kinds of spaces is unavoidable, since individual fortified condominiums in São Paulo are often built in old neighborhoods and are not nearly as self-contained as the more expansive gated communities, of which there are still comparatively few. But people also continue to find some pleasure in moving through unsecured spaces. It is not just out of necessity that they do so. In older neighborhoods, “the street” continues to be characterized by positive qualities of movement, excitement, and sociality (DaMatta 1991: 63-73; Holston 1989: 101-144), as well as the negative quality of danger. And many people who engage in the discourse of crime and fear continue to enjoy the benefits of public spaces—shopping at the weekly markets, walking the streets, and meeting friends in neighborhood parks. Japanese Brazilians mostly fall within the middle and upper middle socioeconomic classes. And they engage in the talk of crime widespread among other residents of São Paulo (Paulistanos). Yet Japanese Brazilians are perhaps even more visible in public spaces than other Paulistanos of the same socioeconomic background. This paper focuses on one particular activity that Japanese Brazilians pursue in public spaces—the game of gateball—and cultural dynamics that makes playing this game in public especially meaningful to elderly Japanese Brazilians. What does gateball mean to them that it should override concerns for security at a time when some middle-class Paulistanos, including younger Japanese Brazilians, have retreated into high security private spaces? I argue that elderly Japanese Brazilians do not remain in public spaces for lack of other alternatives. Some recognize the possibility of conflict in unsecured public spaces, yet they do not shrink from it. A brief look at narratives of Japanese immigration and settlement provides a clue as to why elderly Japanese Brazilians find public spaces attractive. 611

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Japanese Brazilian Narratives of Immigration and Settlement Between 1908 and 1940, roughly 175,000 Japanese immigrated to Brazil, the years of greatest immigration occurring after 1924, when new restrictions in U.S. immigration law made Brazil a much more viable alternative. Another 60,000 immigrated there in the early postwar period (Lesser 1999:10). Most were second- or third-born sons and daughters who would not inherit their family land or business in Japan (Maeyama 1982). Almost all went as agricultural workers. Immigrant historian Tomoo Handa writes about the harsh conditions they faced on the coffee plantations where they started out, when they were unable to make anything close to the wages they had expected and when they were burdened with loans they had to pay back to immigration companies (Handa 1980: 75). In some cases, these companies took deposits from migrants and never returned them (Sugitani 1994: 21). Other migrants went to live in Japanese colônias—communities established on tracts of land that had been purchased with Japanese government support in the interior regions of São Paulo and Paraná states. In certain parts of the interior, high rates of malaria and yellow fever took a heavy toll on Japanese settlers. In one Japanese cemetery outside the town of Alvarez Machado, near the border between São Paulo state and Mato Grosso, lie the graves of hundreds of infants and small children. Inadequate nutrition and the lack of medical care made them particularly susceptible to tropical illnesses (Nihon imin 80 nen shi 1991: 53-54). Such conditions were most severe in the 1910s and 20s when the first Japanese immigrants established settlements in heavily forested areas in the interior regions of São Paulo and Paraná states. Japanese Brazilians also recount the discrimination they faced leading up to and during World War II, and the period of internecine struggle among factions of Japanese who refused to believe Japan had lost the war and those realists who accepted defeat and wanted to get on with their lives (Maeyama 1982). This period of internecine fighting left scars on the Japanese Brazilian community for many years afterwards, yet the postwar years for the most part were a time of success. Japanese Brazilians have had large families and, according to one survey, numbered more than 1.2 million in 1989 (Centro de Estudos Nipo-Brasileiros 1990). In the prewar era, a handful of Japanese had started to establish themselves as shopkeepers and small-business owners in urban areas, but beginning in the 1950s, many more Japanese Brazilians moved from the countryside to the cities. Second- and third-generation Japanese Brazilians have achieved high levels of education and entered a vari612

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ety of professions. Earlier immigrants’ successes in agriculture, as well as later generations’ successes in other professions, have allowed Japanese Brazilians to enjoy a good reputation within broader Brazilian society (Lesser 1999; Lesser and Mori 2001; Roth 2003). Synopses of Japanese Brazilian history generally touch on the cultural and linguistic struggles of the early period of settlement, discrimination leading up to and during World War II, the internecine fighting just after the war, postwar urbanization, and the educational and professional achievements of later generations. Older Japanese Brazilians, community leaders, and professional scholars all highlight their accounts of Japanese Brazilian history with reference to these events.1 Of course there are other less common yet valid accounts that highlight the excitement of the immigrant experience, the freedom many immigrants felt from the restraints of Japanese society, and the sense of vast possibilities that they found in Brazil (Yamashita 1992; Lone 2001). But both narratives portray Japanese Brazilians as possessors of a spirited and perhaps even combative quality that helped them achieve a high status within Brazilian society over the decades. In addition to this self-narrative of struggle, spirit, and overcoming of adversity, a set of structural factors may also help to explain why Japanese Brazilians are willing to engage in public spaces more than other middle- and upper-class Paulistanos. Japanese Brazilians have fit into the role of the middleman minority (Bonacich 1973), often running their own small groceries, laundries, and optical shops rather than working within larger firms run by ethnic others. There is the sense, even among members of younger generations who have achieved high levels of education, that within larger firms they are generally limited to the levels of middle management. Many have gone into professions such as architecture and medicine where their credentials may override any difficulties they continue to face in terms of social capital. Ethnicity continues to be very salient for Japanese Brazilians, even when they do not emphasize it themselves. As Jeffrey Lesser suggests in a forthcoming book on Japanese Brazilian radicals (2007), even those who consciously distanced themselves from the ethnic community have been unable to throw off ethnic labels and all of the cultural baggage that is associated with them in the eyes of other Brazilians. Despite their generally good reputation, Japanese Brazilians feel more comfortable in public spaces with their greater diversity than in the exclusive clubs of the Brazilian elite.

