Читать книгу An Ethnography of the Lives of Japanese and Japanese Brazilian Migrants - Ethel V. Kosminsky - Страница 12
ОглавлениеJapanese Colonies in São Paulo State
First Arrivals and Plantation Labor
During the nineteenth century, coffee plantation owners in São Paulo State became very wealthy from slave labor. As owners expanded their plantations from the region of Campinas, near São Paulo City, to Araras around 1860, they needed a railroad to connect this frontier to the Port of Santos to export coffee. A British company built the first railroad connecting Jundiai to Santos. In 1868, coffee plantation owners built the Companhia Paulista de Estradas de Ferro to reach the coffee plantations that stretched toward the virgin forests of western São Paulo State. During World War I, new coffee plantations began production in Noroeste (Northwest), Alta Sorocabana, and Alta Paulista, and the Estrada de Ferro Noroeste do Brasil reached these areas too. Alta Sorocabana is situated to the West of Assis between the Paranapanema and Peixe rivers and Alta Paulista is located between the Peixe River and the Aguapeí River, to the west of Piratininga. The area west of Bauru, between the Aguapeí and Tietê rivers, had rail connections to the coast (Vieira 1973: 58, 60).
Coffee plantations in western São Paulo State differed from those in the old coffee regions of São Paulo State and Rio de Janeiro State. Railroad construction started in 1870 and was so crucial for the expansion of coffee production and regional population growth that regions of São Paulo State are named after the railroads which served them: Mogiana, Paulista, Sorocabana, Araraquarense, and Northwest. The Companhia Paulista de Estradas de Ferro reached Marilia in 1928 and Tupã in 1941, and finally extended to Panorama alongside the Paraná River. As highways stretched westward after 1920, the colonization of the São Paulo State hinterland increased even more. Those cities where railroad construction temporarily stopped, such as Marilia, experienced business growth and became regional centers (Vieira 1973: 60–62).
In 1895, Japan and Brazil signed an Amity and Trade Treaty that foretold future Japanese immigration to Brazil. The relationship between Japanese migration agencies, the coffee business, and the Brazilian state governments of São Paulo and Minas Gerais promoted Japanese emigration to fill the constant labor shortage that worsened in 1902 when the Italian government prohibited its citizens from emigrating to work on coffee plantations. The absence of the Italians had created a crisis in the coffee business. Conservative voices in Brazil objected strenuously to the emigration of Japanese and Chinese workers, which they regarded as a “yellow peril” that would dilute the racial composition of the Brazilian population. As there was no available labor supply in Europe that could be encouraged to emigrate, Brazil turned to Japan. In 1908, São Paulo became the first Brazilian state to receive Japanese immigrants, a group that worked in the expanding coffee business that was rapidly expanding westward toward the Paraná River (Endoh 2009: 27–28).
Initially, the São Paulo State government assumed the leading role in the tripartite arrangement with the coffee plantation owners and the Japanese emigration agencies. The government subsidized part of the travel fare for immigrants with the remainder paid by coffee plantation owners, who then charged their laborers by withholding part of their salary. The Japanese emigration company, Kõkoku Shokumin Kaisha, sent the first 168 Japanese families to Brazil. These families contained 781 hired immigrants and twelve without any labor agreement (Saito 1961: 29). Although part of the travel fare was subsidized, an immigrant needed to spend 150 yen per person, which prevented poor rural people from emigrating. From 1908 to 1914, the total number of immigrants reached 3,734 families or 14,886 people (Saito 1961: 31). Saito demonstrated that those immigrants probably came from urban areas and had sufficient resources. Yet, as the Japanese process of industrialization/urbanization started after the Meiji Restoration in the late 1800s, the immigrants’ parents and/or grandparents were most likely from rural areas.
The initial settlers faced harsh living conditions on the plantations, suffering from poor diet, increasing debt, and high living expenses. Among the first Japanese workers that arrived in 1908 on the Kasato-maru were 210 who went to the coffee plantation Fazenda Dumont. Of this number, many ran away when they learned that their meager wages would not enable them to save money and return home (Tschudia 1978: 144–46). They looked for better wages on another plantation or settled in areas where the forest had been recently cut down. Others fled to the outskirts of São Paulo City, migrated to Argentina, or returned to Japan (Vieira 1973: 64; Endoh 2009: 29). They quickly learned that cultivating cash crops rather than working on a plantation was the fastest route to raising capital (Reichl 1995: 40). Troubled by the Japanese laborers’ refusal to settle permanently on coffee plantations, in contrast to European colonists, the São Paulo State government decided to stop the flow of Japanese migrants and the payment of subsidies in 1914, just when the tenth group of immigrants had arrived at the Port of Santos.
Following the outbreak of World War I, European immigration to Brazil was severely interrupted due to the difficulty involved in traveling across the Atlantic Ocean. This heightened the need for Japanese workers. In 1917, three Japanese emigration companies created the Brasil Imin Kumiai or Emigration Society to Brazil, which reached a new four- to five-year agreement with the São Paulo State government to admit 4,000–5,000 colonists per year and reinstate the subsidies. As a result, 3,413 families comprising 13,597 people arrived in São Paulo State between 1917 and 1920 (Saito 1961: 31–32).
After the new agreement in 1917, the Japanese government became more directly involved in the migration business to Brazil and founded Kaigai Kogyo Kaisha, KKK, with the participation of two enterprises, Toyo-Imin and Nambei-Imin. KKK now held a monopoly on emigration services to Brazil. In 1921, the Japanese government started subsidizing KKK. Then in 1923, the government created a special service in charge of emigration propaganda and started paying the company the amount of money that it charged the emigrants. The agreement with the São Paulo State government ended in 1920 and, as the war was over, immigrants from Portugal, Spain, and Italy started arriving to work at coffee plantations.
The renewed European emigration led the Japanese government to send poor peasants and political dissidents to Brazil. Japanese colonization companies usually worked together with similar Brazilian enterprises, but the Japanese KKK insisted that Brazil subsidize immigration, which it did. São Paulo State only agreed to subsidize partial travel expenses between 1908 and 1921 (including 3,000 in 1920 and an additional 600 the following year) for those coffee plantation workers whose emigration had been arranged by Japanese immigration companies. According to this agreement, plantation owners had to reimburse 40 percent of this subsidy back to the state. They then turned around and subtracted this amount from the colonists’ salaries. Although the subsidy increased, it ended completely in 1921 (Saito 1961: 33, 68; Endoh 2009: 138–40).
The São Paulo State government refused to grant any more subsidies because Japanese colonists often worked one year or less on the coffee plantations, while European colonists remained on the plantations far longer. To keep the flow of immigrants, the Japanese government decided to subsidize labor emigrants in 1925. Sociologist Hiroshi Saito considers the period from 1908 to 1925 as the exploratory period of Japanese immigration to Brazil (Saito 1961: 32–33). Indeed, 1925 marked a watershed in Japanese immigration to Brazil because the Japanese government assumed control of the immigration process. In summary, between 1908 and 1941, Japan sent 188,985 immigrants to Brazil with most arriving between 1925 and 1934. By 1934, a self-census conducted to celebrate twenty-five years of immigration showed that 53 percent of Japanese engaged in farming were independent farmers (Reichl 1995: 37–40).
Planned Colony of Bastos: A Racially Homogenous Colony
Like the other Japanese agricultural colonies in Brazil, Bastos was racially homogenous. Among the initial families, only 20 percent came straight from Japan; the other 80 percent had arrived years earlier to work on coffee plantations and later bought plots of land in Bastos (Mita 1999: 65). However, ethnic homogeneity was not an exclusively Japanese trait. German and Italian immigrants who settled in Brazil in the late 1800s exhibited similar characteristics. As a result of Brazil’s policy not to sell land to former slaves or to poor whites, these three immigrant groups lived in relative isolation in their own rural colonies with little, if any, communication with cities.1 Differences in language, culture, and religion—with the exception of Italians and some Catholic Germans—between Brazilians and these immigrant groups were stark. Japanese immigrants, in particular, were the most isolated because they were racially different from the Brazilian population.
At first, Japanese colonists developed their self-identity in opposition to Italian, German, and Spanish colonists and to African-Brazilian former slaves with whom they worked on São Paulo’s coffee plantations. Japanese also assumed their self-identity in opposition to Brazilians and thus identified themselves as Nipponjin in resistance to all who were non-Japanese (Mitta 1999: 99).
