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[Yamashita continues]... ethnic prejudice, and immigration laws expressly denying Asian immigration and any possibility for citizenship or land ownership, Brazil was vast and needed to be settled and farmed. I can't go into a long history here about race in Brazil, but Japanese take their place in the color scheme of dark to light, displaying their own prejudices against the "gaijin" while in a funny way literally capitalizing on what they sell as a better version of being Brazilian. Jeffrey Lesser, friend and historian, writes about this in a pretty convincing way.

One other important thing: the population of Japanese and their descendents in Brazil (1.8 million maybe) is much larger than in the US. Numbers make a difference. Finally, while Japanese Brazilians experienced restrictions in travel and business and dispersal and imprisonment of leadership during WWII, Japanese Americans were incarcerated in camps. These differing histories mixed with the social, political and cultural backdrops of Brazil and the US make their indelible marks on both communities.

LRS: What drew you to study the rural communes?

Yamashita: Japanese rural communities in Brazil interested me because many of them were settlements pioneered by the Japanese in the 1920s—that is to say they cut down virgin forests, dug wells, built houses, and planted new fields. The communities that I studied in particular were started by Christian socialists who had ideas of communal and cooperative support systems, following the philosophy of Leon Tolstoy and a Japanese philosopher named Mushanokoji. I was told by the founding issei that they had hoped to create a "new civilization." Pretty heady stuff for a student wandering around searching for something.

LRS: What has being in Brazil, Japan, and the U.S. made you understand about the construction of cultural and racial identities? Has your understanding of these things evolved over the years?

Yamashita: This is a complicated question. I would say briefly that I've become personally more relaxed, accommodating of myself and others. If the US and Japan (more so) are incredibly uptight spaces for racial difference, Brazil is much more easy-going, with a good dose of humor always. At the same time, I am ever aware of the political presence of cultural and racial identities, and I'm readied for that fight if necessary. I don't think of these problems or questions as hard and fast; more like a dance—muscular, powerful, playful, fleeting.

Those who are Japanese (myself oftentimes included), in whatever way they define that, must think there is something "Japanese" about themselves. The Japanese nation says it's in your blood ancestry. Maybe it's a DNA thing, or maybe it's the food—shoyu, miso and sashimi. It's probably true, as your question suggests, that my understanding about all this has evolved. For Japanese Americans, we return to these spaces for community and political centers. I think that as long as differences provoke injustice, whether we believe in Japanese-ness or any other -ness or not, we will be forced again and again to knock at the door of identity to find common ground and allies in that continual struggle for social justice, equality, and human dignity.

LRS: In one of the funniest scenes in Tropic of Orange, the bold and blunt Emi, a Japanese American woman who works as a TV anchor, offers a "sacrilegious" denunciation of multiculturalism. My favorite part of that scene is when she calls out the white woman who's wearing chopsticks in her hair, but my favorite line is when she's asked, "Do you know what cultural diversity really is?" and she responds, "It's a white guy wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and dreds." After the book came out were you challenged about the sentiments Emi expresses?

Yamashita: I guess I haven't heard any challenges about Emi's badmouthing of multiculturalism, but maybe someone has critiqued it. I don't know. I was all for multiculturalism until it became appropriated by Coca Cola and United Colors of Benetton.

LRS: Where did the image of "the white guy wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and dreds" come from?

Yamashita: I think I stole that image from somewhere, possibly an article about the music scene in Seattle, my apologies to the author. Well, technically, Emi steals it. As you know, her purpose in the book is to get away with everything.

LRS: You were initially in Brazil to record women's oral histories as a scholar. Why the turn to fiction? What did you feel could be expressed through fiction that could not be in scholarly work?

Yamashita: I could hardly be called a scholar. I had studied with Paul Riesman, an anthropologist at Carleton, and he was very influential in my thinking, but I did not know the first thing about researching anthropology. When I arrived in São Paulo, I consulted with Takashi Maeyama, a professor in sociology who was at the Estudos de Nipo-Brasileiros. It was he who got me started on oral histories of early Japanese women immigrants. I did this for about 2 months, and then traveled into the rural interior of Brazil, visiting the communes about which I eventually based my writing.

I turned to fiction in the form of a novel of historical fiction because I could not see my way to focusing the material into something narrow or specific that an academic work might require. (In any case, I was not attached to any graduate program or course of study.) Also, I did not believe that I could engage in scholarly work about Japanese immigration without reading in the Japanese language archival material (diaries, newspapers, documents) and without being more precisely fluent in the language. I felt that I could capture the truth of this history more honestly and cohesively in a novel.

LRS: Your work, especially Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and Tropic of Orange, contains pretty blistering critiques of capitalism and uneven development. In your opinion, what is the relationship between creativity and politics?

Yamashita: I can't help it. I think I'm supposed to be writing for a reason. I'm sure I've been criticized for my political bent. Because of it, one agent refused to represent me. I can't think of any work that

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