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with them. He received two or three birds every day. Although he was only five years old, he noticed that the number of birds did not increase. One day, one nhambu hid itself under the ofuro.²¹ His mother said, “it does not matter, my son, we are going to have it for dinner.” That is the reason why the number of birds did not increase. This was their source of protein; therefore, the number of toys never increased.

      At the time of the interviewees, Takahashi Akira was seventy-eight years old and Roberto Hiroshi Takeuchi was fifty-three, so there was a difference of twenty-five years between the childhood of the first and the second one.

      As a child Takahashi Akira probably played with slingshots (estilingue)—as he described his older brother used it in order to catch birds—spun a top (roda pião), played with a bilboquet, and with a ball, climbed trees, and tried to catch fish. However, Takahashi Akira mentioned playing with birds in a context of food. Girls played with handmade cloth dolls, Mamagoto (little house), and Otedama ²² (Cytrynowicz and Cytrynowicz 2017: 79). The old interviewees rarely referred to toys and games. They worked with their parents as coffee plantations laborers, and eventually at the families’ own small farms. In families with a first-born daughter, she was responsible for cooking and taking care of her younger siblings; in families with a first-born son, he took care of his siblings and brought water from a river, even when far from home (Cytrynowicz and Cytrynowicz 2017: 34). Certainly most children’s activities were related to work and school rather than to play.

      Roberto Hiroshi Takeuchi described his childhood:

      My childhood was very difficult too. When I compare my childhood with current ones, I can see how it was difficult. However, I had a healthy childhood. Everything was free. My siblings, my friends and I made all our toys. Currently there are factories that offer everything ready-made, but in our time we played shooting marbles [bolinha de gude], and we made slingshots in order to go to our small farm. Everything was by foot, and there were no cars. Some could afford a bicycle. We were friendly with boys and girls. We didn’t have any malicious thoughts. We played tag [pega-pega], hide-and-seek [esconde-esconde] or spinning a top . . . We used to play hopscotch [amarelinha], everything was healthy. Currently with the Internet, children become adults, they don’t have that childhood with a doll, the kinds of games that we had. Now childhood is very different.

      Those toys and games (to play hopscotch, hide-and-seek, tag, and shooting marbles) show the influence of Western culture, probably through the Brazilian public school, and contact with children of non-Japanese descent.

      Regarding his relationship with his father, Roberto said that he usually did not talk to him. Back then the Japanese immigrants’ attitude within the family and also outside home required “absence of displays of affection” (Yanagisako 1985: 248):

      Japanese men in the past were different from today. My father didn’t talk to us. I saw him only working. There was no communication between us as we have currently with my children. Affection toward us children meant watching us. He worked on our behalf so we could attend school. Bastos started to have a high school after the 1970s, and in São Paulo the high school had been there for a long time. Then, he said “my son, go to study.” So we, a group of youths, got together and went to São Paulo to attend high school and later college.

      There was no lack of food when Roberto was a child.

      According to Dr. Rodolfo Yamashita, a lawyer, who was born in Padre Nóbrega (a small city near Marilia) in 1943, and who lives in Marília, the lack of food was widespread.²³ He said that the first Japanese immigrants used to catch golden fish in Feio River’s piracema.²⁴ But, once a group of mandi ²⁵ migrated into the river, and their spikes hurt the immigrants a lot. “Life was a lot of suffering: language, mores, and food were different.”

      Takahashi Akira explained why they had such a poor diet:

      Food was also very precarious; they could not afford to have meat or eggs. People used to eat dried meat because they did not have a refrigerator, so they had to choose dried meat or dried codfish. Although the colonization company’s grocery store sold Japanese food, it was expensive, probably due to being imported, allowing very few people to buy it. Most of the immigrants who came to Brazil were not peasants. They didn’t know how to plant crops. If they were really peasants and owned land, they had cultivated vegetables, raised animals, including chickens, harvested fruits. Nobody did these things. They only thought about making money and going back to Japan. That’s why they were never concerned about cultivating edible plants. They didn’t want to sell bananas, they only thought about what they could sell at the market. They had mamão because it grew by itself. They didn’t raise chickens; skunks ate chickens, and they had no fences to protect them.

      Antonio Suzuki disagreed: “We raised pork. There was always pork to eat. I never had beef. I only ate pork. It was hard to keep it because there was no refrigerator. When we killed a pig, every day was pork, pork cooked with squash, cooked with ‘daikon,’²⁶ and that’s how it was.”

      Takahashi Akira blamed the immigrants for having a poor diet due to the fact that they were not peasants, and that they had come to Brazil in order to make money and return to Japan fast. However, the second explanation is correct. They immigrated to Brazil as many had gone to Hawaii in order to work a few years and save money. The first reason does not fit the data.

      Although some immigrants came from towns and cities, they were the product of the recent rural–urban migration, and their parents were still peasants. According to Zenpati, during the first period of immigration (1908–1928), the occupations of the immigrants were: peasants 68.4 percent, non-peasants 16.8 percent, and unemployed 14.8 percent. The immigrants’ fathers’ occupations were: peasants 83.5 percent and non-peasants 16.4 percent. During the second period (1924–World War II), several immigrants came from urban centers, although all of them, with the exception of those who belonged to the intellectual stratum, were familiar with agricultural work. They had left the countryside in order to look for temporary jobs in cities because they were not the first-born sons. The data referring to immigrants’ occupations in the second period (1923–1941) are peasants 49.9 percent, non-peasants 34.3 percent, and unemployed 15.8 percent. The immigrants’ fathers’ occupations were peasants 67.4 percent and non-peasants 32.6 percent (Census Committee of Japanese Colony 1964, cited in Zenpati 1976: 172, 181).

      Some immigrants left the plantations and went to Brazilian urban areas. They said that in Japan they were carpenters, fishermen, and business people (Nogueira 1973: 133, 119). A few settled in São Paulo City. Immigrants had to tell the Brazilian authorities that they were peasants; otherwise they would not be accepted. Coffee plantations only wanted people with agricultural experience. Whatever they said as a reason to leave the awful plantation life conditions, it does not disqualify Zenpati’s data.

      Back then, continued Takahashi, people planted vegetables for their own consumption. And they also had insufficient knowledge about them:

      When we were children we didn’t know what a salad was. Sometimes we cut a cabbage in small pieces, and ate it, or radish, squash. Food was also very precarious, with many children, much work, and then people got old very fast. When I was a child, and I saw a fifty-year-old man, one used to say, my goodness what an old person! Currently we see people at sixty, seventy years old, and I joke, I’m seventy-eight years old and I still want to date a lot! [People laugh]. Things changed a lot, currently people live until sixty, seventy years old, and it is considered normal, but many years ago at the age of fifty, sixty people were already dying.

      Regarding food for little children, Takahashi explained that they had a kind of chicken soup, and they were breastfed until a later age. When the mother had no breastmilk, sometimes in the same colony’s section there was a mother who had also given birth at the same time, and had too much milk, then she breastfed another baby besides her own: “My mother raised an acquaintance’s son because when she gave birth to her last child, she had too much milk, then she fed this other person’s baby for more or less one year.”

      

      According to Saito, in the 1920s, Japanese immigrants started leaving the region of coffee plantations to move to the pioneer area in western São Paulo

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