A stamp in my great grandfather’s document made me question what I know about the japanese mig
- Juliana Sakae
- 31 de mai. de 2018
- 3 min de leitura
For a long time I believed that my great-grandmother’s name was Batian. If you understand Japanese, you know where I’m heading to. The word means literally “grandmother,” something I discovered when a friend called her grandma (what a coincidence) exactly how I called mine. I knew little about the history of my issei ancestors (Japanese who emigrated to another country) or nissei (children of Japanese born abroad). But it’s never late: at thirty, with the father’s aide, I began diving into research and discovering fantastic things.
This is the family tree of my father who is sansei (3rd generation). After him comes yonsei (4th generation) and gosei (5th generation).
We began the hunt for documents. All of my paternal great-grandparents were born in Kumamoto, southern Japan, and migrated to the coffee farms of São Paulo in the early years of the twentieth century. Thanks to the Museum of the Japanese Migration in Sao Paulo, we found intact records of the ships that docked in Santos coming from Kobe. At the age of 19, my great-grandfather Heizo Sakai left Japan shortly before the cherry blossoms at the end of the winter of 1914 and arrived in Brazil after five weeks aboard the Wakasa Maru.
(Wakasa Maru boarding list made available by the Museum of the Japanese Migration of Sao Paulo. My grandfather is # 894)
Heizo married Haruki thanks to miai, the ancient version of Tinder. At that time, an uncle or a friend would take pictures of single women and men around in search of matchmaking. Haruki’s cousin, Tomoe, married Yoshichi, and her eldest sons–my grandparents Tosio and Yae–eventually got married. They thrived as farmers. They were the owners of farms, sales and flower shops, and they could do what their parents dreamed: to send their children to college. The photo below was taken in 1955 and it shows a day in their lives. The caption “couve-fror” (in English: “cabbage”) reveals the origin of the author, since the phoneme “L” does not exist in Japanese (originally, cabbage is spelled “couve-flor” in Portuguese). For my grandmother, I was Juriana instead of Juliana.
I saw the migration only by its end: happy. Until the day I went in search of these documents in Liberdade, a Japanese neighborhood of São Paulo, where the Museum is located.
I often say that the best thing about Journalism is to have the privilege to meet incredible people. There I met Mr. Matsuura, who very willingly located all the documents I wanted and a little more: the books of the company Toyo, the Japanese immigration agency responsible for the workers.
Matsuura patiently translated dates and words from a difficult Japanese (“It’s an old katakana and the person who wrote it was not having a good day,” he commented politely). He pointed me to my great granfather’s name, Heizo, and like he wasn’t saying much, he added: “He ran away from the farm.” Between one breath and another, Matsuura said, “Life was very difficult. See, there were so many fugitives that they even created a stamp for that.”
(Toyo Imin Goshi Kaisha – Heizo Sakai’s Immigration Registry Book)
I went on to learn how his arrival in Brazil really was. I discovered that the ship Wakasa Maru was a cargo ship, without cabins, with only 4 bathrooms for 1,720 passengers. I discovered that my great-grandfather Yoshichi, who came with his wife and daughter, was a widower in their early years of Brazil, which was not uncommon: poor working conditions killed many immigrants. I learned that the Japanese came as dekasegi, temporary workers, who wanted to return in a few years, but who in indebtedness could not. It was not their choice to stay, but the lack of it.
It was the first time that I saw my great-grandfather as just a teenager, probably afraid, migrating alone, not knowing the language, unaccustomed to the weather, arriving at the coffee farm that still inherited conditions analogous to slavery, with no money to return. So much history of sacrifice (but also hope) embedded in a small stamp.
Learn more:
If you are a Japanese migrant descendant, I recommend reading the book by Jorge Okubaro O Súdito (Banzai, Massateru!), a non-fiction novel about the coming of his issei father, and the Japanese tv show Haru & Natsu — the story of two sisters separated by immigration and their sacrifices throughout that period.
[book] O Súdito (Banzai, Massateru!) by Jorge Okubaro [book] Corações Sujos by Fernando Morais [tv show] Haru & Natsu, The Letters That Never Arrived
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