This social and cultural isolation compelled Japanese immigrants to work collectively. By necessity, agricultural colonies cut down forests, built roads, and established schools for their children. Immigrants bought land in conjunction with countrymen with whom they had worked on coffee plantations or with whom they had traveled from Japan. Some bought land with people who had come from the same Japanese province. Unlike other immigrant groups, the Japanese received both financial help and technical and agricultural advice from the Japanese Consulate located in São Paulo. The Japanese government also helped to build and maintain Japanese-language schools for the immigrants’ children (Mita 1999: 58).
Between 1925 and 1941, the Japanese government took two approaches to the expanded migration of Japanese throughout São Paulo State. It both organized planned colonization and provided financial incentives for immigrants. In 1925, the Japanese government began planning colonies on demarcated plots of land. First, Japanese companies purchased large plots of land in western São Paulo, divided them into smaller lots and then sold these lots to Japanese who wished to emigrate. The resulting colonies received resources for public health, education, and cooperatives. Although this kind of colonization involved only 4 percent of Japanese immigrants in Brazil, it’s necessary to consider also those who were attracted by the colonial centers and the production of cotton stimulus given to small land renters (Vieira 1973: 46–47).
The history of the Bastos colony began in 1928, when Yugen Sekinin Brasil Takushoku Kumiai (Bratac), known in Portuguese as the Sociedade Colonizadora do Brasil Ltda. located in São Paulo City, financed the colony with Japanese capital. Bratac intended to establish a colony for immigrants who would come directly from Japan. This proved difficult due to Brazilian immigration policy in the 1930s and the Pacific War in 1941–1945 when Japanese emigration stopped completely. Bratac then decided to sell plots of land to the “earlier immigrants,” those who had arrived previously to work on coffee plantations (Mita 1999: 49).
The colonies founded by Kaigai Kogyo (Colônia de Registro) and those established by Bratac (Três Barras, Bastos, Aliança, Tietê eventually developed into municipalities, Três Barras into Assaí; Aliança into Mirandopólis; Tietê into Pereira Barreto; Bastos kept the same name) (Saito 1961: 213–15). The Japanese government and Japanese colonization enterprises also provided incentives for immigrants to plant cotton in Alta Paulista and Alta Sorocabana. These immigrants also rented small parcels of land (Reichl 1995: 40–41).
Bastos’ colonists were divided into those who had come straight from Japan as landowners and those immigrants and their children who had worked first as coffee plantation laborers before buying land in Bastos. The adjustment of the immigrants depended greatly on whether they were landowners with capital to invest in land, or if they had emigrated as coffee plantation laborers. These laborers arrived in family units or as members of a “composite family.” As immigrants settled in a rural area, their survival relied on their own labor or if they had capital, the possibility of hiring Brazilian workers. Labor and familial relationships were interwoven. All family members, husbands, wives, and children contributed in order to provide food and shelter. Japanese tradition played an important role in maintaining a patriarchal family structure, which empowered husbands and fathers. The immigration experience contributed to the immigrants’ culture, whose system of strong familial relationships helped their adaptation to the Brazilian patriarchal society. The persistence of patriarchal patterns of familial relationships can also be found among other immigrant groups. Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their descendants in São Paulo City (Kosminsky 2004: 291) and Syrian and Lebanese families in São Paulo (Truzzi 1992: 93) followed the same pattern. The noted Brazilian sociologist Antonio Cândido showed that immigrants from areas in southern Italy and Syria adopted semi-patriarchal traits from Brazilian society, because they already possessed similar traits (Cândido 1951: 306–7).
Reformulations of the immigrants’ familial relationships were often linked to the segment of Brazilian society with which they had contact.2 In Bastos, Japanese immigrants and their descendants only met Brazilians who themselves were poor migrants from northeast and southeast Brazil and had been hired by Bratac to clear trees. Contacts with other Japanese Brazilian associations were rare. According to 1937 Bratac data, the colony’s 1425 families included only seventy-six non-Japanese families or five percent of all the colony’s families. Marriage outside the immigrant group was still rare as research in 1953 conducted by ACENBA Nikkei Cultural and Sports Association of Bastos (Associação Cultural e Esportiva Nikkei de Bastos) revealed (Mita 1999: 103).
Until World War II, Japanese agricultural communities of related families gathered to perform religious ceremonies honoring their ancestors. These ceremonies built a strong feeling of belonging to a community. However, in Bastos and other Japanese agricultural colonies in Brazil, families were often not related and frequently had come from different Japanese regions and could not perform religious practices together. Instead, they practiced the cult of the emperor, which was performed in several ceremonies. For immigrants, the cult of the emperor maintained their link with Japan: “they were Japanese living on the other side of the ocean” (Mita 1999: 98). Certainly, this attitude was integral to the Japanese goal of imperialist expansion, which aimed to secure land, raw-material resources, and trustful and respectful citizens. The cult of the emperor was maintained even after World War II into the 1950s. Only then did Japanese immigrants and their descendants realize that they would not be able to return to Japan as they had thought. After the war, Japan was in ruins. The temporary immigration in order to accumulate savings became permanent.
Before World War II, rural communities in Japan were composed of familial groups, whose shared ancestry, religious customs, and mythological beliefs enabled them to maintain strong group allegiance. Families who did not take part in those ceremonies were not considered members of the community. As families in Bastos and in other rural colonies in Brazil were not related and had come from different Japanese regions, they had little in common (Mita 1999: 96). However, their shared traits: physical attributes, language (despite regional differences), customs, values, endogamy, and their self-identity (Weber 1978: 385–98) enabled them to identify as members of the same ethnic group.
The non-related Japanese immigrants’ cohesion could be threatened, especially in regard to their link to Japan. The Japanese government emphasized patriotism to overcome the immigrants’ distance from Japan and their internal cultural differences. It stressed emperor worship and civic virtues as the most important elements of a Japanese national identity in order to strengthen the link between the Japanese state and immigrants (Endoh 2009: 9).3 Japanese immigrants in the Bastos colony adopted the Emperor Jimmu, whose accession has been recorded at 660 BC in their mythology as the spiritual leader of their community. Other colonies did so as well. This attitude provided much-needed cohesion for a disparate people trying to come together as a whole community. Social links were reinforced by ceremonial events such as the anniversary of the colony’s foundation, New Year festivities, sporting commemorations, and official school ceremonies. Shared loyalty was common in Japanese families. A family’s living room typically boasted a picture of the Japanese imperial couple next to one of Brazilian President Getulio Vargas. This proved to be true, at least until 1952 (Mita 1999: 96–101). For immigrants, it symbolized the affirmation of their ethnic identity, their strong connection to Japan, and their integration into one civil religion.
Sociologists note that a civil religion has the function of preserving social values and providing social cohesion (Marshall 1998: 73). Robert Bellah was one of the first sociologists to apply this concept. Following the work of Emile Durkheim, Bellah states that every social group has a way of expressing its identity that is “religious.” Civil religion is the connection of a nation and of a people to ethical principles, helping guide them “to some form of self-understanding” (Bellah 2006: 221).
Reverence for the emperor played a very important role, especially at the end of World War II when immigrants and their descendants divided into two groups: those who refused to believe that Japan had lost the war and those who did not question it. The first group, Kachigumi, created an association called Shindo Renmei (“Liga do Caminho dos Súditos,” or Association of the emperor’s Subjects), which attacked and killed some members of the second group, the Makegumi (Morais 2000; Mott n.d.; Nakasato 2011). The non-believers regarded the relationship between the emperor and the Japanese people to be akin to the relationship between father and son (Bastos Shuho 1952: 8). According to the novel Nihonjin, the old Japanese immigrant told his son, who had published an article on behalf of the Makegumi: “To betray the Nation is the same as to betray one’s own father” (Nakasato 2011: 142).
Coffee to Cotton to Sericulture to Poultry (1928–2006)
Brazil’s cotton industry took root when Japanese immigrants bought land that was sold by São Paulo coffee plantation owners following the collapse in coffee prices. The Kaigai Iju Kumiai Rengokai (KIKR), the Japanese Provinces Associations Foundation, had intended to cultivate coffee in its colonies, but the 1929 economic crisis and the resulting drop in coffee prices led the Brazilian federal government to prohibit new coffee farms in São Paulo State in 1932. Initially, plantation owners tried raising cattle; later they divided their large landholdings into small properties, which they then sold to Japanese immigrants to plant cotton. Cotton cultivation proved successful because it did not require a major investment, it was harvested yearly and it found a ready market in Japan-based textile industries. Japanese immigrants believed that they were helping their homeland’s development by planting cotton (Vieira 1973: 65–66).