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Gateball in São Paulo Liberdade, with its concentration of Japanese restaurants and stores delimited by red torii gates and lanterns, is known as São Paulo’s Japan town, but the roughly 300,000 Japanese Brazilians who live scattered throughout the metropolitan area are most concentrated in a string of neighborhoods south of Liberdade, especially Aclimação, Vila Mariana, and Jardim Saúde. As we can see from the map below, there are gateball courts in most parts of São Paulo with significant numbers of Japanese Brazilian residents, including the less affluent eastern and northern districts, as well as the wealthier southern and western ones. The thirteen courts that appear in the map on the following page were among the most prominent, and I was able to visit all except Lapa and Vila Sônia in the summer and fall of 2002. I spent the most time at Saga, Jardim Saúde, Ibirapuera, and Bom Retiro, because I could get to them relatively easily by metro or a short bus ride. The courts at Lapa, Cooper Cotia, and Nippon Country were privately owned and their members were on average wealthier than those who played on public courts. Because the latter two were located toward the edges of the city (and thus do not appear on the map above) andsomewhat far from areas of high Japanese Brazilian residence, however, they were used primarily just on weekends. The clubs located on public grounds were used on a daily basis. These clubs were also more diverse in terms of the class composition of their members, with former store-owners, medical doctors, fish market sellers, university professors, and flower vendors all playing gateball together. The members at the Saga club were probably the most diverse for several reasons. With its 19 courts, it was the largest club, and served as the headquarters of the Paulista Gateball Federation, which incorporated most of the clubs throughout the state of São Paulo. Moreover, it was the only club located a short walk from a metro stop, and thus drew players from many parts of the city. Although this club had been affiliated with the Saga prefectural association and still retained the prefecture’s name, the gateball club has since become an independent entity and immigrants from Saga prefecture and their descendants comprised a small minority of its members. At every location, I conversed in Japanese with the majority of players, who were first-generation Japanese immigrants and still more comfortable speaking in Japanese even after living in Brazil for fifty or more years. I often switched to Portuguese, however, when interacting with second-generation Japanese Brazilians. I accepted various members’ encouragement to take up a mallet and play with them, and they would give me tips on strategy and 614

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Map of metropolitan Sãn Paulo, indicating locations and names of major gateball courts.

technique. After several weeks, I started to conduct more formal interviews with various members. A player I interviewed once my game was fairly proficient commended me for having learned how to play. He felt that only by playing the game could someone really understand all of the strategy and drama it involves. He was dissatisfied with most of the coverage of gateball tournaments in the Japanese language newspapers which, he said, never went beyond the list of scores and photo of winners with their trophies. Gateball was first introduced into a semi-rural part of Brazil by Kuroki Masami, a first generation Japanese Brazilian from the town of Suzano, on the outskirts of São Paulo city. In 1979, Kuroki encountered gateball on a trip to Japan, and brought back some gateball equipment to Suzano, which has come 615

