Interviews

1. How he met his wife

2. Life on board the migrant ship

3. Closed Japanese community

4. Japanese language education for children

5. Proud of having been involved in human resource development

6. Brazilians with a Japanese identity

7. I want to restore my Japanese nationality

8. What is Nikkei?

9. What made your parents decide to move to Brazil?

10. From scrubbing pad factory worker to tailor

11. Occupations of early Japanese immigrants

12. My father forced me to speak Japanese at home

13. Winners and losers

14. The winners who remained at the beginning of the migration

15. The Japanese government's mistaken assumptions about Japanese Americans

16. Since childhood, he has been interpreting for his father.

17. Foreign language education was severely restricted during the war

18. From immigrant boy to doctor of Law

Professor of Law, University of Sao Paulo, Lawyer, Translator (b. 1948)

Japanese language education for children

While we were living in Sao Paulo, my dad passed away in 1989. My mom asked if my family and my younger brother’s family would move in with her. But she chose to move in with my family and that’s when she started living with us. In 1990 my third son was born and so, he was grandma’s little boy. Grandma tried as much as possible to speak to him in Japanese. The two older boys also spoke in Japanese. My mom contributed to my children’s Japanese language education, but my wife and I would always speak in Portuguese. It was only my mom who couldn’t speak anything but Japanese so my mom and my kids, my mom and her grandkids, they understood that they would speak in Japanese.

When winter came, I was invited to Tokyo University. It wasn’t so bad because accommodations was covered and so I could take the kids and my mom to Japan with me. And while I didn’t have a clear or direct plan to teach them Japanese, indirectly, by taking them to Japan and exposing them to Japanese culture, I did end up doing that.

children families Japanese

Date: September 19, 2019

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Yoko Nishimura

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Masato Ninomiya was born in Nagano Prefecture in 1948 and moved to Brazil at the age of 5 with his family. He currently maintains a legal office in São Paulo, and in addition to working as a Law Professor at the University of Sao Paulo, also serves as Special Assistant to the President at Meiji University and as Visiting Professor of Law at Musashino University. Since its founding in 1992, he has served as President of CIATE (Center for Information and Support to Workers Abroad), Advisor to the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) for Central and South America, and also a Committee Member of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Additionally, he is considered a Nikkei community leader in Brazil, supporting various activities such as improving the working conditions of Brazilian Dekasegi, and the education of Japanese-Brazilian children. . (May 2021)