[EDITED x2]
Between the time spent in Tokyo and Kyoto, two of Japan's most popular and touristic cities, the field trip group had a chance to experience a rather more common taste of the japanese lifestyle, in the city of Mito.
There, we walked through farms, picked up and ate raw beans, and visited a local farmer's traditional house. In the tour, the farmer told us (Through Jordan, the Tokiwa University staff who was assigned as translator in the moment) about the empty properties surrounding the area. There was an increasing amount of the population, especially amongst young people, who were leaving rural areas such as the one we were in, to migrate to larger cities, resulting in fine houses being abandoned along with the properties they are situated in.
Still in Mito, I turned on the television one day, in hope to watch the weirdest japanese game show I could find. Instead, something else called my attention. It was a documentary or news report on the brazilian community growing in rural areas throughout Japan. Sincerely, I don't remember if the show had subtitles or if it was dubbed, but I could understand it. So I layed in bed and dedicated the following minutes to watch it.
Apparently, to fill the empty land caused by the migration of local owners to larger urban centers, some prefectures adopted external policies of attracting foreigners to occupy the houses and work on the land. Brazilians were a large portion of such immigrants.
This called for my curiosity since, as I mentioned on my previous post (https://psndoadan.wixsite.com/website/post/edo-history-of-vending-machines-in-japan), I am accustomed to the opposite relation.
Extract from the blog post:
"(...) For this reason, many prefectures implement policies to attract foreign labour to occupy the increasing number of abandoned houses in the fields. In Mito, I watched a news report on the increasing number of brazilians who came to Japan to work on the fields. This is interesting to me as I am used to the opposite side of this relationship: Living in Sao Paulo (the biggest concentrations of japanese people outside on Japan), I grew up with many Japanese friends- most of their relatives having immigrated to work on brazilian fields. The immigration movement was very extensive."
The region I grew up in Brazil, São Paulo, is in fact the largest concentration of Japanese people outside of Japan. The neighborhood I grew up in, ParaÃso, is not too far from the area that hosts the largest Japanese community in São Paulo (and, therefore, in the world- after Japan) - the neighborhood of Liberdade. Ramen shops, japanese flags, and even onsens are everywhere. It is a true Japantown. I had many japanese friends growing up, so I frequented many of those places.
Why are there so many japanese people living in Brazil?
The first ship that transported Japanese immigrants to Brazil was Kasato Maru, in 1908. It carried 790 people, mostly farmers from Okinawa, who traveled to Brazil in to work on coffee plantations, in search for jobs and a better life. Although the first, this was not the most significant wave of Japanese immigration to Brazil.
This was about 50 years after Japan abolished the close door policy (1858) under pressure by the United States. So Brazil was not the first destination to which Japanese immigrants went to. In 1868, 153 immigrants left Japan to live in Hawaii, to work on sugar cane plantations. Additional 42 Japanese citizens went to farms in Guam.
The context, in Japan, for the biggest wave of immigration to Brazil, is that of the of the second Great war. To avoid it, about 750,000 Japanese left the country to live and work abroad in the pre war period. Brazil was the destination to 25% of them (close to 190,000 individuals). On the post war period, the number of immigrants that arrived in Brazil was about 55,000, between 1953 and 1973.
After the war, the country was devastated. Both physically, and for its citizens, psychologically, having to endure the death of thousands, and the defeat of a leader who called for the Japanese nationalistic feeling of superiority over other nations and claimed to be, himself, associated with the divine.
Japan had spent the previous four decades annexing territories in China, Korea and Southeast Asia, relying heavily on importing food. During this period, there was, naturally, an intense occupation of these regions, by Japanese people. After their surrender, Most of these territories were liberated or occupied, so millions of the Japanese who lived there were sent back to Japan. This raised a very complicated problem for the nation: millions of refugees and being cut off its food supplies. The result was widespread starvation.
Looking back, today, to the the events that lead this time, one may conclude that Japan's recovery was relatively fast and successful. But at the time that it was occurring, the situation was different. One could not be certain of how Japan would recover, and at what pace. There was suffering happening in the present, many people living in very complicated situations, and uncertainty about what the future was to bring. This was the context that inspired many Japanese people to emigrate overseas, in search for better opportunities and a better life, explaining the impressive community of approximately 1.6 million of Japanese descendents in Brazil (as of 2014, according to the IBGE - Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).
Why Brazil ?
Initially, the main destinations for Japanese immigrants was Hawaii and other states in the US; Canada and Australia. But eventually, those countries set a limit to the number of japanese immigrants they would accept, due to the growing anti-Japanese sentiments from the population, and xenophobia from the fear that their jobs would be taken away from them.
For this reason, to deal with the new immigration limit imposed by those countries, Japan turned to South America, mainly to Brazil, where government policies and marketing campaigns were being used to attract foreign labour to work on coffee plantations.
A brief context for Brazil...
Brazil was once the world's main coffee producer and exporter. In fact, this title lasted more that 150 years, between the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Sadly, Brazil also topped the charts as the world's biggest consumer of african slave labour.
To put it in context, from 1530 until Brazil abolished slavery, in 1888 (Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery...) about 4,000,000 Africans were "imported" to brazilian lands as slaves (i). Comparatively speaking, the number for the United States (and, at the time, the 13 colonies), known, worldwide, for their use of slave labour, is fewer than 350,000. (ii) Brazil received 40% of the total number of Africans brought to the Americas, while the US received approximately 10%.
Due to this fact, the current population of Brazil has a higher proportion of african-descendent citizens than most african countries.(ii)
Brazilian farmers used the abundant supply of slave labour to work on their coffee plantations. With the abolishment of slave trade in 1950 (*slaves at the time remained slaves until 1888), a deficit of cheap labour was created. To solve the problem, the elite coffee producers worked on attracting european immigrants (mainly from Italy) to work on their plantations. They would often subsidize their trip.
Upon arrival, those immigrants faced low salaries and poor work conditions, including ill-treatment from their bosses, who were use to deal with slaves and not employees. For this reason, Italy (the country with the biggest number of immigrants to Brazil) prohibited italian subsidized immigration to Brazil.
Another labour shortage was created.
As the context in Japan was one of poverty and overpopulation, Brazil fulfilled Japan's need for a new destination to immigrate (as we have seen, outside of Australia and North America), and Japan fulfilled Brazil's need for new labour.
16/June/2019
Tokyo, Japan 🇯🇵
Edited:
Galicia, Spain 🇪🇸