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to be known as the birthplace of Brazilian gateball. A stone monument marks the playing grounds there. But from the very early years, gateball spread rapidly to neighboring towns and the city, where it has come to enjoy its greatest popularity. The first official competition in Brazil was held in 1982. Since then, elderly Japanese Brazilians have taken up the mallet in very large numbers. In 2002, Toru Honda, the president of the Paulista Gateball Federation, claimed that there were more than 20,000 registered gateball players in Brazil. Among older Japanese Brazilians, karaoke was the only other activity that rivaled gateball in popularity. Both pastimes enjoyed widespread popularity and intense enthusiasm. First-generation Japanese Brazilians often used the Japanese term “muchû” (entranced) to describe the obsession people had with gateball. It is a term that is used to describe both positive obsessions, such as a single-minded dedication to work or study, as well as negative ones, which distracted one from responsibilities towards family or work. Secondgeneration Japanese Brazilians often used the Portuguese term “viciado” (addicted) to describe how people often went through phases when they would play gateball every day of the week as well as weekends, sometimes forgetting their responsibilities to their work or family. Most elderly gateball players claimed, however, that they no longer had any responsibilities other than to maintain their health. Suzuki Eiji invented gateball in 1947 in Japan, apparently inspired by foreign occupation forces playing croquet in his Hokkaido village following the end of World War Two (Nakano 1987: 37).2 Initially, Suzuki intended gateball as a game for youth, who, in the early postwar years, he felt were in need of inexpensive, healthy, organized physical activity. Gateball equipment could be made cheaply of wood, and the limited size of the courts made them viable in urban neighborhoods as well as in rural areas. In the 1950s, Suzuki promoted the game in public schools, factories (where people could play during break time), at hot spring resorts, and convalescent homes for tuberculosis patients (ibid: 154-60). The game’s popularity increased dramatically in the 1970s when senior citizens’ associations (rôjinkai) in Japan started promoting it as an activity that could keep elderly people physically and mentally fit (Iwamoto 1984: 177). As Japanese society achieved a degree of wealth in the 1970s, the steadily increasing elderly population could both promote and demand more attention for their health needs and leisure activities. Today, it is estimated that there are between 3 and 6 million regular gateball players in Japan, with active participation by both men and women.3

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Suzuki’s major innovation was to transform croquet into a team sport. Croquet can be played in teams, but it is more often played individually, with each player assigned his or her own distinctly colored ball. In gateball, there are two teams, red and white, with five players to a team. The balls are numbered from one to ten. The odd numbers are red; the even numbers are white. Each player is assigned to a ball, and play progresses in number order. There are only three numbered wickets, or gates, to pass through, and a sin-

DIAGRAM 1: This diagram and explanation is intended to suggest some of the strategy that goes into placement of balls on the court. Each ball must pass through gate 1 from the start line in order to enter play. When a ball passes through a gate, the player may strike it again. In this diagram, player 9 has passed through gate 1 and the ball has stopped in the vicinity of ball 1. If player 9 is able to strike her ball so that it hits teammate’s ball 1, she can then send ball 1 to some other place on the court that is advantageous for the team. This could be right in front of gate 2 so player 1 could easily pass through it when her turn came; or it could be next to an adversary’s ball that comes later in the order. Thus if ball 1 is sent next to white ball 2, 4, 6, or 8, player 1 would easily be able to hit the opponent’s ball and send it out of bounds. Of course, it will be white player 10’s turn before red player 1’s. If 10 successfully entered play, she might be able to disrupt the red team’s plans. 617

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gle stake in the middle of the court. But by making it a team sport of five on five, Suzuki radically increased the complexity of strategy for placing balls on the court. The game is won by accumulating the most points by the end of 30 minutes of play. Passing a ball through a gate garners one point, and hitting the stake garners two points.4 Croquet’s transformation into gateball bears out the commonly held understanding that collectivity holds a place of great importance within Japanese society. As we will see below, however, team sports do not necessarily imply group solidarity or harmony. Some Japanese Brazilians themselves criticize gateball as being a “mean-spirited sport” (ijiwaru spôtsu) because, as with croquet, players often spend as much time and derive as much pleasure driving opponents’ balls out of play as they do passing their own through a series of wickets. For them, gateball is a sport that leads to as much conflict as it does to any sense of collectivity. The discord arises not just between opposing teams, but among team members themselves, as they negotiate their own position with those of their captains and teammates. I suggest that it is precisely the possibility of discord, rather than of any certainty of harmony, that attracts many elderly Japanese Brazilians to the game.

A Mean-spirited Sport? During my observations, I routinely saw little squabbles arise among players, although when I asked people about it directly, most would deny that anything serious ever happened. Still, people readily elaborated on the kinds of conflicts that did arise. One player at the Saga club explained: Everyone thinks differently. So one says ‘hit it here,’ one says ‘hit it there,’ one says ‘let’s attack,’ another ‘let’s defend.’ There are many styles of play. According to various players, conflict arose when members of a team ignored the directions of their captain, or when an overbearing captain refused to consider the suggestions of experienced teammates. Players sometimes criticized teammates for missing easy shots. Taji-san, the 86-year-old director of the Bom Retiro gateball club, tried to avoid such conflict by taking a forgiving attitude whenever he captained. Taji: People are trying their best to hit their marks, so they already feel bad when they miss. If someone complains about it, they really feel bad. 618

