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