As part of the Japanese Empire's expansionist designs, Japanese immigrants in Latin America were expected to be successful and to exhibit an exemplary behavior in the host countries in order to improve the international prestige of Japan as a modern philanthropic nation that was willing to support the local rural economies with its diligent labor and technological expertise. This official mandate has affected both the way in which Nikkei are perceived in Latin America and the way critics interpret their cultural production.

This chapter explores the negotiations of national identity in literature by Japanese immigrants in Mexico. More specifically it measures the limits of Nihonjinron, a term that refers to theories or discussions about the Japanese, a sort of strategic essentialism through which the Japanese have taken advantage of positive stereotypes about them propagated by Westerners. In the following pages, I will contrast the strategic essentialism in Mitsuko Kasuga's (Pen name: Akane) performative tanka with the challenges to Nihonjinron and official foreign policy mandates of exemplary behavior in Carlos (Yoshigei) Nakatani's memoir. Akane's tanka are the site where she performs her diasporic idea of Japaneseness, which, in my view, incorporates elements from Nihonjinron. Her lyrical representation of her take on Japanese and Nikkei cultures incorporates several stereotypes of Japaneseness that were first elaborated by nineteenth-century Western travelers who visited Japan and were later adopted by the Japanese themselves in Nihonjinron discourse, as if they were part of their national psychology: the stoic, self-controlled behavior of the samurai associated with the concept of enryo (withholding of self-expression or actions toward people, thus avoiding conflict and keeping social harmony); a perceived mystical communion with nature; the ganbare spirit of a resilient and hardworking Japanese; the group-oriented outlook aimed at preserving social harmony; the proneness to mono no aware (a sensitivity of ephemera), a sense of sadness or nostalgia evinced by object contemplation, and so on.

In stark contrast with this self-essentializing and self-exoticizing views, Carlos (Yoshigei) Nakatani's as yet unpublished memoir, “Novela escrita por Carlos Nakatani. Historia de su propia vida,” takes us to quite a different outlook on life and on the Japanese and Nikkei realities, as it reflects no intention whatsoever to improve Japan's international image, all the while challenging the positive yet self-essentializing stereotypes typical of Nihonjinron.