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The interesting thing about gateball, you can be assured that the person who complains about someone else’s mistake will invariably make one of their own immediately afterwards. They could be aiming for something real close, but they will miss. Roth: The person who complained will… Taji: later miss. Roth: And the person who initially committed an error? Taji: Will say “serves you right” (zama miro) (laughs).... The person who makes a mistake and is chided for it gets a bit peeved (shaku ni sawaru), and may lose interest in the game. He was trying his best after all. So captains really can’t complain about such mistakes. I definitely don’t. Others often do, however, and when they do, things don’t go well for any of them. Yamashiro-san from the predominantly Okinawan Casa Verde club similarly noted that a captain should not harp on mistakes made during the game. When he felt it necessary to discuss things with a player, he would bring it up later on at a casual meeting or outing to a bar, when everyone was more relaxed. Conflict often seemed to lie close to the surface of the game, lurking in the anxiety-ridden denials, bursting forth occasionally in disputes over rules and strategies. Some old-timers mentioned fights from long ago in which combatants used their mallets as weapons, but such accounts are probably exaggerated. I did once observe an 84-year-old fellow brandish his mallet overhead as if it were a sword, but his actions were made in jest towards a giggling group of elderly women, who responded with quick thrusts of their own mallets towards his undefended belly and groin. Clearly, there is a light-hearted side to the game. Play fighting is an example of how elderly men and women sometimes flirt with each other on the courts. Yet the potential for actual conflict did seem to underlie interactions on the gateball courts, and this real danger, and the opportunity to overcome it through transformations into play fighting, may have been one of the attractions of the game for many older Japanese Brazilians. There may be other reasons Japanese Brazilians have found this game attractive. Barbara Myerhoff, in her study of elderly Jewish residents in Venice, California, suggests that conflict itself may have a reassuring quality for those in the last years of life. For the very elderly, silence was frightening, for it seemed to suggest their slide into oblivion (Myerhoff 1977; see also Traphagan 2000). For them, to get angry and to fight was to be supremely engaged and 619

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alive. As one of her informants put it, “We fight to keep warm. That’s how we survive” (Myerhoff 1977: 188). Myerhoff writes: Anger is a powerful indication of engagement between people, the very opposite of indifference.... It is...[a means by which people]... deny that they are helpless victims of circumstances. By demonstrating opposition, per se, one is asserting that he or she has some degree of resistance, autonomy, and power over oneself and possibly others. (Myerhoff 1978: 184) At least some Japanese Brazilians fit the model that Myerhoff offers us. While I was eating lunch with Yanagi-san, an 80-year-old acquaintance whose team was on its way to winning the over-80 category at the Brazilian national gateball tournament, he told me that players generally obeyed their captains and didn’t quarrel over strategy during formal competition. However, fights (Portuguese: briga) tended to erupt in less formal settings. He put his two fists in front of his face in a boxing pose, and said with a laugh that there was something pleasurable (Portuguese: gostoso) about fighting. There was a line beyond which pleasurable conflict and engagement could become disagreeable. This was true even for Yanagi-san. Six months before I spoke to him at the national championship, he had had a fight that made him quit his club and give up gateball. I could not believe it, for he had played almost daily for many years. In the end, he and his teammates were able to reconcile and go on to win the championship. Although the altercation had been serious enough to provoke a separation of several months’ duration, perhaps it also contributed a productive tension that helped their team win. Elderly Japanese Brazilians are not attracted to gateball simply because it affords them an opportunity to enact their continued physical, mental, and social mastery at a time in life when their bodies are slowly beginning to betray them. No doubt, gateball engages them at various levels, but I suggest that for many elderly Japanese Brazilians, gateball takes on special meaning because it allows them to express a combative quality that holds an important place in their own self-narratives of migration and settlement in Brazil.5 While Japanese Brazilian men are generally more overtly aggressive, women too share in the pleasure of combat, as they are similarly invested in self-narratives of suffering and overcoming. Many other Brazilians characterize Japanese Brazilians as hardworking, honest, and trustworthy (guarantido). While Japanese Brazilians themselves fre620

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quently repeat such positive characterizations of themselves, it is striking how frequently they also stress their combativeness, their willingness to fight. “Faito!” (fight!), as the Japanese pronounce the word imported from English, is used to urge total effort and unwavering perseverance in the face of daunting obstacles. Commentators have often singled out “fighting spirit” as the most significant characteristic of the Japanese style of playing baseball. William Kelly writes that “fighting spirit” (konjo) “combines passive, stoic endurance with active, all-out drive” (Kelly 1998: 104). Kelly notes that this quality has arisen at specific moments in modern Japanese history, particularly the late 1910s and 1920s (ibid. 105), when many first-generation Japanese Brazilians migrated to Brazil. But the fighting spirit of elderly Japanese Brazilian gateball players differs in at least one significant way from that of Japanese professional baseball players. In contrast to the captain’s or manager’s unquestioned authority that was idealized in the Japan context for several decades beginning in the 1920s, Japanese Brazilians idealized the captain who could use greater finesse and tact in managing often undisciplined gateball players. In one case, the authority of the captain couples with the subordination of individual players to the team; in the other case the tact of the captain couples with the more spirited individual play. This reflects the greater emphasis Japanese have given to the element of perseverance within the notion of “fighting spirit,” whereas Japanese Brazilians have given at least as much importance to the combative and spontaneous aspects of spirit (seishin).6 Gateball provides a vehicle for players to enact a kind of aggression within the controlled parameters of the official rules of play. In this sense, it seems to share some central characteristics with many other sports and games described by Norbert Elias and those sociologists and historians he has inspired. Elias has argued that the violence inherent in sports has increasingly been ameliorated as a part of the “civilizing process” that reflected a broader shift within European, especially British society, since the seventeenth century, where parliamentary debate gradually displaced overt and violent conflicts among regional leaders (Elias 1982; Elias and Dunning 1986; Dunning and Rojek 1992). More than sports that incorporate actual physical contact and overt aggression, such as boxing or football, gateball allows for combat within a more decorous framework. From the perspective of onlookers, the sport appears very civil. At most, those whose balls are sent out of bounds may appear slightly annoyed. But just below the placid surface of the game, very real tensions often churn among team members as well as between teams. 621

