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