Japanese settlers leave their mark on S?o Paulo society

Letter from Brazil: Despite it being one of the world's biggest cities, most visitors have little idea of what to expect from a first visit to São Paulo, other than it will be immense.

Having now entertained quite a few guests in the last 18 months I can report that among the least expected of discoveries is one I made on my own first visit - that the city is home to the world's biggest Japanese expat community.

More than half of all ethnic Japanese who live outside Japan have their home in Brazil, most of them in São Paulo state. Brazil has an estimated 1.5 million citizens of Japanese descent. The Liberdade district, tucked in behind São Paulo's imposing main cathedral, is this community's spiritual home. Here street lights come in the shape of oriental lanterns and most shop signs are in Japanese. It is a popular destination for all paulistanos in search of good sushi, some acupuncture or manga comics.

The Japanese presence in Brazil dates back to the arrival of the ship the Kasato-maru in the port of Santos on June 18th, 1908 with 781 Japanese immigrants on board. They were leaving behind the severe recession which followed Japan's victory over Russia in the war of 1904-05 and were tempted to Brazil by offers of work on coffee plantations.

Plantation owners had been searching for a reliable source of manual labour since many of their former slaves upped and left for the cities following emancipation in 1888. São Paulo's government, dominated by the coffee barons, signed an agreement with Japan to receive 3,000 workers in three years. They worked as indentured servants for two years and were then free to work for themselves for as long as they wanted.

While good on paper, the agreement did not work so well in practice.

"Brazil was advertised as a paradise in Japan but when the immigrants arrived people found the conditions very harsh. Many of the plantation owners seemed to think they were still dealing with slaves," says Iossuke Tanaka, a member of the organising committee in charge of celebrating the centenary of the Japanese community in Brazil.

As a result many fled the plantations before their two years were up and made their way to the city of São Paulo, then overflowing with immigrants and work opportunities.

Cheap accommodation attracted them to Liberdade, which means "freedom" in Portuguese and, according to city lore, was first settled by runaway slaves.

In all an estimated 200,000 Japanese came between the arrival of the Kasato-maru and the outbreak of the second World War . Despite being ruled by a dictator with fascist sympathies, Brazil sided with the Allies during the war and for several years its Japanese community was treated with suspicion by the government, which closed all the country's Japanese-language newspapers.

The end of the war, and reports of the devastation in Japan - many carried by 60,000 new immigrants who arrived in the conflict's aftermath - convinced most Japanese they would be better off making their home permanently in Brazil, and their fantasies of returning to Japan after making a fortune disintegrated.

In the years since the community has become one of Brazil's most successful. As well as Liberdade there are prosperous towns in the interior of São Paulo and Paraná states that are heavily Japanese, and Japanese Brazilians have migrated into the interior along with other Brazilians in recent decades. The country again has Japanese newspapers and even a sumo wrestling championship.

While holding on to some of the old traditions the community has, over the decades, become more Brazilian. The Shinto and Buddhist faiths of the original immigrants have largely been replaced by Christianity, and grandparents give out about their grandchildren preferring to speak Portuguese at home instead of Japanese.

But if the community's links with Japan did diminish over the generations they have been partly re-established in recent years. Facing low growth and high unemployment at home, many Brazilians of Japanese ancestry have gone to Japan in search of work. Today an estimated 300,000 live there, mainly in the industrial corridor between Tokyo and Osaka.

The Japanese government has been a keen supporter of closer links, putting up the money for the huge project to fix up São Paulo's main river, a filthy open sewer previously prone to frequent flooding.

On a visit to promote closer ties in 2004, Japan's prime minister Junichiro Koizumi wept as he told an audience of his joy on meeting up with a long lost cousin who had emigrated to São Paulo half a century ago.

But if the Japanese have been "Brazilian-ised", they have also left their own mark on the country's culture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in gastronomic matters.

São Paulo, which likes to think of itself as South America's culinary capital, is obsessed with sushi, the tradition of which was preserved within the Japanese community for generations before other paulistanos got a taste for it.

It has now become such a part of the city's identity that sushi restaurants are found everywhere, not just in Liberdade. For many in the Japanese community a new lucrative living can be had serving up industrial quantities of some of the best examples of this edible art outside of Japan.