Japanese Immigrants in the Northeast
Japanese immigrants established eight colonies in the following northeast states: Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco, and Bahia, comprising 115 families. The immigrants in Bahia had probably migrated there from São Paulo and Paraná States. All of them grew agricultural crops and raised poultry. They cultivated green peppers, carrots, tomatoes, chayote, and squash, and watermelons, melons, bananas, passion fruit, papayas, and oranges. Their cereal crops included rice and corn. Besides these crops, they planted sugarcane and black pepper. They also cultivated flowers. This produce was sold directly to consumers or through intermediaries or cooperatives. The immigrants also created new agricultural techniques, such as hybrid crops.
Almost all Japanese immigrants were able to read and write. Although children worked in the field, they attended school too, despite having to walk two hours each way through a forest in order to attend classes at a junior high school and college located in the closest city (Valente 1980: 29–37).
Japanese Immigrants in the South: Rio Grande do Sul
Japanese immigrants, totaling 2,249 people, arrived in Rio Grande do Sul State before World War II. They moved to this state due to the availability of public land, government support, favorable environmental conditions, a developing economy, and rich soil. Italian and German immigrants had inhabited this state since the 1800s. Japanese immigrants and their descendants settled in cities located on the border between Brazil and Argentina and on the border between Brazil and Uruguay, as well as in nearby suburbs. They settled among Italian, German, and Polish immigrants and their descendants. They spread throughout the state, scattered in small numbers, even on the coast and in the cattle-raising areas.
Most Japanese immigrants rented land to cultivate; others quickly became landowners. These Japanese immigrants and their descendants came in small groups traveling from the São Paulo countryside. They understood that the social environment allowed them to become landowners or easily rent a plot of land, so few worked as wage laborers at the beginning of colonization. Many of them cultivated fruit and vegetable in the suburbs, thus supplying nearby cities with produce. Most also raised poultry. Other farmers cultivated flowers. A few immigrants also arrived in Rio Grande do Sul directly from Japan between 1955 and 1963 (Laytano 1980: 39–65).
Japanese Immigration to São Paulo State
São Paulo State sought Japanese immigrants to work on its coffee plantations due to the labor shortage caused by the Italian ban on emigration. Japanese emigration to South America started at the end of the nineteenth century as temporary migration, following similar flows to Hawaii, the United States, and Canada. Japanese emigration to Latin American countries, of which Peru was the first, was spurred by the 1907 “gentlemen’s agreement” between the United States and Japan, which barred prospective Japanese immigrants from the United States. At the same time, Japanese emigration to Canada and Australia was prohibited. Both Peru and Brazil, however, needed cheap labor for agricultural work. The first immigrants faced “misery and hardship” in Peru (Takenaka 2004: 77) and many problems in Brazil (Saito 1961: 21).
After ten years of negotiation between Japan and Brazil, an agreement was signed in 1907 between the São Paulo state government and the Kõkoku Imin Kaisha (Imperial Company of Emigration) that opened the door. According to this agreement, the Japanese company would send 3,000 emigrants over three years. Thus, in 1908, the first group of 772 Japanese emigrants was sent as laborers to the coffee plantations. This immigration to Brazil was subsidized by the São Paulo state government, which paid part of the trip’s cost to the Japanese emigration company. The coffee plantation owners, who paid the immigrants’ wages, covered the other part. This type of immigration lasted until the end of World War I. When European immigration resumed, the São Paulo state government stopped subsidizing Japanese immigrants, arguing that they were unreliable workers and had ultimately left the plantations (Mita 1999: 39–40). The real reason they left, however, was that they were treated poorly, as if they were slaves, suffering from poor living conditions, debt to the coffee plantation company stores and malaria, which killed some of the colonists. The only alternative for the immigrants was to run away from the plantation at night (Sternberg 1970: 279–93).
When the Japanese immigrated to São Paulo State for the first time in 1908 as coffee plantation laborers, they faced many hardships. They had a different phenotype, spoke another language, ate different food, had particular habits and customs, and were not Catholics, as most Brazilians were. Plantation owners exploited them, treating them as if they were slaves. African–Brazilian slaves were freed only in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, and it took a long time for plantation owners to change their mentality toward their laborers.
Japanese emigration companies had a dual role in sending workers overseas. They sent families to labor on coffee plantations and promoted the emigration of landowners in order to establish colonies in Brazil. The first colony, named the Colony of Iguape, was built in Vale do Ribeira do Iguape, São Paulo State. Tokyo Syndicate was founded with financial resources from private individuals and from the Department of Agriculture and Commerce of Japan in 1910. In 1912, the São Paulo state government donated 50,000 hectares of land to Vale do Ribeira do Iguape. Four thousand Japanese arrived over four years in order to cultivate rice, with the São Paulo government subsidizing their travel expenses (Mita 1999: 44–45).
Another company dedicated to emigration and colonization, Brasil Takushoku Kabushiki Kaisha, was founded in 1913. The Japanese government, with financial support from Tõyõ Imin Kaisha, helped fund this company. As all the Japanese emigration companies were unified and given state approval, Brasil Takushoku Kabushiki Kaisha was incorporated into KKKK in 1919, which is when this company started building and administering the Colony of Iguape. From the start, immigrants were provided with a medical clinic, rice processing factory, schools, a food store, and a designated settlement house (Mita 1999: 45).
Japanese immigrants who labored on coffee plantations lived in poorly built houses made of wood that lacked a floor and furniture or a bathroom and kitchen. They were forced to make their own mattresses using grass or hay stored in the plantation barn and purchase fabric at the plantation owner’s store to sew clothing. Tables and stools were made from discarded branches, and there was no sewage disposal. Food was very expensive at the local store, and there were no doctors nearby. In order to bathe, they made an ofuro in the back of the house. It was a very difficult life, as Nakasato describes in his novel (2011):
German, Italian, and Swiss who immigrated as laborers for coffee plantations faced similar situations. These immigrants who traveled to southern Brazil as familial small landowners fared no better: the land was not yet measured; there were no houses, roads, schools, or food stores. In addition to these problems they had to deal with loneliness, because the distance between plots of land was great. (Seyferth 2004)
Shinano Iju Kyokai (Associação de Emigração de Shinano), from Nagano Province, established the Colonia de Aliança, later called Mirandópolis, in northwest São Paulo State in 1924. Other Japanese provinces, such as Tottori, Toyama, and Kumamoto, inspired by the example of Nagano Province, built their colonies nearby. This emigration and colonization was financially supported by these Japanese provinces and preceded those activities subsidized by the Japanese government. These settlements motivated Japanese capital to invest in the founding of Yugen Sekinin Brasil Takushoku Kumiai (Bratac), named Sociedade Colonizadora do Brasil Ltda. in São Paulo City in 1928. Under its leadership, the number of Japanese colonies where immigrants owned their land increased (Mita 1999: 46, 48).
In Brazil, Bratac represented Kaigai Iju Kumiai Rengokai (KIKR), or the Foundation of Japanese Provinces Association (founded in 1927), whose president was the Japanese Minister of the Interior. The Japanese government lent money to KIKR to buy 90,000 alqueires of land in São Paulo State and northern Paraná in order to establish coffee plantations under Japanese authority. The colonies of Aliança became part of KIKR. Bratac provided the Japanese colonies with a rice processing factory, ice factory, flourmill, lumber mill, brickyard, coffee processing factory, cotton spinning factory, school, hospital, and food stores. Among all the immigrants who came from Japan, only 4 percent settled directly into these colonies before World War II (Saito 1960: