The story that was once told about citizens of foreign countries who could demonstrate Japanese ancestry was that even if they had never been to Japan, even if they couldn't speak the language, they nevertheless remained, in some essential way, Japanese. Thus the Japanese government believed that if such people were to emigrate to Japan, they could and would fit smoothly into Japanese life. They were, after all, simply coming home.
Acting on this belief, Japan decided, in the 1980s, to give these Japanese-Peruvians, Japanese-Argentineans, Japanese-Brazilians and other members of the diaspora preferential visa status. That the foreign workers necessary to keep Japan Incorporated running needn't be entirely foreign seemed a solution to the problem of internationalizing Japan's workforce, while at the same time maintaining the social harmony thought to be possible only in a homogeneous culture.
This version, as Joshua Hotaka Roth demonstrates in "Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan," was accepted and propagated not only by the Japanese government, but also, at least in the early days, by many of the nikkeijin themselves. Economic factors were, of course, largely responsible for the huge jump during the '80s and '90s in the number of nikkeijin who chose to move to Japan, but, even so, many of these immigrants chose not to explain their residence in Japan in economic terms. They preferred to think of it "as a return to homeland that offered a possibility of self-understanding." "Brokered Homeland" focuses on the way in which these people's self-understanding -- as well as other people's understanding of them -- shifts as a result of their experiences in Japan.