Trivia Question

I need to clear something up.

What city has the largest Japanese population living outside Japan?

Go ahead, look it up. Use Google.

What'd you come up with? Sao Paolo, Brazil?

Wrong. This is an internet myth that, like a lot of myths, has a grain of truth to it. But that grain of truth has been twisted and misunderstood.

According to Japan's foreign ministry (quoted in this NY Times article), New York City has the largest population of Japanese outside of Japan at 59,295 people. That's only the official statistic - the article is actually about all those who are not counted in that stat. Nearly 500,000 Japanese come to New York City every year, and many of them don't leave when they're supposed to. (Yes, that makes them illegal immigrants.)

Even the official stat is larger than Sao Paolo's, though. In fact, in all of Brazil, there are only about 83,000 Japanese-born residents, which is dwarfed by the number in the United States (officially over 400,000).

Where the myth probably comes from is the number of Japanese descendants in Brazil. Japanese emigration to Brazil has been pretty long-standing, and it's a community that never fully assimilated into the rest of the country - they've married and had children mostly with their ethnic brethren. So there are literally millions of ethnic Japanese Brazilians. But they are Brazilians, not Japanese - the same way a US-born person of Japanese descent is an American. You wouldn't call such a person "a Japanese person living outside of Japan". That'd almost be a little racist.

Anyway, just wanted to clear that up. It came up in a discussion I was having today, and I was pretty annoyed when I looked it up and saw how often this myth is repeated in the top Google search results (including Wikipedia).