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From a social psychological perspective, sports and other leisure activities provide people within modern industrial society, with its disciplined workplaces and pervasive restrictions on public action, a necessary catharsis and excitement that make the daily grind bearable (Maguire 1992: 104; Lyng 1990). Marxist scholars interpret sports and leisure more generally as means of social control, defusing critical consciousness and replenishing workers’ energies in the service of capitalist accumulation (see review in Rojek 1992: 5).7 Both perspectives emphasize that sports activities are formally bounded in time and space, and serve as a kind of release valve from the normal and more serious activities of day to day life. They only differ in that the release valve serves a positive function in one account and a negative one in the other. But in the case of gateball in São Paulo, the exciting contentiousness of gateball does not have the effect of subduing Japanese Brazilians in other contexts. Rather, it provides an occasion to contest public spaces with other groups, and models a kind of restrained combative engagement in contexts outside the courts themselves. Japanese Brazilian contestations of public space have been made with a certain amount of decorum, through claims of a broader civic-mindedness and benefits for surrounding communities. Similar to Geertz’s definition of religion as both a model of reality and a model for ethical behavior, gateball may be interpreted in some ways as a representation of Japanese Brazilians’ historical experience as well as a model for current interactions in São Paulo’s urban spaces (Geertz 1973: 87-125). In some other social contexts, the rule-governed framework of games or ritual may allow antagonistic ethnic groups to interact in a more controlled and safer way than in less regulated spheres of social life. André Levy writes that the dwindling population of Moroccan Jews practices a general avoidance of Muslim compatriots in many spheres of social life, but that they do interact in the framework of card games on the beach in Casablanca (Levy 1999). The case of Japanese Brazilian gateball in São Paulo is the reverse in several ways. Gateball play generally does not involve interaction with ethnic Others. Moreover, Japanese Brazilians are well integrated into the economic life of the city, and there is considerable interaction between them and other Brazilians in various spheres of daily life, despite an ongoing sense of difference. Although there is merit in viewing the temporal and spatial coordinates of games and ritual as distinct from other spheres of social life (Handelman 1977), all social encounters are governed by an array of moral and social constraints and could be construed as having game-like qualities (Goffman 1967). This is true, even in the case of São Paulo, where high rates of violence are 622

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recorded in crime statistics. While other middle-class Paulistanos react with fear and loathing, Japanese Brazilian gateball players have remained in public spaces, claiming choice fragments for themselves, in a way that is assertive while maintaining a veneer of respectability.

A Civic-minded Sport? Unlike many gateball players who are attracted and engaged by the game’s “mean-spirited” or combative qualities, gateball organizers prefer to portray it as a civic-minded sport, for it has motivated many Japanese Brazilians to revitalize public spaces. Organizers claim that they have transformed dead spaces that had been left to drug dealers and vagrants into lively social spaces benefiting entire neighborhoods, not just gateball players themselves. Perhaps because they have cultivated positive images of themselves as hardworking and honest, Japanese Brazilians have been able to receive stewardship of some particularly desirable spaces in the city, including the gateball grounds in Ibirapuera, Bom Retiro, Jabaquara, and Jardim Saúde, among others. Since the 1990s, Brazilian government offices have increasingly embraced multiculturalism as a means of governance (Karam 2007). Japanese Brazilian gateball organizers have become adept in their negotiations for political favors, regularly inviting officials from the São Paulo Secretary of Sports, Leisure, and Recreation to banquets and opening ceremonies for the major tournaments. In addition to making the case for themselves as responsible stewards of the land, Japanese Brazilian gateball organizers have emphasized the benefits of gateball, particularly for the elderly, of whose health and welfare city officials have started to become more conscious in recent years. Japanese Brazilians are not the only residents to have the city grant them stewardship over public land. Many sports clubs, mostly soccer oriented, have received land as part of the city government’s program to increase the amount of unpaved surfaces within the city in order to alleviate the perennial flooding from run-off during the rainy season. But Japanese Brazilians self-promotion has allowed them to obtain some particularly desirable locations for a game that is played almost exclusively by a single ethnic minority. While gateball clubs and other sports clubs are privately run, one condition of their operation on public lands is that they are not racially exclusive. Gateball clubs are formally open to enrollment by people of all backgrounds, but in fact only a handful of non-Japanese ethnics have joined, partly because 623

