built the first railroad connecting Jundiai to Santos. In 1868, coffee plantation owners built the Companhia Paulista de Estradas de Ferro to reach the coffee plantations that stretched toward the virgin forests of western São Paulo State. During World War I, new coffee plantations began production in Noroeste (Northwest), Alta Sorocabana, and Alta Paulista, and the Estrada de Ferro Noroeste do Brasil reached these areas too. Alta Sorocabana is situated to the West of Assis between the Paranapanema and Peixe rivers and Alta Paulista is located between the Peixe River and the Aguapeí River, to the west of Piratininga. The area west of Bauru, between the Aguapeí and Tietê rivers, had rail connections to the coast (Vieira 1973: 58, 60).
Coffee plantations in western São Paulo State differed from those in the old coffee regions of São Paulo State and Rio de Janeiro State. Railroad construction started in 1870 and was so crucial for the expansion of coffee production and regional population growth that regions of São Paulo State are named after the railroads which served them: Mogiana, Paulista, Sorocabana, Araraquarense, and Northwest. The Companhia Paulista de Estradas de Ferro reached Marilia in 1928 and Tupã in 1941, and finally extended to Panorama alongside the Paraná River. As highways stretched westward after 1920, the colonization of the São Paulo State hinterland increased even more. Those cities where railroad construction temporarily stopped, such as Marilia, experienced business growth and became regional centers (Vieira 1973: 60–62).
In 1895, Japan and Brazil signed an Amity and Trade Treaty that foretold future Japanese immigration to Brazil. The relationship between Japanese migration agencies, the coffee business, and the Brazilian state governments of São Paulo and Minas Gerais promoted Japanese emigration to fill the constant labor shortage that worsened in 1902 when the Italian government prohibited its citizens from emigrating to work on coffee plantations. The absence of the Italians had created a crisis in the coffee business. Conservative voices in Brazil objected strenuously to the emigration of Japanese and Chinese workers, which they regarded as a “yellow peril” that would dilute the racial composition of the Brazilian population. As there was no available labor supply in Europe that could be encouraged to emigrate, Brazil turned to Japan. In 1908, São Paulo became the first Brazilian state to receive Japanese immigrants, a group that worked in the expanding coffee business that was rapidly expanding westward toward the Paraná River (Endoh 2009: 27–28).
Initially, the São Paulo State government assumed the leading role in the tripartite arrangement with the coffee plantation owners and the Japanese emigration agencies. The government subsidized part of the travel fare for immigrants with the remainder paid by coffee plantation owners, who then charged their laborers by withholding part of their salary. The Japanese emigration company, Kõkoku Shokumin Kaisha, sent the first 168 Japanese families to Brazil. These families contained 781 hired immigrants and twelve without any labor agreement (Saito 1961: 29). Although part of the travel fare was subsidized, an immigrant needed to spend 150 yen per person, which prevented poor rural people from emigrating. From 1908 to 1914, the total number of immigrants reached 3,734 families or 14,886 people (Saito 1961: 31). Saito demonstrated that those immigrants probably came from urban areas and had sufficient resources. Yet, as the Japanese process of industrialization/urbanization started after the Meiji Restoration in the late 1800s, the immigrants’ parents and/or grandparents were most likely from rural areas.
The initial settlers faced harsh living conditions on the plantations, suffering from poor diet, increasing debt, and high living expenses. Among the first Japanese workers that arrived in 1908 on the Kasato-maru were 210 who went to the coffee plantation Fazenda Dumont. Of this number, many ran away when they learned that their meager wages would not enable them to save money and return home (Tschudia 1978: 144–46). They looked for better wages on another plantation or settled in areas where the forest had been recently cut down. Others fled to the outskirts of São Paulo City, migrated to Argentina, or returned to Japan (Vieira 1973: 64; Endoh 2009: 29). They quickly learned that cultivating cash crops rather than working on a plantation was the fastest route to raising capital (Reichl 1995: 40). Troubled by the Japanese laborers’ refusal to settle permanently on coffee plantations, in contrast to European colonists, the São Paulo State government decided to stop the flow of Japanese migrants and the payment of subsidies in 1914, just when the tenth group of immigrants had arrived at the Port of Santos.
