coffee plantations due to the labor shortage caused by the Italian ban on emigration. Japanese emigration to South America started at the end of the nineteenth century as temporary migration, following similar flows to Hawaii, the United States, and Canada. Japanese emigration to Latin American countries, of which Peru was the first, was spurred by the 1907 “gentlemen’s agreement” between the United States and Japan, which barred prospective Japanese immigrants from the United States. At the same time, Japanese emigration to Canada and Australia was prohibited. Both Peru and Brazil, however, needed cheap labor for agricultural work. The first immigrants faced “misery and hardship” in Peru (Takenaka 2004: 77) and many problems in Brazil (Saito 1961: 21).
After ten years of negotiation between Japan and Brazil, an agreement was signed in 1907 between the São Paulo state government and the Kõkoku Imin Kaisha (Imperial Company of Emigration) that opened the door. According to this agreement, the Japanese company would send 3,000 emigrants over three years. Thus, in 1908, the first group of 772 Japanese emigrants was sent as laborers to the coffee plantations. This immigration to Brazil was subsidized by the São Paulo state government, which paid part of the trip’s cost to the Japanese emigration company. The coffee plantation owners, who paid the immigrants’ wages, covered the other part. This type of immigration lasted until the end of World War I. When European immigration resumed, the São Paulo state government stopped subsidizing Japanese immigrants, arguing that they were unreliable workers and had ultimately left the plantations (Mita 1999: 39–40). The real reason they left, however, was that they were treated poorly, as if they were slaves, suffering from poor living conditions, debt to the coffee plantation company stores and malaria, which killed some of the colonists. The only alternative for the immigrants was to run away from the plantation at night (Sternberg 1970: 279–93).
When the Japanese immigrated to São Paulo State for the first time in 1908 as coffee plantation laborers, they faced many hardships. They had a different phenotype, spoke another language, ate different food, had particular habits and customs, and were not Catholics, as most Brazilians were. Plantation owners exploited them, treating them as if they were slaves. African–Brazilian slaves were freed only in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, and it took a long time for plantation owners to change their mentality toward their laborers.
Japanese emigration companies had a dual role in sending workers overseas. They sent families to labor on coffee plantations and promoted the emigration of landowners in order to establish colonies in Brazil. The first colony, named the Colony of Iguape, was built in Vale do Ribeira do Iguape, São Paulo State. Tokyo Syndicate was founded with financial resources from private individuals and from the Department of Agriculture and Commerce of Japan in 1910. In 1912, the São Paulo state government donated 50,000 hectares of land to Vale do Ribeira do Iguape. Four thousand Japanese arrived over four years in order to cultivate rice, with the São Paulo government subsidizing their travel expenses (Mita 1999: 44–45).
Another company dedicated to emigration and colonization, Brasil Takushoku Kabushiki Kaisha, was founded in 1913. The Japanese government, with financial support from Tõyõ Imin Kaisha, helped fund this company. As all the Japanese emigration companies were unified and given state approval, Brasil Takushoku Kabushiki Kaisha was incorporated into KKKK in 1919, which is when this company started building and administering the Colony of Iguape. From the start, immigrants were provided with a medical clinic, rice processing factory, schools, a food store, and a designated settlement house (Mita 1999: 45).
Japanese immigrants who labored on coffee plantations lived in poorly built houses made of wood that lacked a floor and furniture or a bathroom and kitchen. They were forced to make their own mattresses using grass or hay stored in the plantation barn and purchase fabric at the plantation owner’s store to sew clothing. Tables and stools were made from discarded branches, and there was no sewage disposal. Food was very expensive at the local store, and there were no doctors nearby. In order to bathe, they made an ofuro in the back of the house. It was a very difficult life, as Nakasato describes in his novel (2011):
German, Italian, and Swiss who immigrated as laborers for coffee plantations faced similar situations. These immigrants who traveled to southern Brazil as familial small landowners fared no better: the land was not yet measured; there were no houses, roads, schools, or food stores. In addition to these problems they had to deal with loneliness, because the distance between plots of land was great. (Seyferth 2004)
Shinano Iju Kyokai (Associação de Emigração de Shinano), from Nagano Province, established the Colonia de Aliança, later called Mirandópolis, in northwest São Paulo State in 1924. Other Japanese provinces, such as Tottori, Toyama, and Kumamoto, inspired by the example of Nagano Province, built their colonies nearby. This emigration and colonization was financially supported by these Japanese provinces and preceded those activities subsidized by the Japanese government. These settlements motivated Japanese capital to invest in the founding of Yugen Sekinin Brasil Takushoku Kumiai (Bratac), named Sociedade Colonizadora do Brasil Ltda. in São Paulo City in 1928. Under its leadership, the number of Japanese colonies where immigrants owned their land increased (Mita 1999: 46, 48).
In Brazil, Bratac represented Kaigai Iju Kumiai Rengokai (KIKR), or the Foundation of Japanese Provinces Association (founded in 1927), whose president was the Japanese Minister of the Interior. The Japanese government lent money to KIKR to buy 90,000 alqueires of land in São Paulo State and northern Paraná in order to establish coffee plantations under Japanese authority. The colonies of Aliança became part of KIKR. Bratac provided the Japanese colonies with a rice processing factory, ice factory, flourmill, lumber mill, brickyard, coffee processing factory, cotton spinning factory, school, hospital, and food stores. Among all the immigrants who came from Japan, only 4 percent settled directly into these colonies before World War II (Saito 1960: 295–96). However, many immigrants who had arrived earlier as coffee plantation laborers later moved to the Bratac colonies.
NOTES
1. All translations are by the author unless noted otherwise.
2. Brazil is divided in five administrative regions, each one with its own states. The North Region includes: Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, and Tocatins. The so-called Amazon area has, besides those states, part of Minas Gerais state in the Center-West region and most of Maranhão state in the Northeast region. The Northeast region includes these states: Maranhão, Piauí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe, and Bahia. The Central-West region has these states: Mato Grosso, Federal District, Goiás, and Mato Grosso do Sul. The Southeast region and includes: Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo. Finally, the South region includes the states: Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul.
3. This kind of agreement mandated that the Japanese laborers had to work for three or four years in a plantation, and during this time, they had to pay back their debt to the landholder (Saito 1961: 31, footnote 25).
4. Most Japanese immigrants, who came before World War II, were from the following regions: Kyushu, Chugoku, Okinawa, Hokkaido, Tohoku, and Shikoku (Sakurai, 2000: 133).
5. In São Paulo, 1 alqueire is equal to 2.42 hectares; 12,932 alqueires is equal to 31,295 hectares. One acre is equal to 0.4047 hectares.
Japanese Colonies in São Paulo State
First Arrivals and Plantation Labor
During the nineteenth century, coffee plantation owners in São Paulo State became very wealthy from slave labor. As owners expanded their plantations from the region of Campinas, near São Paulo City, to Araras around 1860, they needed a railroad to connect this frontier
