For a century and more, Japanese and their descendants have migrated back and forth across the Pacific to and from South America in search of better lives for themselves and their children.
Brazil’s economy, the growth of which in recent years has contrasted starkly with Japan’s — has driven the latest wave of such journeys, with a third of Japan’s Brazilian community leaving since the 2008 global economic crisis hit.
For those left behind, the change brings very particular challenges.
In April 2008, about 13,000 Brazilian workers and their families lived in Toyohashi, an industrial city in central Japan, 250km southwest of Tokyo. Only about 8,000 remain.
Many of the migrants look Japanese despite their Portuguese names and Brazilian passports, which should be a key help for integration, but at the same time, many still know little of Japanese language and culture.
With their numbers now in rapid decline, the community has lost its self-sustaining critical mass, and those who choose to stay on are having to make extra efforts to bridge language and cultural divides. Andrea Pereira moved to Japan with her husband more than 10 years ago, and their six-year-old daughter Ellen was born into a family that spoke Portuguese at home, meaning she has never had the chance to properly learn Japanese.
The Pereiras’ solution was to send her to a pre-school run by a local Brazilian association in Toyohashi, where she can learn about her host culture, and how to talk to those around her.
“We hope that we can take away as much anxiety as possible,” pre-school teacher Tsuyuko Yokota said, adding that the school would help the children make a “smooth and fun start” at elementary school.
“Although there are Brazilian schools here that teach in our mother tongue of Portuguese, I’d prefer a Japanese school,” said Pereira, 30, a mother of three.
“We prefer them to be learning what it’s like to be Japanese,” she said.
The families’ divided identities are a legacy of a complicated history.
Thousands of Japanese went to South America at the start of the 20th century, accepting low wages and poor working conditions on coffee plantations after the abolition of slavery.
In the past 100 years, the number of Brazilians of Japanese descent had grown to about 1.4 million, according to official statistics.
Another example of such populations lies in Peru, where the ethnic Japanese politician Alberto Fujimori was president for 10 years from 1990 until he fled — to Japan — during a corruption scandal.
Unlike many rich nations, ethnically homogenous Japan does not have a large immigrant population, and has shown itself to be unusually allergic to the idea of large influxes of foreigners.
However, when its economy boomed in the 1970s and 1980s, policymakers in Tokyo found the country was short of labor and turned to the emigrants’ descendants.
When Tokyo moved to allow people with Japanese heritage to come to work in Japan on renewable three-year visas, tens of thousands crossed the Pacific to return to their ancestral homeland and seek their fortunes.
However, setting up home in Japan left some Brazilians struggling, with seemingly unbridgeable language and culture gaps meaning many simply retreated into their immigrant communities, creating pockets of Portuguese-speakers who had good jobs, but little common ground with their wider surroundings.
Since the global economic crisis hit four years ago, many short-term worker contracts have ended and the movement has been the other way, despite Brazil’s red hot economy slowing recently.
Japan’s economy shrank last year, hit by the huge earthquake and tsunami of March last year that left more than 19,000 dead and wreaked havoc with industrial production, and other factors stemming from global economic woes.
Kumiko Sugimoto, 51, hopes that with Japan’s rapidly graying society, finding work as a caregiver for the elderly will bring her the security she needs after losing her job at a bakery in Toyohashi.
She is studying for a nursing qualification at a vocational training school that also teaches Japanese language.
“Before, I used to think that we’d go back to Brazil, but my daughters grew up here, and now we can’t go back,” Sugimoto said. “So now I need as many qualifications I can get. I don’t think we’ll ever return to Brazil.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion