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