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they are not familiar with the sport, nor with the Japanese language, which still dominates the space of gateball. The rules of the game are in Japanese, and during tournaments, umpires must make all of their calls in Japanese. There are a number of non-ethnic gateball players who are both familiar with the game and with the Japanese language—mostly Korean and Taiwanese— those who had grown up within Japan’s colonial empire. Most of these players are concentrated in the club in Bom Retiro, where they form the majority of members. From the perspective of city officials, however, the only recognizably non-Japanese players are the five or six Italian or Lebanese descendants scattered among various clubs. While demonstrating considerable political savvy, Japanese Brazilians appear to take genuine pleasure in managing the spaces that are entrusted to them. They have planted trees on the grounds surrounding gateball courts, providing welcome shade not only for gateball players, but also for others who use the adjacent park space. At the beautiful Butãtã gateball club, kids who played soccer in the treeless fields nearby would sometimes take breaks in the shade along the borders of the gateball courts. In creating and maintaining green spaces in the urban environment, Japanese Brazilians have assured themselves the esteem of city government officials. Japanese Brazilians have beautified these public spaces in ways that have highlighted their Japanese heritage. At the Ibirapuera club, members planted a little Japanese style garden next to their courts, and ringed the margins of the courts with a profusion of roses and sunflowers. At Bom Retiro club, the director planted vegetables, which he distributed among the members of the club. At Bom Retiro, Saga, Jardim Saúde, and almost every club I visited, members had planted an abundance of cherry trees, symbols of their Japanese heritage. The director of the gateball club in Jardim Saúde, eighty-seven-year-old Yamagata-san, made a convincing case for the civic contributions that the club had made in the years since it had been established. He explained that the park in which the courts were located was in pretty sad shape when the neighborhood Japanese Brazilian cultural association (Saúde bunka taiiku kyôkai) received permission from the city government to build two courts there in the late 1980s. They claimed that the space had been largely unused, except for a few kids from a nearby favela (slum) who kicked around a soccer ball. Members of the gateball club had a short stone divider a few inches high built between the newly marked gateball courts to keep the balls from rolling from one court to the next. It had the additional function of making it difficult to play soccer in that space. Initially, there was some bad feeling 624

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with the soccer kids, who smashed the stone divider and sprayed graffiti on the little concrete hut that had been built to store gateball equipment. The city then agreed to build a more resistant six-inch concrete divider between the gateball courts. In recent years, partly as a result of the daily presence of the gateball players, as well as a large mixed ethnic group practicing radio calisthenics (rajio taiso),8 the park has become a vibrant space, that has attracted hundred of joggers, walkers, and other local residents who enjoy sitting and watching all the activity around them. Gateball organizers suggest that if a small number of kids had been displaced to construct their courts, hundreds of elderly now frequented the park every morning, and the neighborhood as a whole has benefited. Similarly, members of the Paulista Gateball Federation at the Saga courts took the initiative to turn what they claimed had been a partially abandoned weed choked gully into a desirable playing space. While the city allowed the club to use this space rent free, it did not provide them with any financial help for the construction necessary to make the space usable. According to Toru Honda, the president of the Paulista Gateball Federation, the Federation had to raise U.S. $200,000 from amongst its several thousand members as well as from Japanese and Japanese Brazilian businesses in São Paulo over a ten year period to pay for the construction. Three thousand truckloads of earth were required to fill the gully and create a level playing field. The Federation also built concrete grandstands along two sides. Mr. Honda beamed as he told me that they have been able to create a gateball center on an even grander scale than exists in Japan itself. It is one that all members of the club are proud of. Mr. Honda also pointed to the overall improvement of the neighborhood. Before their investments in the location, the street on which the courts were located apparently had been dangerous to walk along. He maintained that since the new courts were completed in 1996, people have found the neighborhood more attractive, and that property values have risen. Underlying tensions over the use of public space continue, however. While amicable relations predominate among gateball players and on-lookers at several courts such as Jardim Saúde and Butãtã, neither of which are fenced in, there were many other courts at other locations where gateball players have constructed barriers between themselves and other residents. In these cases, non-members could do little more than look in from the margins, sometimes taunting the elderly Japanese, who studiously ignored them. Kids walking on the other side of the fences surrounding the Saga courts occasionally goaded the elderly Japanese Brazilians playing there by shouting “ariga625

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to!” at them.9 These kids had appropriated this Japanese term for the purpose of irreverently pestering the old “japonês” playing gateball, an act of appropriation that may reflect some degree of resentment at what they perceived as Japanese appropriation of Brazilian space. Ironically, the Japanese term that these kids had appropriated meant “thank you” in Japanese. Most of the gateball players paid no attention to the kids who shouted at them and were comfortable in their belief that they had earned the right to use these public spaces, and that their pursuits were in fact beneficial for society as a whole. If our earlier discussion about elderly Japanese Brazilians’ special appreciation for the contentious quality of gateball is sound, it may be supposed that older gateball players actually relish the contestation that arises with other locals over the use of public spaces. This contestation occurs at two stages: first, in the process of establishing gateball grounds, and second, after those spaces have been refurbished and are being actively used for gateball. When city officials gave Japanese Brazilians authorization to build courts on public land, other users of these spaces were displaced. According to gateball players, they have done their neighborhoods a service by ridding them of marginal and unattractive figures such as drug dealers and kids from nearby favelas. The second stage of contestation occurs after these grounds have been established, and other middle-class neighbors begin to make claims on the public spaces that Japanese Brazilians have improved. At this stage, Japanese Brazilians make the argument that they have earned the right to use these spaces through all the work they put into developing them, and that other neighborhood residents have benefited tangibly through higher real estate values and greater safety. Japanese Brazilians point out that other residents, who may wish to use these spaces for other activities, have not earned the right to do so. The kinds of conflicts over public space described here are commonplace. Many scholars writing on fortified enclaves and gated communities have emphasized the increased segregation they bring about. Scholars writing about gentrification have emphasized those it dispossesses (Gibson 2004; Freeman 2006; Dávila 2004; Mitchell 1995). We should not overlook, however, the members of the middle-classes who choose to remain in public spaces and the kinds of cultural dynamics and social factors that may motivate them to do so even as many others are fleeing from them. In the case of elderly Japanese Brazilians, I suggest that the tension built into the game of gateball serves as a model of a cantankerous aspect of their own self-image, and at the same time serves as a model for restrained yet contentious interactions with diverse others in public spaces. 626

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Conclusion Some theorists of public space have idealized it as essential to democratic societies, in that it can provide a forum for people of diverse backgrounds to interact in spontaneous ways (Walzer 1986; Berman 1986; Young 1990). Walzer (1986) has suggested that the lack of civility in public spaces drives middle-class residents into privatized spaces, leading to the further abandonment and deterioration of public spaces. In order to prevent a small minority of “deviants” from scaring everyone else out of these spaces, Walzer suggests that certain restrictions could be reasonably placed on behavior in public. Drawing on the work of William Sennet (1986), Walzer emphasizes the importance of civility, or some minimum code of conduct for interactions in public (Walzer 1986: 474). Walzer also draws on the work of the late Jane Jacobs (1961), arguing that healthy public spaces are “self-policing.” Such spaces are watched over and maintained by people who live around them, or who are otherwise invested in them (Walzer 1986: 474). But if elderly Japanese Brazilians are willing to stay in these spaces and claim them for themselves, we must not assume that middle-classes always fear those they consider below them. Berman criticizes Walzer for just such an assumption. He suggests that we not understand “their terrors...as plain facts, or alternately as eternal laws of social physics....” Rather, we should recognize them as “historically relative and socially conditioned ideologies” (481). For Berman, people have been socialized into fearing crime and social difference, and they can be socialized into accepting greater diversity. He rejects Walzer’s assumptions about normalcy and deviancy, and makes the case for “a genuinely open space, [where] all of a city’s loose ends can hang out, all of a society’s inner contradictions can express and unfold themselves” (Berman 1986: 484). If some people are frightened initially by the behavior of others, Berman feels that they can be socialized gradually into accepting greater diversity (481). Despite their differences over how free and open these public spaces should be, however, Walzer and Berman both idealize the spontaneous interaction with diverse others as vital to democratic societies. Most discussions of public space and gentrification hold forth as an ideal the completely open democratic space, and decry the threats posed to this ideal by corporate control and racial and class segregation (Zukin 1995; Sorkin 1992; Davis 1990). Such an idealization of public space, however, sets up a binary between open and closed spaces that does not do justice to the broad array of spaces with varying degrees of openness that constitute urban environments. From such a perspective, any attempt to fence off portions of pub627