Following the 1932 ban on new coffee cultivation, the Yugen Sekinin Brasil Takushoku Kumiai (Bratac), or the Brazilian branch of the KIKR, also abandoned its entire coffee production in Bastos and replaced it with cotton. Within a few years, Bastos became known as “the land of cotton.” Bankers and factory owners in Japan supported the immigrants financially and advised them on cotton production (Vieira 1973: 66–67; Reich 1995: 40). However, cotton production soon diminished due to soil erosion. In 1938, the Japanese government began reducing cotton imports, first because of the war against China and later because of Second World War II. As a result, some Japanese families abandoned the colony. Bastos then decided to replace cotton production by growing silkworms and cultivating the mulberry trees on which they fed (Mita 1999: 67–75).
Between 1925 and 1935, a period whose final five years covered the span when new coffee production was banned, Japanese immigration totaled 139,059 people, nearly four times greater than the 34,939 people who had come between 1908 and 1924 (Vieira 1973: 44). Japanese colonization companies had previously purchased large plots of land in western São Paulo that it now divided and sold to Japanese who wanted to emigrate. The new Japanese immigrants of the 1920s thereby bypassed the stage as contract laborers. These new immigrants utilized family labor and many enjoyed some upward mobility. A self-census conducted in 1933 showed that 53 percent of the Japanese in the São Paulo colonies who were farmers were independent.
Some Japanese immigrants preferred to rent rather than buy plots of land, because they believed this would improve their chances at immediate success. This behavior resembles that of an earlier generation of Japanese emigration in 1875 when laborers traveled to Hawaii for a few years without their families (Saito 1961: 21), hoping to earn enough money to return to Japan. Although Brazil was further from Japan than Hawaii, migrants held onto the idea of return. It should have been a temporary migration, but World War II shattered their hopes.
After World War II, Japanese immigrants and their descendants developed poultry farming that they directed at the Brazilian market. Poultry farming led to the concentration of wealth, increasing the economic differences within the immigrant group. This economic activity influenced the opening of poultry feeding factories, where most employees were non-Japanese. In 1966, the Japanese and their descendants established two big meat plants, where most employees were also non-Japanese. Similarly, the silk mill used non-Japanese labor. The use of non-Japanese labor increased the non-Japanese population in Bastos, most of whom were migrants from northeast Brazil and Minas Gerais State. Some of these Brazilians started to raise cattle, but many lived in slums on the periphery of Bastos.
By 1978, among the Japanese families that had immigrated to Brazil after World War II, ninety-five families had settled in Bastos, forming twelve percent of all families of Japanese origin. As the number of the non-Japanese population increased, the proportion of Japanese immigrants and their descendants in the Bastos colony fell from eighty-eight percent in 1941 to only thirty percent in 1981 when Bastos’ population was 15,461. On the other hand, people of Japanese origin totaled 4,448 in 1978. Among the Japanese immigrants and their descendants, fifty-five percent lived in urban Bastos and forty-five percent in its rural area. Following the Brazilian pattern of migration after World War II, most of Bastos’ population lived in the urban zone. In 1981, seventy-one percent of Bastos residents were urban dwellers (Mita 1999: 190–93).
Starting in the 1950s, Japanese immigrants and the Japanese Brazilians became interested in local and national Brazilian politics. At the same time, they began working to integrate Bastos’ economic life into the national society. Their children were also Brazilian citizens by birth. Several Japanese Brazilians were elected mayor of Bastos between 1956 and 1982 (Mita 1999: 190–91). At the time of our research, the deputy mayor was of Japanese origin too.
Living in Bastos and Other Colonies: First and Second Generations
Agricultural Production Cycles
My students and I conducted fieldwork in Bastos in 2005 and 2006 by listening to the voices of immigrant descendants. They told us about their parents’ life experiences. Most of the interviewees, whose Japanese immigrant parents came for working as coffee plantation laborers, talked to us about their lives at ACENBA and at their homes.
According to the geographer John P. Augelli:
The climate of the region is subtropical (Cwa) but frosts, while infrequent, represent a potential danger to tropical crops. The precipitation factor can also be a hindrance to crop production. Total annual rainfall amounts to approximately 47 inches, of which 20 inches fall during the rainy season from October to January. A combination of high temperature and sandy soils reduces the effectiveness of precipitation with the result that partial crop failure due to inadequate water supply is an ever-present threat. Since much of the rain falls in the form of heavy thundershowers, crop destruction by hail is an added danger. The few patches of original vegetation which still remain indicate that the Peixe Valley (where Bastos is located) was once characterized by a predominantly forest cover locally called a “mato cerrado.” At present, little is left of this mato. (Augelli 1958: 5)
Thus, the only way to make a living from crop production was to rotate the crops. Takahashi Akira4 explained the production cycles in detail:
The first plan was planting coffee. Bastos was founded on June 18, 1928. Soon after a world crisis erupted with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange. Brazil didn’t know what to do about the crisis and coffee had lost all its value. Nobody imported coffee from Brazil anymore, and then there was a big burning of coffee in Santos in 1930, and the government prohibited the planting of new coffee bushes. So they had to find an alternative. Cotton was one option. Cotton was successful for some years. However, monoculture causes significant soil erosion. Then after five or six years, cotton production diminished. Fertilization of soil, agricultural machines, everything was precarious. People used horses, donkeys, and plows. Everything combined shortened the period of cotton production. After that came mulberry trees and silkworms. Currently most farmers have eggs. They still have silkworms, but it’s not how it was earlier. We still have the biggest production of silk in the world, biggest in Latin America.
Mr. Kawasaki completed the story:
We have only one plant that makes silk yarn, but this one in Bastos is the biggest in the world. Currently this company is also in Londrina [Paraná State], and in other places. There are silkworms companies in Central Brazil too. The raw material makes a profit because production is low in each region. Since the beginning of commercial agriculture at the time of the Second World War, Americans encouraged Japanese colonists who had knowledge of silkworm production to increase this production. Americans paid a lot of money, and every Japanese person started to raise silkworms. Americans did this in order to argue with Japan and Germany, and to create a war climate [everybody laughs]. Meanwhile Americans fought Japanese . . . that’s the history.5 After the war the export market for silk yarn ended.
Then the producers looked for an alternative. Some had already started poultry farming. As they already had ranches to raise silkworms, they replaced them with chickens. They started with 100, 200 and 500 chickens. Anyone with a thousand was considered a big chicken raiser. But they started poultry farms because they already had ranches, and they saw the cooperatives in the São Paulo metropolitan area, such as horticulture, which were extending their branches in the countryside. Horticulture prevailed in Bastos because the land was used for family cultivation. Japanese farmers researched, modernized things and used fertilizers, which they learned how to use. Then they began to cultivate fruit plants. Bastos filled São Paulo cities with a white, round watermelon called Jabati watermelon. After that they cultivated tangerines and ponkans, which filled the whole country. After that they began to plant melons, which soon prevailed in the São Paulo market.
Mrs. Keiko6 and her own family had to leave the hotel and move to a house:
My mother-in-law and my sister-in-law took care of the hotel because many children do not allow the mother-in-law to work [she laughs]. At first my husband went to work on a small farm. He had a friend who liked to cultivate watermelons, melons, and these things. He wanted to work with him. But it didn’t work out because he didn’t have land of his own. He planted in my father’s land [however he had the same problem: he didn’t own the land].
The working life experience of Roberto’s father was different7 . When Roberto’s father was 18 or 20 years old he moved to the city (Bastos), and bought a store that sold saddles and other animals’ leather articles. He had bought it from a Latvian man. At that time agricultural work was done with animals. When cars and trucks started arriving, he transformed his business into a shoe store. “My father worked very hard,” he said. He was not yet married when he moved to the city, but he thought that it would be easier for his children to attend school. He had five children, and all of them attended college.
Mr. Kawasaki told us about the expansion of the poultry farms:
Chicken and egg production increased. Japanese like to suffer [he laughs]; they like a kind of work that has no Saturday, Sunday and no holiday. My father’s family started poultry farming in 1945. I stopped two years ago, and rented the poultry farm to other people. During that time we didn’t have one day that we would have said: today we are going to close the doors, no one works. Somebody had to work because chickens need to eat, to drink water, and someone has to collect the eggs. In our city there is a big poultry farmer called Takeuchi, who is the biggest Brazilian producer.
Besides Takeuchi, there were four more big poultry farmers, which demonstrated the concentration of wealth, and the maintenance of monoculture. These farmers employed non-Japanese workers.
