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organized in rural areas where family and community relationships were very close. However, as new generations started replacing the earlier ones, conversion to Catholicism increased. The conversion to Catholicism is due to the proselytism of the Catholic Church and the fact that Brazilian nationalism has Catholicism as one of its roots. The increase in mixed marriages also expanded the conversion to Catholicism in São Paulo City and in cities of medium size (Mori 1992: 594–98).

      In the 1920s, few Shinto shrines were built in the immigrant colonies. In 1938, the Bastos colony built the Sanso Shrine in homage to the deity of silkworms. This kind of Shinto shrine represented the deity of the village, which existed in Japan. However, the emperor cult performed the role of joining Japanese immigrants together as a collective. In Japan, this role was played by religious practices. In the colonies, the centers of the emperor cult were the Japanese schools, which the immigrants founded. Japanese schools, besides being the places where the children learned, were the headquarters of Japanese society, the agriculture cooperative, and wedding parties. Before all the events, everybody had to bow to the east, followed by a deep bow to the picture of the emperor, a solemn recital of the emperor’s edict about education, and finally singing the Japanese national anthem (Mori 1992: 569).

      Mayeama compares the emperor cult to Catholicism. The picture of the emperor was the divine body, the emperor’s edict about education was the sacred word, the national anthem the sacred song, the director of the school the priest, and the Japanese school the deity of the village (Mayeama 1984: 415. Cited in Mori 1992: 569). The creation of the religious structure allowed the development of the immigrants’ religiousness. The immigrants who arrived in the 1930s brought Japanese nationalism with them, which reinforced the immigrants’ religiousness (Mori 1992: 569).

      Yet the Japanese religions failed to flourish due to the combined pressure of the Catholic Church and Brazilian nationalism. Japanese immigrants were also afraid of anti-Japanese prejudice. Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant, were very active in the Japanese colonies and also in São Paulo City, where a Japanese neighborhood was formed (Mori 1992: 569). The Catholic Church founded schools in São Paulo City and in the colonies and helped in the immigrants’ adjustment to their new social environment. Catholic priests also shielded Mrs. Margarida Vatanabe and three other immigrants, who created the Japanese Catholic Committee of São Paulo (Comissão Católica Japonesa de São Paulo) in June 1942, from persecution by the Brazilian police and army, as Brazil was at war with the Axis countries. The aim of the committee was “to provide social assistance, moral and material to persons in need without any difference of religion, race or nationality” (Mayema 2004: 249–50).

      In addition to the many difficulties the immigrants faced in practicing their religion, they also suffered the decay of their esthetic sense. According to Handa (1971. Cited in Nogueira 1973: 148), when immigration to Brazil started in 1908, Japanese rural life had still not changed and still conformed to tradition. Immigrants had not been previously influenced by Western countries and now had to change their clothes, food, and housing in Brazil. These changes were made more difficult due to differences in mores and language. Thus, they lost the Japanese esthetic sense without having apprehended the Brazilian esthetic. They lived at colonists’ houses on the coffee plantations and adjusted their clothes to Brazilian styles.¹⁶ They also adopted parts of the Brazilian diet, such as coffee and beans, which they were unaccustomed to. Immigrants stopped using a bowl and hashi and began using a dish and spoon. Immigrants intended to work for a limited time, not permanently and thought they would make enough money in four or five years to return to Japan. When they realized that they would not make money as plantation laborers, some immigrants pretended to have forgotten their labor agreement and ran away. Plantation life was so different, it was disorienting.

      The Japanese worked hard over extensive areas in a hot climate. Their diet had changed and they lacked nutrition, further weakening them. Harsh working conditions included overseers who screamed to compel compliance. They couldn’t understand Portuguese, and the unfamiliar food tasted strange. The solution was to cultivate their land, live together with other Japanese, and eat Japanese food, such as miso (a condiment made of soy beans) and shoyu (soy sauce). Brazilians criticized them for refusing to assimilate, despite their having abandoned their mores more than any other immigrant group. Their modus vivendi was completely different from other immigrants and from Brazilians. As years passed, immigrants had to get accustomed to the bitterness and suffering known only to those who had worked at the coffee plantations. Immigrants who had moved from the coffee plantations to farm colonies lost their Japanese traits but had not yet adopted the Brazilian way of life. They went to live in houses made of wood, mud, and straw. Their belongings were never organized as if they were still at the coffee plantations (Handa 1971: 223–28. Cited in Nogueira 1973: 149).

      It is evident that Japanese immigrants carried very different mores than those dominant in Brazil. According to Egon Schaden, who studied German and Japanese acculturation in Brazil,¹⁷ Japanese immigrants experienced more culture shock than Germans. Besides, the Japanese phenotype was very different from the Brazilian phenotype, which made interracial relationships uncommon. This increased ethnocentric evaluations and differences in language, religion, familial system, political points of view, hygiene habits, kitchen practices, and many other mores. Therefore, acculturation initially required deeper cultural fragmentation among Japanese and Japanese Brazilian people than among European immigrants (Schaden 1956: 44. Cited in Nogueira 1973: 144). Amid such behavioral differences, Japanese people of the same sex bathed together. Brazilians and European immigrants considered this behavior promiscuous. At the beginning of the 1900s, São Paulo was an agrarian society, very traditional and conservative (Nogueira 1973: 146).

      Comparing prewar Japan to Brazil and other Latin American countries, it is clear that Japanese immigrants suffered downward migration from a more developed country to a less developed one, “as opposed to the dekasegi emigrants who went to the richer North America” (Endoh 2009: 19). Despite the anti-Japanese social environment in the host societies, large-scale immigration to Brazil continued. The Japanese government actively promoted Latin American emigration, which peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. During these years, the Japanese state financially supported Japanese immigration to the Peruvian and Brazilian countryside and to a lesser degree Japanese immigration to Bolivia and Paraguay (Endoh 2009: 19). Certainly this reflected the Japanese imperialist policy to ensure access to raw materials and to have trustworthy and loyal subjects through territorial expansion.

      Food and Health

      Women’s labor, including household chores and agricultural work, was very hard. It was also very difficult to get enough food to feed their children. Immigrants and their children, whether born in Japan or in Brazil, had to cope with adversity, especially those who had arrived without financial resources.

      Antonio Suzuki spoke about the immigrants’ diet in the first years after their arrival:

      Previously, food was very bad, really very bad. At that time, my mother made shoyu, the Japanese sauce, by herself. She also made miso, made of soy. But there were no vegetables, nothing. There was nothing to eat on the plantation. We cultivated neither potatoes nor manioc. I only remember that there was bean soup. Even when we arrived in Bastos, food was bad. We started planting, but it was not enough. As there were many Japanese immigrants, someone invented something, someone made another thing or cultivated something. Instead of vegetables, we ate a plant called picão. We collected it green. After arriving in Bastos, we had mamão,¹⁸ which was good. When it is ripe it is tasty, and when it is green one can make tsukemono ¹⁹ preserves, or cook it, which is also tasty. We didn’t cultivate mamão; it sprouted by itself. It was good; we ate a lot. We cultivated bananas; it was easy. However, food was hard to get. As I was born here I liked beans very much. My mother cooked beans with dried meat. When I went to school, my snack was rice and beans, that’s what I took to school. I only ate rice and beans.

      Takahashi Akira²⁰ recollected his childhood, connecting it to food. His parents signed a four-year agreement with a plantation owner, in order to cultivate coffee. Many families planted rice and beans between the coffee bushes. His parents planted rice, piling it up to dry. He told us a story from his childhood. As many years ago children did not have toys, his older brother made a trap in order to catch birds and little animals. He always

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