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lic spaces, as some of the Japanese Brazilian gateball associations have done, undermines the “openness” that these theorists see as the raison d’être of such spaces. Gateball players, however, might argue that the fences are not really exclusionary. Their clubs are open to anyone interested in joining, even if only a handful of non-ethnics have done so. Membership fees are low (approx U.S. $5 per month) and equipment costs are also quite reasonable. Moreover, the height of fences (both literal and symbolic) matter; those surrounding gateball courts are of limited height, and they are permeable, rather than impenetrable or militarized. Gateball courts remain public spaces to some degree. Anthropologists need to recognize the range of openness possible in these spaces, and the degree to which walls may be permeable, as well as the possibility that people move between various types of spaces on a daily basis. Certain elites, such as one Japanese Brazilian owner of a shopping complex in Liberdade, may move with bodyguards and bullet proofed cars from one fortified space to another similarly fortified one. Younger Japanese Brazilian professionals are also somewhat anxious about public spaces in the city, often reacting with concern when I described my explorations through the downtown areas around Praça da Sé, São Bento, or Brás. Some have suggested that Japanese Brazilians are often targeted by bandits, mentioning how those returning after several years working abroad in Japan have been robbed on the highway home from São Paulo’s airport. At the same time, however, many middle-class Japanese Brazilians go about their daily lives shopping, playing, or relaxing in unsecured public spaces, with far less anxiety than the dramatic crime reports might suggest. Certainly they recognize the possibility of assaults and take precautions to avoid them. But they have not retreated from public spaces. Perhaps this is especially the case for elderly Japanese Brazilians. Their willingness to confront situations of potential conflict stems in part from their self-narrative of survival and struggle in a harsh Brazilian environment, in which their combative as well as hardworking qualities have served them well. The process of confrontation and negotiation that Japanese Brazilians have engaged in to establish their gateball courts may provide them with its own intrinsic satisfaction—the satisfaction of active engagement and sometimes conflict, which allows them to demonstrate their power and their ability to resolve differences, not by giving up on their distinctiveness, but by insisting on it and demonstrating how it contributes to the broader social good. Exploring these cultural meanings helps us understand the initial paradox of continued middle- and upper-class Japanese Brazilian presence in São Paulo’s unconfined public spaces. 628

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research was funded by a grant from the Social Science Research Council and a faculty fellowship from Mount Holyoke College. Versions of this paper were presented at Brandeis University, the Latin American Studies Conference, the Association for Asian Studies Conference, and the Southern Japan Seminar. Thanks go to William W. Kelly, Debbora Battaglia, Jeffrey Lesser, Beth Notar, Michelle Bigenho, Julie Hemment, and Barbara Yngvesson for comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for Anthropological Quarterly.

ENDNOTES 1

See Roth (2002: 31-34) for an account of similar narratives of “suffering and overcoming” by Japanese Brazilian community leaders at a conference for overseas Japanese hosted by the Japanese government. 2

See also http://www.gateball.or.jp/JGU/whats/whats4.html.

3

Guttmann and Thompson (2001: 231) provide the low end figure and Traphagan (2000: 114) the higher end. 4

See Traphagan (2000, chapter six) and Kalab (1992) for descriptions of gateball rules and discussions of the game’s significance to elderly in Japan. See also Hawkins (2002) for an overview of gateball from a croquet player’s perspective. 5

Taku Suzuki, a researcher of Japanese immigrants in Bolivia, provides an interesting comparative case. He recorded an explicit statement connecting the contentious quality of Japanese Bolivians’ annual track and field competition with a history of immigrant struggles. Responding to those who criticized the degree to which the event led to quarrels and bad feeling, one of the organizers said that it was precisely the event’s contentious quality that encapsulated the fighting spirit of Japanese immigrants, a spirit that was so crucial for them to succeed in a harsh environment and carve a position of respect for themselves within Bolivian society (Suzuki 2003: 244-246). 6

See Moeran (1984) for a discussion of the internal cultural debate in Japan over the significance of “spirit.” 7 In H.G. Wells’ novella, The Croquet Player, the main protagonist describes himself as enclosed in “a pleasant round of harmless and fruitless activities” (1937: 12). At the end of the story, we see him take refuge in the game to avoid grappling with the pressing social and political issues of the day. 8

Just around the time that gateball courts were established at Jardin Saúde, another group of elderly Japanese Brazilians started to occupy a section of the park for early morning “radio calisthenics” (rajio taisô). Radio calisthenics are a Japanese institution. Begun in Japan in 1928, it was apparently inspired by Danish gymnastics. It has been broadcast for decades on Japan’s national radio and television stations (NHK) and has millions of Japanese up and stretching at 6:30 every morning. In Brazil, thousands of elderly Japanese Brazilians head out to local parks every morning to listen to the calisthenics tapes played on boom boxes. Some of these calisthenics routines are originals from many decades ago in Japan. Others are more recently imported. While the calisthenics group at Jardim Saúde started off with just a handful of Japanese Brazilians, it has gradually attracted a surprisingly large number of other Brazilians, so many, in fact, that Japanese Brazilians now comprise a minority of the roughly 150 retirees and housewives who come to stretch every morning to these Japanese calisthenics tapes. Although the language used on these tapes is Japanese, anyone can participate by following the motions of several instructors leading the exercises. The successful ethnic integration here may have to do with the leader of the group, Mr.

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Inoue. A third-generation Japanese Brazilian affiliated with an evangelical church, he addresses the gathering in Portuguese and often includes a spiritual message. 9

Along with “sayonara” (farewell), “arigato” (thank you) is one of the few Japanese words that most Brazilians are familiar with, but few were sure what each of these words meant. Both these words appear in the refrain of “Ariga Tchan” (1998) a song by the popular group É o Tchan (see Roth n.d.).

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