Religious Practices and Cultural Habits
The early Japanese immigrants did not actively practice their religion. In Japan, their religious life was based primarily on the cult of ancestors, which was the duty of the first-born son, and most immigrants to Brazil were second or third sons. In the prewar and wartime periods, emperor worship replaced ancestor worship in Brazil. As the Japanese communities were formed, the connections between each immigrant and the emperor provided the glue that held the communities together (Reichl 1995: 40–41). When the Japanese immigrants decided to remain indefinitely in Brazil after World War II, the cult of ancestors re-emerged (Mori 1992: 562–63).
Working as laborers on coffee plantation, the immigrants had few religious practices. They were restricted to death ceremonies and to reciting Buddhist or Shinto prayers in front of a Buddhist or Shinto altar, if they had one at the house where the deceased lived (Handa 1987: 735). When immigrants died in Brazil, their immigrant relatives performed burial rituals, which were considered provisional due to “their spirit flight to Japan” (Willems 1948: 98. Cited in Mori 1992: 562–63). The burial was very humble; there were no prayers, and instead of sotobas 8 there were crosses made of white wood. Immigrants wrote the dates of birth and death of the deceased on the back of the cross on the horizontal side and the person’s name and age at death on the vertical side. On the front they wrote, “Buddha save us.” On top of the grave, they painted flowers made of tin. Then they lit candles, joined the palms of their hands, and kept silent or mumbled invocations to Buddha.
After the funeral, the family of the deceased returned home and installed a shelf in a bedroom corner, where they placed a picture of the departed and offerings of flowers and incense. If they did not have incense they used candles. They also kept a lamp lit for a few days, similar to Buddhist altars. The family invited people from the neighborhood on the seventeenth day. There were no prayers due to the absence of Buddhist monks. Everybody bowed in front of the altar, and had dinner together (Handa 1987: 727).
Although the immigrants considered themselves temporary workers outside Japan, they did not lose their position in the familial structure. They also left relatives in charge of the cults of their ancestors. When immigrants died in Brazil, their relatives performed burial rituals, which were considered provisional due to “their spirit flight to Japan” (Willems 1948: 98. Cited in Mori 1992: 562–63). Only after World War II did Japanese immigrants accept that they would remain indefinitely in Brazil and that is when the cult of ancestors re-emerged (Mori 1992: 562–63).
Religious practices on the coffee plantations were similar to those in the Japanese colonies established according to the principle of ethnicity. They rented or bought plots of land together. The cultural paradigm of these colonies had its roots in Japanese villages. First created in 1910, by the 1930s 600 to 700 colonies in southeastern Brazil had appeared. Japanese immigrants started to order altars from carpenters only after they had been in Brazil more than ten years (Handa 1987: 730). Religious practices, Buddhist and Shinto, began only with the improvement of the colonies’ production and organization in the second half of the 1920s and in the 1930s in the extended colonies, such as Cafelândia, Registro, Marília, Lins and others located in São Paulo State (Mori 1992: 567).
Although the Japanese immigrants’ everyday life appeared to lack religion, their habits had religious meaning. Handa recollected some examples: they adorned altars with ossonae, offerings, and omiki, sake (saké in English), or Brazilian sugarcane liquor in order to celebrate the New Year. They also celebrated the anniversary of the death of a relative by eating shôjin-ryôri,9 and in the ceremony of the frame house (jôtôshiki), they had mocha, a Japanese rice cake. They celebrated tenchôssetsu together, and in everyday life, they always said itadakimassu and gochissôssama before and after meals (Handa 1987: 730).10
Issei parents raised their children according to Buddhist precepts.11 They criticized waste, taught Nisei “to feel sorry” for things, and to “spare” them. At the same time, parents said to their Nisei children that they would be “punished” if they performed any action without piety. They also told them that those who behave poorly are held responsible for what they do and will have “to pay” for it. Issei parents guided them to always practice good actions, thus they would be performing true “charity.” So the immigrants preserved everyday Japanese Buddhist norms without being aware that their attitudes could have religious meaning. However, those actions were not practiced as a whole; therefore, Handa does not classify them as religious. On the other hand, I think that preserving some of those traits has kept the religion alive considering all the difficulties the immigrants faced.12 As nostalgia for their homeland increased and aspirations to become rich diminished, the immigrants developed the desire to pray to Buddha and the cult of their ancestors in their daily life, as Handa (1987: 730) states.
Mrs. Keiko’s parents were Buddhist:
My father used to say to all his children: you make your decision after you are 18 years old. Parents don’t dictate which religion you should attend. Our school was Catholic, and they pushed us to be baptized, but my father didn’t allow it. He said religion is everybody’s choice. He didn’t coerce us to follow Buddhism either. He used to say everyone has to make their own decision, but only after they reach adulthood. Currently we follow our father. The school forced us to go to mass every Sunday, and my father never prohibited it. My father never instructed us about Buddhism. He used to say that you are free. If you like it, if you want to be baptized as Buddhist you can, but he never forced us. I am the same way as my father; everyone makes his/her own choice. My children are neither Catholic nor Buddhist. But my parents always worship at the Buddhist temple and my children also go to the Buddhist temple. I don’t practice our ancestors’ cult.
When immigrants leave their countries, they bring their religion with them. The Japanese immigrants followed one of these religions: Buddhism, Shintoism, or Catholicism. Most were Buddhist. Buddhism is related to the cult of family and ancestors. The Buddhist tradition remains, while Shintoism has shown a tendency to disappear due to the fact that Buddhism is connected to the cult of family and ancestors (Mori 1992: 580–81). However, for the Japanese immigrants and their descendants, the cult of ancestors or of a deceased relative could only be practiced in Japan, where they could return to the “house” of their family (Mori 1992: 563). That could be one of the reasons that Mrs. Keiko and her husband went to visit the house where their parents lived before emigrating to Bastos, Brazil, in 1930.
According to Mrs. Keiko, she and her husband “never treat in a different way those who were Brazilian or Japanese. Back then everybody was Japanese.” Their lovely relationship with their grandson (a teenager of mixed Afro-Brazilian and Japanese descent) is evident to everybody.
As Mr. Takahashi Akira explained:
Most Japanese were Buddhist. Currently it changes a lot, but back then everybody was Buddhist. Those who attend the Buddhist temple are mostly the elderly. Nowadays it’s rare to find Japanese families without a mixing, almost all the families have a race mixing. I think that there is no family who doesn’t have a son or a grandson married to a Brazilian or a daughter married to Brazilian. Then religion also varies a lot, there is Catholic, Buddhist, Candomblé,13 Evangelical, and each person attends what he/she wants. But, there is something, a church is also a place where young people meet, and eventually date [he laughs]: “I go there because my girlfriend is there.”
Mr. Kawasaki said: “Among all religions there is almost no difference. They have the 7th day mass, one-month mass, one-year.” Mr. Fukui completed this thought: “They perform mass in Catholicism and also in Buddhism, but historically Buddhism is thousands of years old and Catholicism is 2005 years old.” Mr. Takahashi concluded: “Currently, as there are many young people who don’t understand Japanese, the Buddhist temple also performs ceremonies in Portuguese, otherwise it doesn’t attract people. If people don’t understand what they are talking about they don’t go.”
Mrs. Margarida Vatanabe, whose maiden name was Tomy Ikegami, left her village, Makurazaki, in the province of Kagoshima in southern Japan, at the age of eleven years in 1912, in order to work in São Paulo City. She returned to Japan for a short period of time after thirteen years in order to visit her parents’ tombs. At first she went to Makurazaki to visit her parents’ tombs, and then to her uncle’s home, where the ihai 14 of her parents was kept. As she disliked her aunt’s husband’s attitude toward her and her siblings, she moved her parents’ ihai to her oldest sister’s home (Mayeama 2004: 123, 128).
