Book recalls truculent persecution of the Estado Novo against Japanese immigrants

A peaceful 38-year-old Japanese immigrant had done his military service in his country’s Air Force and even showed photos of the time to his Brazilian neighbors. Behold, in 1942, already with the Second War, Brazil breaks diplomatic relations with Japan and, in the midst of the witch hunt, the immigrant is arrested as a spy —the accusation was never proven— and sent to the prison on the island of Flores , in Rio, and then to one of the cells of the Deops (the political police), in São Paulo.

The episode is reported among a hundred other very similar ones in “Isolated in a Territory at War in South America”, by professor and immigrant journalist Koichi Kishimoto (1878-1977).

The book had already been printed in Brazil in Japanese, in 1947 and 1948, in editions that sold out quickly —and because of them Kishimoto was twice arrested, accused of defaming Brazil and artificially stimulating ethnic tensions with the Japanese community, and his naturalization was almost revoked, which could have led to his deportation. Now, it is published for the first time in Portuguese, by Ateliê Editorial.

The work does not bring a historical essay on racism against immigrants and does not add spectacular information to the bibliography that has reported the bad times of millions of Japanese settled here, after the outbreak of the last Great War.

But the text is of an extraordinary delicacy, when describing the pain of discrimination suffered because of slanted eyes and very straight black hair. The portrayed characters demonstrate a sincere attachment to Brazil, but at the same time loyalty to the emperor who commanded, and through no fault of their own, an enemy belligerent power.

The Japanese, and the detail is not mentioned in the book, had physiognomic differences in relation to immigrants from other Axis countries —the Italians and Germans. But all were prohibited from sending their children to schools that taught in the familiar language, and publications in Italian, Japanese and German were all summarily banned.

War is war, and such prohibitions were understandable to some extent. But the problem lay above all in the way in which Brazil during the Estado Novo dictatorship practiced prohibitions.

The forced withdrawal of 4,000 Japanese from Santos, on the coast of São Paulo, was brutal because, in the minds of some police or military personnel, the suspicion that they were spying so that German submarines could torpedo Brazilian freighters was raised.

The arrest of fathers and mothers who kept school books in the Japanese language at home for their children to use was also brutal, since Japanese schools had been suddenly closed by the police.

Or, finally, was the order given by the Deops so that the Japanese, in a few days, emptied the neighborhood of Liberdade and Rua Conde de Sarzedas, which they occupied with houses and businesses since, in 1908, they began to arrive as immigrants to São Paulo. The idea was that, dispersed, the hundreds of immigrant families would be less dangerous than if they were crowded into a few blocks.

The fact is that the war ended in 1945, in Europe and the Pacific, but the Japanese community in Brazil went through an internal divergence that the book reports, among other sources that it consulted.

A portion of the immigrants believed that the information that Japan had been militarily defeated was false and forged by the US. According to them, the Asian country was indestructible and protected by the gods. Another part believed, resigned, that defeat had occurred and that life would go on, without Japan becoming the epicenter of military power in the Pacific.

The conflict involved kachigumi (“victorious”) and makegumi (defeatists). The two groups came to blows and, between March 1946 and January of the following year, some people were killed and others injured. The evocation of the episode destroys very strong myths in the immigration imaginary, with the impartiality of the journalistic narrative.

Another conclusion leads Kishimoto’s book to become a meeting point for the two wings of the community. Regardless of the Japanese defeat, the immigrants as a whole resented the Estado Novo’s decision to expropriate all the companies owned by this huge portion of immigrants.

The government’s argument was that, without expropriation, the official coffers would not be able to compensate the victims of war damage that Japan would supposedly cause. These losses were part of the fiction through which the dictatorship imposed itself on less informed Brazilians.