Japanese Brazilians are Brazilian citizens who are nationals or naturals of Japanese ancestry or Japanese immigrants living in Brazil. Japanese immigration to Brazil peaked between 1908 and 1960, with the highest concentration between 1926 and 1935. In 2022, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that there were 2 million Japanese descendants in Brazil, making it the country with the largest population of Japanese origin outside Japan. However, in terms of Japanese citizens, Brazil ranked seventh in 2023, with 46,900 Japanese citizens. Most of the Japanese-descendant population in Brazil has been living in the country for three or more generations and most only hold Brazilian citizenship. Nikkei is the term used to refer to Japanese people and their descendants.
Japanese immigration to Brazil officially began on June 18, 1908, when the ship Kasato Maru docked at Porto de Santos, bringing 781 Japanese workers to the coffee plantations in the São Paulo state countryside. For this reason, June 18 was established as the national day of Japanese immigration.Dia Nacional da Imigração Japonesa, Prefeitura Municipal de Promissão18 de junho, Dia Nacional da Imigração Japonesa, Migalhas Immigration to Brazil ceased by 1973, with the arrival of the last immigrant ship, the Nippon Maru. Between 1908 and 1963, 242,171 Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil, making them the fifth-largest immigrant group after Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and German immigrants. Currently, most Japanese Brazilians live in the states of São Paulo and Paraná.
In the early 20th century, Japan was overpopulated relative to its infrastructure, and its predominantly rural population experienced significant poverty. At the same time, the Brazilian government was encouraging immigration, especially to supply labor for coffee plantations in São Paulo. Coffee was Brazil's main export product, and the country's financial health relied on it. Much of the labor on Brazilian coffee plantations came from Italian immigrants, whose passage by ship was subsidized by the Brazilian government. However, in 1902, the Italian government issued the Prinetti Decree, which banned subsidized immigration to Brazil due to reports that Italian immigrants were being exploited as laborers on Brazilian farms. Consequently, the São Paulo government sought new sources of labor from other countries, including Japan, and Japanese immigration to Brazil developed in this context.
Labor contracts on coffee plantations required immigrants to work for five years, but conditions were so poor that many left within the first year. Through great effort, some Japanese workers managed to save enough to buy their own land, with the first Japanese land purchase occurring in 1911 in the São Paulo countryside. Over the decades, Japanese immigrants and their descendants gradually moved from rural areas to Brazilian cities. By the early 1960s, the Japanese Brazilian urban population had surpassed the rural one. Many Japanese immigrants began working in small businesses or providing basic services. In Japanese tradition, the eldest son would continue the family business to help support his younger siblings' education. By 1958, Japanese and their descendants, though less than 2% of the Brazilian population, accounted for 21% of Brazilians with education beyond high school. A 2016 IPEA study found that Japanese descendants had the highest average educational and salary levels in Brazil. With Brazil's economic deterioration from the late 1980s, many Japanese descendants from Brazil began migrating to Japan, in search of better economic conditions. These individuals are known as Dekasegis.
History Background
Between the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, coffee was the main export product of Brazil. At first, Brazilian farmers used African slave labour in the coffee plantations, but in 1850, the slave trade was abolished in Brazil. To solve the labour shortage, the Brazilian elite decided to attract European immigrants to work on the coffee plantations. This was also consistent with the government's push towards "whitening" the country. The hope was that through procreation the large African and Native American groups would be eliminated or reduced. The government and farmers offered to pay European immigrants' passage. The plan encouraged millions of Europeans, most of them Italians, to migrate to Brazil. However, once in Brazil, the immigrants received very low salaries and worked in poor conditions, including long working hours and frequent ill-treatment by their bosses. Because of this, in 1902, Italy enacted the Prinetti Decree, prohibiting subsidized emigration to Brazil.
Japan had been isolated from the rest of the world during the 265 years of the Edo period (Tokugawa Shogunate), without wars or epidemics brought in from abroad. With its agricultural techniques of the time, Japan produced only the food it needed and had practically no formal stocks for difficult periods. Any agricultural crop failure caused widespread famine. The end of the Tokugawa Shogunate gave way to an intense project of modernization and opening to the outside world during the Meiji era. Despite the agrarian reform, mechanization of agriculture made thousands of peasants unemployed. Thousands of other small peasants became indebted or lost their land because they could not pay the high taxes.
The end of feudalism in Japan generated great poverty in the rural population, so many Japanese people began to emigrate in search of better living conditions. By the 1930s, Japanese industrialisation had significantly boosted the population. However, prospects for Japanese people to migrate to other countries were limited. The United States had banned non-white immigration from some parts of the world on the basis that they would not integrate into society; this Exclusion clause, of the 1924 Immigration Act, specifically targeted the Japanese. At the same time in Australia, the White Australia policy prevented the immigration of non-whites to Australia.
