An Ethnography of the Lives of Japanese and Japanese Brazilian Migrants. Ethel V. Kosminsky
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.
Japanese immigration to Brazil diminished after 1933 due to the immigration quota established by the Constitution of 1934, which contained an amendment based on the U.S. National Origins Act of 1924. This amendment “fixed an annual quota of two percent of the number of immigrants from each nation who had arrived in the previous fifty years . . . The national government also gained total authority over immigration” (Lesser 1999: 120). As a result, Japanese immigration fell from 23,000 in 1933 to only 3,500 per year until 1942, when it stopped completely following the onset of the Pacific War.
Among those immigrants who arrived in 1933, 180 families settled in Bastos. From 1934 onwards, Bastos started receiving coffee laborers’ families and in 1937 those who came straight from Japan constituted only twenty percent of the Japanese colonists, as eighty percent came from coffee plantations. Therefore, the earlier immigrants assumed a position similar to those who came straight from Japan. They became owners of small agricultural properties and represented a large number of Bastos’ colonists (Mita 1999: 65–66). I will call these colonists indirect immigrants, because they did not arrive in Bastos directly from Japan.
Ms. Yanagisako took part in our first meeting at ACENBA in 2006. As a teacher of Japanese and someone who had just arrived from Japan, she said that the descendants of immigrants who arrived before World War II maintained Japanese culture, including its language from the Meiji Era, when widespread literacy began. In Bastos, she encountered Japan from the Meiji Period, not from a modern country. Monica Emiko Sasai, who worked in Japan with her family for several years, said that some words used in Bastos were no longer spoken in Japan.
Takahashi Akira drove us to Antonio Suzuki’s home. Very sick and eighty-three years old, he still wanted to talk to us. It is quite rare to meet a Japanese person or a second-generation immigrant whom compatriots call by a Portuguese name. Maybe because he owned a drugstore, and his name in Japanese was difficult for Brazilians to say, he remained Antonio Suzuki even to other Japanese Brazilians. He lived by himself in a big house with a very well-kept garden. Next to his house stood another one made of wood that looked very old. Maybe this was his original home.
Before meeting Mrs. Keiko Fukui, my students and I heard an unexpected question from a woman on the street whom I asked for the location of Hotel Fukui. To my surprise the woman said, “Why don’t you stay in a hotel at the entrance to the city? It’s a new hotel.” I considered her question a little unusual, and then I reminded myself that I was in a small city, where everybody probably knows each other. Anyway, through her directions we found the hotel easily. Bastos at that time had two business streets and a few side streets. Houses were mixed with businesses; with the stores at the front and the owners living at the back. Sometimes, a gated passageway led to the house.
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