From the 1990s onwards, Japanese immigration policies encouraged the immigration of Nikkei Japanese Latin Americans (descendants of migrants from Japan); today the Nikkei population in Japan is approximately of 250,000. While many Nikkei Japanese spoke little or no Japanese on arrival in Japan, their children (many now adults) are mostly born and educated in Japan. Within families, therefore, complex modes of communication combine Portuguese, Spanish, and Japanese among the different generations in family, social, and educational contexts.

We present data from a two year, ethnographic, study of the language practices and identities of 11 Nikkei Japanese participants, with migration histories from Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, and Bolivia, living in the Tokyo and Aichi regions. Data include plurilingual interviews (combining Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, and English), samples of reflective narrative writing, and samples of participants’ plurilingual digital communication. We look for answers to two questions: How and why do participants combine Portuguese, Spanish, and Japanese in their daily lives? And, how do participants’ plurilingual practices and perceptions/performances of identities relate to powerful sociocultural discourses about language use, ethnicity, and place?

Through a plurilingual lens, we illustrate language practices that are uneven in terms of competence, fluid along life paths, and socially situated (Coste, Moore, & Zarate, 2009; Council of Europe, 2001), ranging from mixing languages hybridly to dual monolingualism. Participants described discursively constructed plurilingual practices that were sometimes constrained by powerful social discourses about who they should be and how they should communicate (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006; Weedon, 2009), while at other times finding spaces to exercise their agency more freely within social structures (Archer, 2003; Giddens, 1984) by combining languages hybridly, innovatively, and purposefully to achieve different social goals. We conclude by referring to, and problematizing, the concept of the ethnolinguistic Other as an analytic thread running through our work.