Following the outbreak of World War I, European immigration to Brazil was severely interrupted due to the difficulty involved in traveling across the Atlantic Ocean. This heightened the need for Japanese workers. In 1917, three Japanese emigration companies created the Brasil Imin Kumiai or Emigration Society to Brazil, which reached a new four- to five-year agreement with the São Paulo State government to admit 4,000–5,000 colonists per year and reinstate the subsidies. As a result, 3,413 families comprising 13,597 people arrived in São Paulo State between 1917 and 1920 (Saito 1961: 31–32).
After the new agreement in 1917, the Japanese government became more directly involved in the migration business to Brazil and founded Kaigai Kogyo Kaisha, KKK, with the participation of two enterprises, Toyo-Imin and Nambei-Imin. KKK now held a monopoly on emigration services to Brazil. In 1921, the Japanese government started subsidizing KKK. Then in 1923, the government created a special service in charge of emigration propaganda and started paying the company the amount of money that it charged the emigrants. The agreement with the São Paulo State government ended in 1920 and, as the war was over, immigrants from Portugal, Spain, and Italy started arriving to work at coffee plantations.
The renewed European emigration led the Japanese government to send poor peasants and political dissidents to Brazil. Japanese colonization companies usually worked together with similar Brazilian enterprises, but the Japanese KKK insisted that Brazil subsidize immigration, which it did. São Paulo State only agreed to subsidize partial travel expenses between 1908 and 1921 (including 3,000 in 1920 and an additional 600 the following year) for those coffee plantation workers whose emigration had been arranged by Japanese immigration companies. According to this agreement, plantation owners had to reimburse 40 percent of this subsidy back to the state. They then turned around and subtracted this amount from the colonists’ salaries. Although the subsidy increased, it ended completely in 1921 (Saito 1961: 33, 68; Endoh 2009: 138–40).
The São Paulo State government refused to grant any more subsidies because Japanese colonists often worked one year or less on the coffee plantations, while European colonists remained on the plantations far longer. To keep the flow of immigrants, the Japanese government decided to subsidize labor emigrants in 1925. Sociologist Hiroshi Saito considers the period from 1908 to 1925 as the exploratory period of Japanese immigration to Brazil (Saito 1961: 32–33). Indeed, 1925 marked a watershed in Japanese immigration to Brazil because the Japanese government assumed control of the immigration process. In summary, between 1908 and 1941, Japan sent 188,985 immigrants to Brazil with most arriving between 1925 and 1934. By 1934, a self-census conducted to celebrate twenty-five years of immigration showed that 53 percent of Japanese engaged in farming were independent farmers (Reichl 1995: 37–40).
Planned Colony of Bastos: A Racially Homogenous Colony
Like the other Japanese agricultural colonies in Brazil, Bastos was racially homogenous. Among the initial families, only 20 percent came straight from Japan; the other 80 percent had arrived years earlier to work on coffee plantations and later bought plots of land in Bastos (Mita 1999: 65). However, ethnic homogeneity was not an exclusively Japanese trait. German and Italian immigrants who settled in Brazil in the late 1800s exhibited similar characteristics. As a result of Brazil’s policy not to sell land to former slaves or to poor whites, these three immigrant groups lived in relative isolation in their own rural colonies with little, if any, communication with cities.1 Differences in language, culture, and religion—with the exception of Italians and some Catholic Germans—between Brazilians and these immigrant groups were stark. Japanese immigrants, in particular, were the most isolated because they were racially different from the Brazilian population.
At first, Japanese colonists developed their self-identity in opposition to Italian, German, and Spanish colonists and to African-Brazilian former slaves with