Japanese immigrants lost their properties in Japan, but the “house of family” remained. Mary Okamoto’s grandmother from her father’s side could not afford to pay the tax on her Japanese properties because she and her husband made very little money. After several years when they visited Japan, she found that only the “house of family” remained. Her grandmother was so shocked about her loss, and all the changes in post-war Japan that all her recent memory vanished. She only had recollections of Japan. Suddenly she became very old. “I can imagine all her suffering and anguish. All the time she lived in Brazil, she refused to learn Portuguese, she only spoke ‘não’ [no]. It’s very understandable, the choice of this word.”15
Mr. Roberto said that at ACENBA they celebrate their ancestors, “those who worked for our dear land. This is a Japanese custom to thank them for their passing and their teaching that they left to us.” Mr. Takahashi told us about a Japanese custom that Brazilians have assimilated:
When somebody from a Japanese family dies we are accustomed to bring a certain amount of money in an envelope in order to help this family pay for the burial. Nobody has to do it, but everybody follows this ritual. Even in weddings everybody brings a small contribution. Then, one of the burial agents considered this a very good idea because many families do not have the means to buy a coffin. The family used to go from door to door asking for a monetary contribution in order to have the burial. The family felt humiliated because they had to ask for a contribution for themselves. Among the Japanese there was no such thing; everybody had already bought it. This is a very interesting system, and people [Brazilians] have already integrated it. Every time when there is a burial of a Brazilian family member people already start bringing money. Then, at least here in Bastos, nobody is in a dire need that prevents a family burying its member. This is one of good part of our culture that we also left for the Brazilian society. It’s as my friend just said, we should keep good customs and transfer them to our descendants.
Mr. Keiko’s father allowed her to go to Catholic mass on Sunday following the Catholic school’s persuasion, but he refused to have his children baptized. The number of baptized children in São Paulo City, and other medium-size cities in São Paulo State and also in Brazil, has increased more than in rural areas. The baptism of Nisei was accepted as a “social practice.” The parents followed Buddhism but baptized their children, so that their children were not placed in an inferior position at school.
They also asked Brazilians to become godparents to their sons and daughters, so that they would receive an economic advantage. This practice explained why the Japanese descendants did not become passionate faithful in the 1950s. Thus, the relationship between godfathers/godmothers and godchildren of Japanese origin did not become close, the same as the relationship between godparents and their godchildren’s parents (Mori 1992: 579). The immigrants and especially the Nisei who lived in urban areas perceived the strong link between Brazilian nationalism and Catholicism, even though the Brazilian Republic established the separation of state and religion when it was founded in 1889.
Izumi (1954: 58–59. Cited in Mori 1992: 580) observed an association between an increase in years of schooling and a deeper belief in Catholicism. There was also a difference if immigrants and their children lived in urban or in rural areas. Most of the population who lived in rural areas followed traditional Japanese religions, while most who lived in urban areas were Catholics. There was a greater concentration of Nisei in the cities who attended schools or were looking for jobs. Buddhist temples were better organized in rural areas where family and community relationships were very close. However, as new generations started replacing the earlier ones, conversion to Catholicism increased. The conversion to Catholicism is due to the proselytism of the Catholic Church and the fact that Brazilian nationalism has Catholicism as one of its roots. The increase in mixed marriages also expanded the conversion to Catholicism in São Paulo City and in cities of medium size (Mori 1992: 594–98).
In the 1920s, few Shinto shrines were built in the immigrant colonies. In 1938, the Bastos colony built the Sanso Shrine in homage to the deity of silkworms. This kind of Shinto shrine represented the deity of the village, which existed in Japan. However, the emperor cult performed the role of joining Japanese immigrants together as a collective. In Japan, this role was played by religious practices. In the colonies, the centers of the emperor cult were the Japanese schools, which the immigrants founded. Japanese schools, besides being the places where the children learned, were the headquarters of Japanese society, the agriculture cooperative, and wedding parties. Before all the events, everybody had to bow to the east, followed by a deep bow to the picture of the emperor, a solemn recital of the emperor’s edict about education, and finally singing the Japanese national anthem (Mori 1992: 569).
Mayeama compares the emperor cult to Catholicism. The picture of the emperor was the divine body, the emperor’s edict about education was the sacred word, the national anthem the sacred song, the director of the school the priest, and the Japanese school the deity of the village (Mayeama 1984: 415. Cited in Mori 1992: 569). The creation of the religious structure allowed the development of the immigrants’ religiousness. The immigrants who arrived in the 1930s brought Japanese nationalism with them, which reinforced the immigrants’ religiousness (Mori 1992: 569).
Yet the Japanese religions failed to flourish due to the combined pressure of the Catholic Church and Brazilian nationalism. Japanese immigrants were also afraid of anti-Japanese prejudice. Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant, were very active in the Japanese colonies and also in São Paulo City, where a Japanese neighborhood was formed (Mori 1992: 569). The Catholic Church founded schools in São Paulo City and in the colonies and helped in the immigrants’ adjustment to their new social environment. Catholic priests also shielded Mrs. Margarida Vatanabe and three other immigrants, who created the Japanese Catholic Committee of São Paulo (Comissão Católica Japonesa de São Paulo) in June 1942, from persecution by the Brazilian police and army, as Brazil was at war with the Axis countries. The aim of the committee was “to provide social assistance, moral and material to persons in need without any difference of religion, race or nationality” (Mayema 2004: 249–50).
In addition to the many difficulties the immigrants faced in practicing their religion, they also suffered the decay of their esthetic sense. According to Handa (1971. Cited in Nogueira 1973: 148), when immigration to Brazil started in 1908, Japanese rural life had still not changed and still conformed to tradition. Immigrants had not been previously influenced by Western countries and now had to change their clothes, food, and housing in Brazil. These changes were made more difficult due to differences in mores and language. Thus, they lost the Japanese esthetic sense without having apprehended the Brazilian esthetic. They lived at colonists’ houses on the coffee plantations and adjusted their clothes to Brazilian styles.16 They also adopted parts of the Brazilian diet, such as coffee and beans, which they were unaccustomed to. Immigrants stopped using a bowl and hashi and began using a dish and spoon. Immigrants intended to work for a limited time, not permanently and thought they would make enough money in four or five years to return to Japan. When they realized that they would not make money as plantation laborers, some immigrants pretended to have forgotten their labor agreement and ran away. Plantation life was so different, it was disorienting.
The Japanese worked hard over extensive areas in a hot climate. Their diet had changed and they lacked nutrition, further weakening them. Harsh working conditions included overseers who screamed to compel compliance. They couldn’t understand Portuguese, and the unfamiliar food tasted strange. The solution was to cultivate their land, live together with other Japanese, and eat Japanese food, such as miso (a condiment made of soy beans) and shoyu (soy sauce). Brazilians criticized them for refusing to assimilate, despite their having abandoned their mores more than any other immigrant group. Their modus vivendi was completely different from other immigrants and from Brazilians. As years passed, immigrants had to get accustomed to the bitterness and suffering known only to those who had worked at the coffee plantations. Immigrants who had moved from the coffee plantations to farm colonies lost their Japanese traits but had not yet adopted the Brazilian way of life. They went to live in houses made of wood, mud, and straw. Their belongings were never organized as if they were still at the coffee plantations (Handa 1971: 223–28. Cited in Nogueira 1973: 149).
It is evident that Japanese immigrants carried very different mores than those dominant in Brazil. According to Egon Schaden, who studied German and Japanese acculturation in Brazil,17 Japanese immigrants experienced more culture shock than Germans. Besides, the Japanese phenotype was very different from the Brazilian phenotype, which made interracial relationships uncommon. This increased ethnocentric evaluations and differences in language, religion, familial system, political points of view, hygiene habits, kitchen practices, and many other mores. Therefore, acculturation initially required deeper cultural fragmentation among Japanese and Japanese Brazilian people than among European immigrants (Schaden 1956: 44. Cited in Nogueira 1973: 144). Amid such behavioral differences, Japanese people of the same sex bathed together. Brazilians and European immigrants considered this behavior promiscuous. At the beginning of the 1900s, São Paulo was an agrarian society, very traditional and conservative (Nogueira 1973: 146).
Comparing prewar Japan to Brazil and other Latin American countries, it is clear that Japanese immigrants suffered downward migration from a more developed country to a less developed one, “as opposed to the dekasegi emigrants who went to the richer North America” (Endoh 2009: 19). Despite the anti-Japanese social environment in the host societies, large-scale immigration to Brazil continued. The Japanese government actively promoted Latin American emigration, which peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. During these years, the Japanese state financially supported Japanese immigration to the Peruvian and Brazilian countryside and to a lesser degree Japanese immigration to Bolivia and Paraguay (Endoh 2009: 19). Certainly this reflected the Japanese imperialist policy to ensure access to raw materials and to have trustworthy and loyal subjects through territorial expansion.
Food and Health
Women’s labor, including household chores and agricultural work, was very hard. It was also very difficult to get enough food to feed their children. Immigrants and their children, whether born in Japan or in Brazil, had to cope with adversity, especially those who had arrived without financial resources.