First immigrants
In 1907, the Brazilian and the Japanese governments signed a treaty permitting Japanese migration to Brazil. This was due in part to the decrease in the Italian immigration to Brazil and a new labour shortage on the coffee plantations.Imigração Japonesa no Brasil Also, Japanese immigration to the United States had been barred by the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907. The first Japanese immigrants (781 people – mostly farmers) came to Brazil in 1908 on the . About half of these immigrants were Okinawans from southern Okinawa, who had faced 29 years of oppression by the Japanese government following the Ryukyu Islands's annexation, becoming the first Ryukyuan Brazilians. They travelled from the Japanese port of Kobe via the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. Many of them worked on coffee plantations.
In the first seven years, 3,434 more Japanese families (14,983 people) arrived. The beginning of World War I in 1914 started a boom in Japanese migration to Brazil. Between 1917 and 1940, over 164,000 Japanese came to Brazil, with 90% of them going to São Paulo, where most of the coffee plantations were located.
+ Japanese immigration to Brazil by period, 1906–1993IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (visitado 4 de setembro de 2008)日系移民データ – 在日ブラジル商業会議所 – CCBJ , which cites: "1941年までの数字は外務省領事移住部 「我が国民の海外発展-移住百年のあゆみ(資料集)」【東京、1971年】p140参照. 1952年から1993年の数字は国際協力事業団「海外移住統計(昭和27年度〜平成5年度)」【東京、1994年】p28,29参照." Years Immigrants 1906–1910 1,714 1911–1915 13,371 1916–1920 13,576 1921–1925 11,350 1926–1930 59,564 1931–1935 72,661 1936–1941 16,750 1952–1955 7,715 1956–1960 29,727 1961–1965 9,488 1966–1970 2,753 1971–1975 1,992 1976–1980 1,352 1981–1985 411 1986–1990 171 1991–1993 48 Total 242,643
New life in Brazil The vast majority of Japanese immigrants intended to work a few years in Brazil, make some money, and go home. However, "getting rich quick" was a dream that was almost impossible to achieve. This was exacerbated by the fact that it was obligatory for Japanese immigrants to Brazil prior to the Second World War to emigrate in familial units. Because multiple persons necessitated monetary support in these familial units, Japanese immigrants found it nearly impossible to return home to Japan even years after emigrating to Brazil. The immigrants were paid a very low salary and worked long hours of exhausting work. Also, everything that the immigrants consumed had to be purchased from the landowner (see truck system). Soon, their debts became very significant. Contrary to the plan, only 10% of the nearly 190,000 Japanese who immigrated to Brazil before the Second World War returned to Japan.
On August 1, 1908, The New York Times remarked that relations between Brazil and Japan at the time were "not extremely cordial", because of "the attitude of Brazil toward the immigration of Japanese labourers."An extensive quotation from this article appears in -class battleship.
The landowners in Brazil still had a slavery mentality. Immigrants, although employees, had to confront the rigidity and lack of labour laws. Indebted and subjected to hours of exhaustive work, often suffering physical violence, suicide, (to escape at night), and strikes were some of the attitudes taken by many Japanese because of the exploitation on coffee farms. Even when they were free of their contractual obligations on Brazil's coffee plantations, it was often impossible for immigrants to return home due to their meager earnings.
However, through a system called "partnership farming", in a contract with a landowner, in which the immigrants committed themselves to deforesting the land, sowing coffee, taking care of the plantation and returning the area in seven years' time, when the second harvest would be ready, the immigrants could keep the profits from the first harvest, taking into account that the coffee cultivation is biannual. They also kept everything they planted, in addition to coffee. In this way, many Japanese managed to save some money and buy their first pieces of land in Brazil. The first land purchase by the Japanese in Brazil took place in São Paulo, in 1911.
Many Japanese immigrants purchased land in rural Brazil, having been forced to invest what little capital they had into land in order to someday make enough to return to Japan. As independent farmers, Japanese immigrants formed communities that were ethnically isolated from the rest of Brazilian society. The immigrants who settled and formed these communities referred to themselves as and their settlements as . In 1940, the Superintendence of Coffee Business issued that even though the Japanese living in São Paulo made up only 3.5% of the state's population, they were responsible for 100% of the production of ramie, silk, peaches and strawberries; 99% of mint and tea; 80% of potatoes and vegetables; 70% of eggs; 50% of bananas; 40% of the cotton and 20% of the coffee produced by the state of São Paulo.
Japanese children born in Brazil were educated in schools founded by the Japanese community. Most only learned to speak the Japanese language and lived within the Japanese community in rural areas. Over the years, many Japanese managed to buy their own land and became small farmers. They started to plant strawberries, tea and rice. Only 6% of children were the result of interracial relationships. Immigrants rarely accepted marriage with a non-Japanese person.Enciclopédia das Línguas no Brasil – Japonês (Accessed September 4, 2008)