Japanese immigration in Brazil officially began in 1908. In 2022, Brazil is home to the largest population of Japanese origin outside Japan, with about 2 million Nikkei (日系), a term used to refer to Japanese and their descendants. A Japanese-Brazilian (Japanese: 日系ブラジル人, nikkei burajiru-jin) is a Brazilian citizen with Japanese ancestry. People born in Japan and living in Brazil are also considered Japanese-Brazilians.
This process began on June 18, 1908, when the ship Kasato Maru arrived in the country bringing 781 workers to farms in the interior of São Paulo. Consequently, June 18 was established as the national day of Japanese immigration. In 1973, the flow stopped almost completely after the Nippon Maru immigration ship arrived; at that time, there were almost 200,000 Japanese settled in the country.
Currently, there are approximately one million Japanese-Brazilians, mostly living in the states of São Paulo and Paraná. According to a 2016 survey published by IPEA, in a total of 46,801,772 Brazilians' names analyzed, 315,925 or 0.7% of them had the only or last name of Japanese origin.
The descendants of Japanese are called Nikkei, their children are Nisei, their grandchildren are Sansei, and their great-grandchildren are Yonsei. Japanese-Brazilians who moved to Japan in search of work and settled there from the late 1980s onwards are called dekasegi.
History of Japanese immigrants
Need for emigration in Japan
At the beginning of the 20th century, Japan was overpopulated. The country had been isolated from the world during the 265 years of the Edo period (Tokugawa shogunate), with no wars, epidemics from outside or emigration. Using the agricultural techniques of the time, Japan produced only as much food as it consumed, without storing enough for hard times. Any shortfall in the agricultural harvest caused widespread famine.
The end of the Tokugawa Shogunate allowed an intense project of modernization and expansion during the Meiji era. Despite land reform, the mechanization of agriculture left thousands of peasants unemployed, and thousands more had fallen into debt or lost their land because they could not pay the high taxes, which in the Meiji era were levied in cash, instead of being collected as part of agricultural production.
In the countryside, farmers who did not have their land confiscated for non-payment of taxes were barely able to support their families. Landless peasants moved to the main cities, which became crowded, and job opportunities became increasingly rare, forming a mass of miserable workers.
The emigration policy implemented by the Japanese government was mainly intended to relieve social tensions due to the scarcity of cultivable land and indebtedness of rural workers, allowing for the implementation of modernization projects.
From the 1880s, Japan encouraged the emigration of its inhabitants through contracts with other governments. Before Brazil, Japanese had already emigrated to the United States (mainly Hawaii), Peru and Mexico. The early 20th century also experienced large flows of Japanese emigration to colonize the newly conquered territories of Korea and Taiwan. Large colonies of Japanese descendants were formed only in Brazil, the United States and Peru, and almost all the immigrants who formed large colonies in Korea and Taiwan returned to Japan after the end of World War II.
In April 1905, Minister Fukashi Sugimura arrived in Brazil and visited several locations, being well received by both the local authorities and the people; part of this treatment is due to the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War against the great Russian Empire. The report produced by Sugimura, which described the receptivity of Brazilians, increased Japan's interest in Brazil. Influenced by this report and also by the lectures given by Secretary Kumaichi Horiguchi, Japanese decided to travel to Brazil individually.
Need for immigration in Brazil
Due to the expansion of coffee plantations, which was the major driver of the Brazilian economy from the second half of the 19th century until the 1920s, there was a demand for cheap workforce in rural São Paulo.
The first official visit to pursue a diplomatic trade agreement with Japan took place in 1880. On November 16 of that year, Vice Admiral Artur Silveira da Mota began negotiations in Tokyo to establish a Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between the two countries. Mota was received by the Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Kagenori Ueno. Efforts were renewed in 1882 with Minister Plenipotentiary Eduardo Calado, who accompanied Mota in 1880. However, the treaty would only be signed three years later, on November 5, 1895, by the Brazilian plenipotentiary minister Gabriel de Toledo Piza e Almeida and the Japanese plenipotentiary Minister Sone Arasuke, allowing the introduction of Japanese immigrants in Brazil.
Japan, which had only opened up to international trade in 1846, was considered very distant physically and politically from Brazil. The signing of this treaty represented the beginning of a relationship that has persisted to the present day, with the exception of the years of the World War II.
Before, the Brazilian immigration policy was executed not only as a means to colonize, but also to "civilize" and "whitewash" the country with European population. The immigration of Asians was practically prohibited in 1890. In that year, Decree No. 528 signed by President Deodoro da Fonseca and Minister of Agriculture Francisco Glicério determined that the entry of immigrants from Africa and Asia would be allowed only with the authorization of the National Congress. The same decree did not restrict, and even encouraged, the immigration of Europeans. It was only in 1892 that Law No. 97 was approved, allowing Chinese and Japanese immigrants to enter Brazil, and Decree No. 528 of 1890 lost its effect.