Antonio Suzuki spoke about the immigrants’ diet in the first years after their arrival:
Previously, food was very bad, really very bad. At that time, my mother made shoyu, the Japanese sauce, by herself. She also made miso, made of soy. But there were no vegetables, nothing. There was nothing to eat on the plantation. We cultivated neither potatoes nor manioc. I only remember that there was bean soup. Even when we arrived in Bastos, food was bad. We started planting, but it was not enough. As there were many Japanese immigrants, someone invented something, someone made another thing or cultivated something. Instead of vegetables, we ate a plant called picão. We collected it green. After arriving in Bastos, we had mamão,18 which was good. When it is ripe it is tasty, and when it is green one can make tsukemono 19 preserves, or cook it, which is also tasty. We didn’t cultivate mamão; it sprouted by itself. It was good; we ate a lot. We cultivated bananas; it was easy. However, food was hard to get. As I was born here I liked beans very much. My mother cooked beans with dried meat. When I went to school, my snack was rice and beans, that’s what I took to school. I only ate rice and beans.
Takahashi Akira20 recollected his childhood, connecting it to food. His parents signed a four-year agreement with a plantation owner, in order to cultivate coffee. Many families planted rice and beans between the coffee bushes. His parents planted rice, piling it up to dry. He told us a story from his childhood. As many years ago children did not have toys, his older brother made a trap in order to catch birds and little animals. He always caught nhambu (a bird), cut their wings and gave them to the little brother, so that he could play with them. He received two or three birds every day. Although he was only five years old, he noticed that the number of birds did not increase. One day, one nhambu hid itself under the ofuro.21 His mother said, “it does not matter, my son, we are going to have it for dinner.” That is the reason why the number of birds did not increase. This was their source of protein; therefore, the number of toys never increased.
At the time of the interviewees, Takahashi Akira was seventy-eight years old and Roberto Hiroshi Takeuchi was fifty-three, so there was a difference of twenty-five years between the childhood of the first and the second one.
As a child Takahashi Akira probably played with slingshots (estilingue)—as he described his older brother used it in order to catch birds—spun a top (roda pião), played with a bilboquet, and with a ball, climbed trees, and tried to catch fish. However, Takahashi Akira mentioned playing with birds in a context of food. Girls played with handmade cloth dolls, Mamagoto (little house), and Otedama 22 (Cytrynowicz and Cytrynowicz 2017: 79). The old interviewees rarely referred to toys and games. They worked with their parents as coffee plantations laborers, and eventually at the families’ own small farms. In families with a first-born daughter, she was responsible for cooking and taking care of her younger siblings; in families with a first-born son, he took care of his siblings and brought water from a river, even when far from home (Cytrynowicz and Cytrynowicz 2017: 34). Certainly most children’s activities were related to work and school rather than to play.
Roberto Hiroshi Takeuchi described his childhood:
My childhood was very difficult too. When I compare my childhood with current ones, I can see how it was difficult. However, I had a healthy childhood. Everything was free. My siblings, my friends and I made all our toys. Currently there are factories that offer everything ready-made, but in our time we played shooting marbles [bolinha de gude], and we made slingshots in order to go to our small farm. Everything was by foot, and there were no cars. Some could afford a bicycle. We were friendly with boys and girls. We didn’t have any malicious thoughts. We played tag [pega-pega], hide-and-seek [esconde-esconde] or spinning a top . . . We used to play hopscotch [amarelinha], everything was healthy. Currently with the Internet, children become adults, they don’t have that childhood with a doll, the kinds of games that we had. Now childhood is very different.
Those toys and games (to play hopscotch, hide-and-seek, tag, and shooting marbles) show the influence of Western culture, probably through the Brazilian public school, and contact with children of non-Japanese descent.
Regarding his relationship with his father, Roberto said that he usually did not talk to him. Back then the Japanese immigrants’ attitude within the family and also outside home required “absence of displays of affection” (Yanagisako 1985: 248):
Japanese men in the past were different from today. My father didn’t talk to us. I saw him only working. There was no communication between us as we have currently with my children. Affection toward us children meant watching us. He worked on our behalf so we could attend school. Bastos started to have a high school after the 1970s, and in São Paulo the high school had been there for a long time. Then, he said “my son, go to study.” So we, a group of youths, got together and went to São Paulo to attend high school and later college.
There was no lack of food when Roberto was a child.
According to Dr. Rodolfo Yamashita, a lawyer, who was born in Padre Nóbrega (a small city near Marilia) in 1943, and who lives in Marília, the lack of food was widespread.23 He said that the first Japanese immigrants used to catch golden fish in Feio River’s piracema.24 But, once a group of mandi 25 migrated into the river, and their spikes hurt the immigrants a lot. “Life was a lot of suffering: language, mores, and food were different.”
Takahashi Akira explained why they had such a poor diet:
Food was also very precarious; they could not afford to have meat or eggs. People used to eat dried meat because they did not have a refrigerator, so they had to choose dried meat or dried codfish. Although the colonization company’s grocery store sold Japanese food, it was expensive, probably due to being imported, allowing very few people to buy it. Most of the immigrants who came to Brazil were not peasants. They didn’t know how to plant crops. If they were really peasants and owned land, they had cultivated vegetables, raised animals, including chickens, harvested fruits. Nobody did these things. They only thought about making money and going back to Japan. That’s why they were never concerned about cultivating edible plants. They didn’t want to sell bananas, they only thought about what they could sell at the market. They had mamão because it grew by itself. They didn’t raise chickens; skunks ate chickens, and they had no fences to protect them.
Antonio Suzuki disagreed: “We raised pork. There was always pork to eat. I never had beef. I only ate pork. It was hard to keep it because there was no refrigerator. When we killed a pig, every day was pork, pork cooked with squash, cooked with ‘daikon,’26 and that’s how it was.”
Takahashi Akira blamed the immigrants for having a poor diet due to the fact that they were not peasants, and that they had come to Brazil in order to make money and return to Japan fast. However, the second explanation is correct. They immigrated to Brazil as many had gone to Hawaii in order to work a few years and save money. The first reason does not fit the data.
Although some immigrants came from towns and cities, they were the product of the recent rural–urban migration, and their parents were still peasants. According to Zenpati, during the first period of immigration (1908–1928), the occupations of the immigrants were: peasants 68.4 percent, non-peasants 16.8 percent, and unemployed 14.8 percent. The immigrants’ fathers’ occupations were: peasants 83.5 percent and non-peasants 16.4 percent. During the second period (1924–World War II), several immigrants came from urban centers, although all of them, with the exception of those who belonged to the intellectual stratum, were familiar with agricultural work. They had left the countryside in order to look for temporary jobs in cities because they were not the first-born sons. The data referring to immigrants’ occupations in the second period (1923–1941) are peasants 49.9 percent, non-peasants 34.3 percent, and unemployed 15.8 percent. The immigrants’ fathers’ occupations were peasants 67.4 percent and non-peasants 32.6 percent (Census Committee of Japanese Colony 1964, cited in Zenpati 1976: 172, 181).
Some immigrants left the plantations and went to Brazilian urban areas. They said that in Japan they were carpenters, fishermen, and business people (Nogueira 1973: 133, 119). A few settled in São Paulo City. Immigrants had to tell the Brazilian authorities that they were peasants; otherwise they would not be accepted. Coffee plantations only wanted people with agricultural experience. Whatever they said as a reason to leave the awful plantation life conditions, it does not disqualify Zenpati’s data.
Back then, continued Takahashi, people planted vegetables for their own consumption. And they also had insufficient knowledge about them:
When we were children we didn’t know what a salad was. Sometimes we cut a cabbage in small pieces, and ate it, or radish, squash. Food was also very precarious, with many children, much work, and then people got old very fast. When I was a child, and I saw a fifty-year-old man, one used to say, my goodness what an old person! Currently we see people at sixty, seventy years old, and I joke, I’m seventy-eight years old and I still want to date a lot! [People laugh]. Things changed a lot, currently people live until sixty, seventy years old, and it is considered normal, but many years ago at the age of fifty, sixty people were already dying.
Regarding food for little children, Takahashi explained that they had a kind of chicken soup, and they were breastfed until a later age. When the mother had no breastmilk, sometimes in the same colony’s section there was a mother who had also given birth at the same time, and had too much milk, then she breastfed another baby besides her own: “My mother raised an acquaintance’s son because when she gave birth to her last child, she had too much milk, then she fed this other person’s baby for more or less one year.”
According to Saito, in the 1920s, Japanese immigrants started leaving the region of coffee plantations to move to the pioneer area in western São Paulo State. Many immigrants then fell victim to malaria and many died (Saito 1961: 78–83). Antonio Suzuki recollected:
When I lived in Cafelândia there was malaria.27 Half of the pharmacy stock was medicine for malaria.28 People left the farm very pale, and went to the city, to the drugstore. They bought injections against malaria, and they injected themselves at home. Sometime they got an inflammation on the skin where they used the needle, and then they had to come to the pharmacy. As we worked in the pharmacy we helped them. We had to be careful because they could faint. They had to lie down. They were so accustomed to the disease that when they had fever they had to rest in the shade of a coffee bush. When the fever went away they went back to work. One man took the injection and gave it to his whole family.
Goichi Watanabe, an ophthalmologist, and the president of the kaikan (ACENBA) said that due to malaria “people were looking very hard for a place without malaria, and Bastos was just a region without it.” Takahashi Akira spoke about the advantages of Bastos:
But the most important attraction of Bastos was the hospital. The school was also important, although the immigrants used to build one whenever they settled. They didn’t have any access to medical resources in the other places. Bastos had a hospital and Japanese food. All the food was imported from Japan. Bratac was in charge of everything. They were in charge of the hospital, the cooperative, the rice-improving machine, coffee, and cotton.
Besides malaria, the immigrants from the first period had other diseases like tuberculosis and mental illness. Hundreds of people with mental illness had to be institutionalized as a result of the adjustment process. Several people with mental illness were interned in the Manicômio of Juqueri (Asylum of Juqueri, currently named Franco da Rocha). Mental illness increased year by year (Uchiyama et al. 1992: 216). The high rate of tuberculosis among Japanese immigrants was also related to an inadequate diet. As they drank too many alcoholic beverages and had a poor diet, they easily succumbed to tuberculosis. This also happened to new mothers who ate poorly (Saito 1961: 82–83).
In the early period of immigration and later after 1920, when immigrants started settling in colonies, Japanese associations provided hygiene and medical services but reached few colonies and could not prevent serious illness. In the early days of the colonies, awful housing conditions, inappropriate food, excessive workloads, and the lack of information regarding hygiene in an unknown tropical environment caused serious illness. Even in the late 1930s, the continual mobility of those who planted cotton meant their houses were as poor and precarious as the beginning of colonization. Moreover, the food was not nutritious. These conditions led to precarious health and much illness (Uchiyama et al. 1992: 215–16).
Malaria claimed the most victims among Japanese immigrants, from the beginning of the immigration and into the 1920s. Fortunately, the number of victims diminished in the late 1920s. However, other diseases continued: trachoma, amoebic dysentery, ancylostomiasis, tuberculosis, and mental illness. Among all these illnesses, trachoma reached many Japanese colonies in the countryside (Uchiyama et al. 1992: 216).
The countryside had few private doctors, and small country farmers could rarely afford to treat sick family members. In 1923, the Japanese Minister of the Interior donated money to provide medical and hygiene treatment for immigrants. Later, in the 1930s, the Division of Health of São Paulo State created health offices in the countryside, but they too were insufficient in number. More than a dozen Japanese doctors in São Paulo City treated patients. A hospital was founded in São Paulo City29 and, after investigating the needs of the colonies, Dojinkai established social assistance offices in some cities and towns and provided medicine and treatment at low prices. It also opened a tuberculosis sanatorium in Campos de Jordão, a city in the mountains near São Paulo. The sanatorium was later named São Francisco Xavier (Uchiyama et al. 1992: 216).
The Japanese hospital, later named the Sociedade de Beneficencia Santa Cruz (Holy Cross Society of Social Assistance), opened in 1939 and became the largest social assistance institution in the Japanese community. Due to the disruption of diplomatic relations between Brazil and Japan, the hospital assumed Brazilian management in order to prevent being confiscated by the Brazilian government as enemy property. Finally, the hospital was taken from the Japanese (Uchiyama et al. 1992: 217–18).
Mrs. Keiko had seven children, three boys and four girls. She lost two sons when they were adults. She didn’t talk about the cause of their deaths. As we often talked to each other, Mrs. Keiko told me what happened to her father when he got very old. As a filial duty (giri), he came to live with them and apparently had Alzheimer’s disease. They had to lock the windows and doors so he couldn’t run away from home. He screamed at people from the windows, asking them to free him. “One early morning when I woke up, he said ‘I cleaned the whole kitchen because I wanted to help you’. I found out the kitchen was covered with cooking oil [she laughs].”
Another time, Mr. Fukui walked by. He was thin and his body curved. Then Mrs. Keiko said calmly, “He has stomach cancer.” I was shocked. She said in the same tone of voice, “He is taking medicine. He goes to see a doctor in Bauru.”30 I reminded myself about Ganbare, which means having strength to move ahead even when one is facing difficulty, or having strength and at the same time accepting one’s fate with resignation (Sakurai 1993: 52). I could understand and explain her attitudes regarding the troubles she has faced in her life through Ganbare.31 That is the only way.
Some immigrants arrived in São Paulo already sick from infectious diseases they had brought from Japan. One teenager had purulent ophthalmia, and an adult typhoid fever, according to the State Division of Labor in 1913. Others carried intestinal parasites (data from 1918). Some immigrants came with beriberi, caused by the lack of vitamin B1 in one’s food. A teenager died at Santa Casa Hospital in São Paulo due to paragonimiasis, an endemic disease in Japan that causes morbidity and death (Nogueira 1973: 158–59).
In her biography, Mrs. Margarida Vatanabe referred to cases of tuberculosis, meningitis, alcoholism, stroke, women’s deaths in childbirth, and mental illness in Makurasaki, her hometown, when she visited in 1925. Her mother died of meningitis after her father lost his business. Her father started drinking heavily, and went to work in another town as a truck driver. She immigrated to Brazil in 1912 in order to make money to pay her father’s debts. Eventually, he died from a stroke. Some of those illnesses could be related to the impoverishment of the population due to economic changes, the replacement of fishing boats by modern ones, and the division of labor between fishing and fish preparation for the market (Maeyama 2004: 124–25, 133–34).
Several books have been written about the hard life immigrants endured on coffee plantations. Wages were very low and workers had to buy their necessities such as rice and salt at the company grocery store owned by the plantations. Laborers also had to reimburse their masters for part of their travel tickets. Malaria swept through the plantation communities and several laborers, and their children became infected and died. Other immigrants had mental disorders, such as a male laborer who went up to the roof of his master’s house and started removing tiles in order to look at people inside.32 In the novel Nihonjin (Nakasato 2011: 43), Kimie, recently arrived from Japan with her husband, never adjusted to life on the coffee plantation. She lacked the strength to use a hoe. Moreover, she missed Japan very much, especially the winter snow. During São Paulo’s cold snowless winter she used to open the window, see the plantation covered with snow and imagine herself playing with her siblings. One very cold night, sick with a very high fever, she opened the door to see the snow. Excited, she started running between the coffee bushes and felt snow falling on her head and shoulders. Feeling tired she sat down on the cold land. Quietly she died, frozen.
One family subsidized by the Japanese government that arrived in 1932 and settled in Pereira Barreto, located in northwest São Paulo State, 629 km from São Paulo City, consisted of Sadao Omote’s parents.33 His parents used to tell him and his siblings: “Brazilian colonization companies deceived [us] by claiming that Brazil was a paradise where people could easily get rich very fast, and then return to Japan in order to have a better life.” According to them, the Brazilian companies paid for their trip from Japan to Brazil. But in that year, it was actually the Japanese government that had subsidized their travel tickets.
Sadao Omote’s family endured many hardships. His parents and others unknowingly bought dense forest plots in Pereira Barreto without roads. They had to cut down trees in order to build a house and to then prepare land for cultivating. The food was foreign to them: beans, manioc wheat, and dried, salted meat. They did not understand any Portuguese. In Pereira Barreto, many immigrants suffered from malaria and several died.
Mary Okamoto’s paternal grandparents came from the prefecture of Tokushima in 1938 and settled in the area that eventually became the small city of Dracena.
My grandmother’s ancestors were samurais and she did not immigrate to Brazil because of economic difficulties. Her parents died one after the other in a short period of time. Her privileged lifestyle meant that she had never worked in her life and was not even able to comb her own hair because domestic employees had done everything. My grandfather, her husband, had come from a rural family, and together they tried to operate their family store that sold construction material. My mother thought that emigration was an opportunity for her to “run away” from those problems. One used to say that she had many properties in Japan and that when she arrived in Brazil and realized that she had to work on the land (“trabalhar na roça”) it shocked her, as someone accustomed to an urban routine of theaters and shows. Besides this, the wages were very low—below what the agents had told her in Japan. Moreover, during all her years in Brazil, she never paid any tax to the Japanese government for her property. Ultimately, she lost everything except the family tomb.
