History

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History *

Timeline

  • The Kasato Maru ship brings the first Japanese immigrants to Brazil, arriving in Santos, São Paulo.

  • Earliest known Japanese newspapers appear in rural São Paulo colonies; communication is essential as most immigrants do not speak Portuguese.

  • Japanese communities shift to São Paulo city. A golden era for print media begins, with 3 main newspapers and 7 others publishing sporadically.

  • Nationalism rises. In 1941, Vargas bans Japanese-language media, gatherings, and education, severely restricting Japanese communication.

  • Japanese-Brazilians face persecution. Newspapers cease. Communities are surveilled or forcibly relocated; Japanese becomes a private/home language.

  • Japanese language transmission declines. Second and third generation (nisei and sansei) often aren’t taught Japanese due to school closures and social pressure.

  • With 3rd generation (sansei), Japanese language use further drops, especially in reading/writing. Newspapers continue but with decreasing reach.

  • Fewer Japanese-language newspapers remain (São Paulo Shimbun goes extinct in 2011, Nikkei Shimbun in 2021). Readership declines significantly among Japanese-Brazilians in Brazil.

  • On July 25, 2024, the Brazilian government formally apologizes for WWII persecution. Covered by Diário Brasil Nippou, the last Japanese newspaper in Brazil. Also reported in Japan by Alternativa, a Portuguese-language magazine.

  • Marketing agent Kimiko Aso reflects on the power of Japanese print to bridge Brazil and Japan. Despite fading readership, print media remains a cultural connector.

    In March 18, 2025, Brazilian President Lula makes statement affirming he also plans to officially apologize to the Japanese community himself.

The processes of migration coincide with the dissemination of information to that new community in that community’s language. Japanese print media within Brazil is no different. In the archives of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University is a large collection of 8 Japanese newspapers from Brazil as early as 1917 in the interior colonia  (‘colony’) of São Paulo. Just nine years after the 2,000 or so Japanese workers arrived in Santos, one of the largest port cities at the southern tip in the state of São Paulo, families had spread around the state where the most lucrative agricultural opportunities were with these family colonies. A large majority (if not all) of these Japanese workers did not know Portuguese and therefore communicated in large part with written newsletters and newspapers. However, most of these communities did not print on a mass scale until they moved to the city of São Paulo in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This was the golden era for Japanese-Brazilian print media to flourish, as at this time there were 3 main newspapers printing and a total of 7 sporadically running (Sasaki, 2013). However, in 1941 Getúlio Vargas prohibited the printing, speaking and gathering of anything Japanese within the country of Brazil, straining the use of the language to only be used at home. However, after the war in the 1950s first and second generation Brazilians of Japanese descent did not teach or were not taught Japanese, as many Japanese schools were also shut down in the 1940s restricting the language maintenance of Japanese for future generations (Bailey, 2020; Tsuda, 2000; Sasaki, 2013; Retis, 2021). Because of many extralinguistic and linguistic factors, by the third generation there is a severe drop in speakers and readers of Japanese that live in Brazil. However, there is more research that shows specifically in São Paulo, by the second generation language loss can start to occur (Livia Oushiro, interviewed June 29, 2024).