The prejudice against Asian immigrants was very strong. All Asians were considered inferior races that would harm the "whitewashing" that was taking place in Brazil with the arrival of European immigrants. There was also the fear of the "yellow peril", in other words, that large populations of Orientals would spread ethnically and culturally throughout the Americas. Fear of the "yellow peril" had been exacerbated by the militaristic expansionism of the Japanese empire which, seeking to conquer lands to colonize, defeated China in 1895 and Russia in 1905 (the third defeat of a European country against a non-European in modern times, the first being the Mongol invasion of Europe in 1241, and the second being Italy against Ethiopia in 1896). There was the feeling that the Japanese immigrant was an "unassimilable desired" due to his customs and religion. At that time, the Chinese were considered superior to the Japanese, but this view changed after the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War.
From 1892, Senator Ubaldino do Amaral became one of the most prominent figures on the national political scene regarding his position against the entry of Asians into Brazil. This opinion was shared by Luís Delfino, Senator for Santa Catarina. In 1892, there were several debates in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate on the possibility of Asians entering the country. The position defended by Ubaldino was widely publicized in the political space, since he had great prestige and even became vice-president of the House. However, on October 5, 1892, President Floriano Peixoto sanctioned Law No. 97, allowing Asian immigrants to enter Brazil.
Francisco José de Oliveira Viana, author of the classic book "Populações Meridionais do Brasil", published in 1918, and Nina Rodrigues, creator of Legal Medicine in Brazil, were the great ideologues of the "whitewashing" of the country. Oliveira Viana considered that "the Japanese [were] like sulphur: insoluble".
Despite the prejudice, interest in the workforce was very high and the arrival of a ship with Japanese immigrants began to be planned for 1897. However, due to a coffee overproduction crisis, international prices collapsed and the arrival of immigrants was discouraged. By 1901, international coffee prices had recovered and the Brazilian government considered receiving Japanese immigrants again. The chargé d'affaires of the first Brazilian diplomatic mission in Japan, Manuel de Oliveira Lima, was consulted and expressed his opposition to the project of receiving Japanese immigrants. He wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs warning about the danger of Brazilians mixing with "inferior races".
In 1902, the Italian government banned subsidized emigration of Italians to Brazil. The coffee plantations faced a severe shortage of workers as the number of Italians decreased, which led the Brazilian government to accept the arrival of Japanese immigrants. In 1907, Brazil created the Immigration and Colonization Law, which regularized the entry of all immigrants and definitively ended the restrictions of Decree No. 528 of 1890.
In 1906, Ryo Mizuno, president of the Kokoku Shokumin Kaisha (Imperial Emigration Company), visited Brazil accompanied by Teijiro Suzuki. The timing was propitious, as the restriction of Japanese entry into the US and the restriction of Italian emigration to Brazil meant that the interests of both countries, Japan and Brazil, were aligned. The interest came mainly from São Paulo, since the state was looking for alternatives to Italian immigrants, pursuing the policy of wage depreciation by offering rural workers in quantities above demand. There was also an expectation that Japanese immigrants would resolve the tensions between employers and employees, a situation that had been worsening since the beginning of the century. After the government received favorable reports of the performance of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii, in which the superiority of the Japanese labor force compared to Europeans was praised, the São Paulo state government approved their entry.
The contract between Ryo Mizuno and the Secretary of Agriculture Affairs, Carlos José de Arruda Botelho, representing the São Paulo government, was signed on November 6, 1907. The document stipulated that 3,000 Japanese immigrants would be brought in annual batches of 1,000 people to work as farmers. On November 23, 1907, the newspaper A República published a note opposing the entry of the Japanese.
Pre-immigration The first Japanese to land on Brazilian territory were four crew members of the ship Wakamiya-maru that sank off the Japanese coast in 1803, who were rescued by a Russian warship that took them on their journey. On the return trip, the ship docked for repairs in the Desterro Port, now Florianópolis, on December 20, and remained there until February 4, 1804. There, the four Japanese recorded the life of the local population and the agricultural production of the time.
When Law No. 97 became effective, in 1894, Japan sent Deputy Tadashi Nemoto to visit the states of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and São Paulo. He was pleased with what he saw and made reports to the government and to the Japanese emigration companies in which he recommended Brazil for Japanese immigrants. The departure of the first batch of Japanese to work in the coffee plantations in 1897 was canceled the day before the shipment, due to the crisis that the price of the product suffered throughout the world, which would continue until 1906.