Certainly my grandmother suffered trauma as a result of her immigration. Throughout her years in Brazil she refused to learn Portuguese, she only said “no.” When I was 10 years old, they went back to Japan in order to visit the country and my grandfather’s relatives. When my grandmother returned she was shocked to again face her life in Brazil, especially in contrast to all the changes that Japan had gone through after World War II. She began to act strangely and later had a stroke. She lost all her recent memory and had recollections only of Japan. I can imagine how much she suffered. She suddenly became very old after her return to Brazil. I have a picture of her in Japan and when I compare it to her appearance in Brazil, I can barely recognize her.34
At the beginning of her marriage, Mrs. Keiko and her husband worked in the hotel, but after she gave birth to her second child, her husband did not want to keep on working there. They moved to another house, as she said:
My mother-in-law and my sister-in-law took care of the hotel because many children do not allow the mother-in-law to work [she laughs]. At first my husband went to work on a small farm, but he didn’t succeed because he was not the owner of the plot. Then as he liked electronics very much, he opened a store for fixing radios, and later TV sets. He had no technical knowledge, but he bought books of electronics and he learned by himself. He had this fixing store for many years. Later a friend of his, Dr. Kimura, a medical doctor who was mayor, bought a well drilling rig and asked my husband to be in charge of the company. He worked many years there.
I came back to the hotel when my mother-in-law retired, and my sister-in-law had married and moved to another city. Her husband managed the cooperative and after their marriage they moved to Lins and to Adamantina. My mother-in-law asked us to come back to work at the hotel. She had retired and had aged. I was already more than fifty years old, but I like this work. I prefer to work than to stay without doing anything. When we have a hotel so many people show up, everybody different, everybody good people. I like it; I enjoy myself. Most people who come here are salesmen; many stay only for one night and leave the following day. Many sell products for the poultry farms, and then they stay for one week, ten days. When people used to come from Japan [after World War II] Bratac had accommodation for them, and a restaurant too. Back then there were many single workers who came from Japan.
Mrs. Keiko concluded: “I was always poor; we were always poor. My daughter always says to me: Mommy was born poor, raised poor, married poor and is going to die poor.”
In the beginning of Bastos’ colonization, there was a difference between those who came from Japan with some money, and those who had worked as coffee plantation laborers before buying a plot of land in the colony. Any differences in economic status, depending on whether the first generation had come directly to the colony or to the coffee plantation, had disappeared by the second generation. At the time of our research, we observed the concentration of poultry farmers. Thus, there were only five big poultry farmers. This concentration of wealth is accompanied by the increased impoverishment of most of the population. Therefore, when my students and I went to visit the golf club in Bastos, a beautiful and extensive green area, where Japanese descendants and the Brazilian elite enjoy themselves, it was a surprise to see an old picture of Mr. Fukui hanging on the wall among pictures of other people. I concluded that some years ago, the hotel was in a much better financial situation than currently.
NOTES
1. The Brazilian elite intended to make its population white through the immigration of European workers, so it was not easy for them to accept immigrants from Japan (Seyferth 1966).
2. The Japanese immigrants’ and descendants’ familial relationships will be further explored in chapters 3 and 4.
3. The Japanese people were united under the emperor according to the Civil Code in 1898 under the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912) (Kumagai 2008: 9–10).
4. Takahashi Akira followed the Japanese tradition and used his family name first. People called him by his family name.
5. Silk yarn was exported first to Japan in order to make parachutes and later to the United States.
6. Mrs. Keiko Fukui followed the Brazilian way and used her first name, preceded by Dona (in Portuguese) similar to Mrs.
7. If Roberto’s father had gone with his family to São Paulo City instead of Bastos he could be classified as Jun-Nisei or almost Nisei as a small Japanese child who arrived in Brazil without schooling (Maeyama 2004: 184).
8. Sotoba is a long, pointed piece of wood, which is pierced into Buddhist tombs. It has kaimyô (name attributed to the deceased according to Buddhism) on the front and zokumyô (name used when the person was alive) on the back (Handa 1987).
9. Shôjin-ryôri is devotional cuisine practices by Buddhist monks in Japan.
10. Tenchôssetsu is a celebration of the emperor’s birthday, in which the immigrants and their descendants performed games and sports competitions with the aim of enforcing union among them (Myotin 2006: 267). Itadakimasu is a greeting before a meal and gochissôssama is a greeting and thanks at the end of a meal (Handa 1987: 818–19).
11. Issei are the Japanese immigrants or first generation; Nisei, the children of Japanese immigrants or second generation; Sansei, the grandchildren of Japanese immigrants or third generation; Yonsei, great-grandchildren of Japanese immigrants or fourth generation; Nikkei, the descendants of Japanese immigrants.
12. Cascudo (1984) wrote about Jews in Northeast Brazil and how they preserved some traits from Judaism in their everyday life. For example, if somebody died his/her family covered all the mirrors in the home. The maintenance of these traits eventually could lead a group to affirm their Judaism, and to build a synagogue, such as was the case in Natal, the capital of Rio Grande do Norte State in Northeast Brazil (Ramagem 1994).
13. Candomblé is an African Brazilian religion.
14. Ihai is a small flat piece of wood that has on its front the Buddhist name of the deceased attributed after his/her death, and on the back the name that he/she used while alive (Mayema 2004: 123).
15. Interview with Professor Mary Okamoto (UNESP-Assis) by email on November 4, 2016.
16. Colonist (colono in Portuguese) in this case means a laborer who works on a coffee plantation. It was a special agreement between the land owner and the laborers, in which the latter lived in an area of the plantation, cultivated coffee with their family, received a small amount of money, and had the right to cultivate edible plants in between the coffee bushes to feeding their family. The colonist had to buy staples, like salt, sugar, and so on, at the grocery store that belonged to the coffee plantation owner. This system of work was called colonato in Portuguese.
17. See my critique of the theory of acculturation (Kosminsky 2007).
18. Mamão is a kind of papaya.
19. Tsukemono are Japanese preserved vegetables.
20. Testimony collected during the Centennial of Japanese Immigration to Brazil.
21. Ofuro means a traditional Japanese bathtub made of wood in which people immerse themselves in hot water.
22. Otedama means small bags made of cloth stuffed with rice or small beans (azuki) that are thrown into the hands in groups of three to five bags (Cytrynowicz 2017: 79).
23. Testimony collected during the Centennial of Japanese Immigration to Brazil.
24. Piracema is when groups of fish go upstream to deposit their eggs.
25. Mandi is a Brazilian freshwater fish.
26. Daikon is the Japanese name for a type of radish.
27. Malaria, “An infectious disease characterized by cycles of chills, fever, and sweating, caused by a protozoan of the genus Plasmodium in red blood cells, which is transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected female anopheles mosquito” (thefreedictionary.com. March 10. 2016).
28. When Antonio Suzuki was sixteen years old, he went to work in a drugstore in Cafelândia. He returned to Bastos in 1945. Later he opened his own pharmacy in Bastos.
29. General-Consul Saito used this financial support to build a Japanese hospital in São Paulo City. He created a Zai Burajiru Nihonjin Dojinkai (Sociedade Japonesa de Beneficência no Brasil, Japanese Society of Social Assistance in Brazil), known as Dojinkai, with the participation of 29 financial members (Uchiyama et al. 1992: 216).
30. Bauru is the closest big city to Bastos. The distance between the two cities is 209 km and it takes a little more than 3 hours to go from one city to the other.
31. Ganbare refers to accept all troubles without complaining, what means to accept one’s destiny, which has a positive meaning. Ganbare is based on Confucianism, which recommends that man must look for harmony (wa). Wa denotes harmony between man and universe. If man accepts whatever destiny was attributed to him, this conformity is one of virtue, which leads him to harmony. Ganbare in Brazil meant also to make an effort to work very hard in order to save money, whether families intended to go back to Japan or after World War II to have a better life. Japanese people needed to improve their personal virtues, so that each one can contribute in order to reach people’s harmony (Based on Sakurai 1993: 52).
32. Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, emeritus professor of sociology at São Paulo University, told this story in an informal conversation with her graduate students in the 1980s. According to her, this story happened at her grandparents’ coffee plantation in São Paulo State.
33. Professor Sadao Omote at UNESP–Marilia. Statement collected on March 1, 2016.
34. Mary Okamoto at UNESP-Assis. Statement collected in February 24, 2016.
