Interviews

1. Defining the term "Nikkei" (Portuguese)

2. Brazilian of Japanese descents (Portuguese)

3. Japan's impact on the image of Nikkei in Brazil (Portuguese)

4. Change in sense of Nikkei Brazilian identity over time (Portuguese)

5. Nikkei community concentrated in São Paulo (Portuguese)

6. Changing life styles of successive generations (Portuguese)

Celia Oi

Former Director, Museu Histórico da Imigração Japonesa no Brasil

Nikkei community concentrated in São Paulo (Portuguese)

(Portuguese) The Nikkei community in Brazil is something quite special. Brazil has the largest Nikkei community in the world, and it’s a community with many unique aspects to it. So, for example, in terms of unique aspects, it’s a community that’s centered in São Paulo. Immigrants began arriving in 1908, and from the very beginning, they went to plantations in the state of São Paulo. And a great many of them stayed in São Paulo.

After some time, in the thirties, they started going to Parana, but São Paulo is still the country, rather the state where there’s a real presence of Japanese immigrants. Roughly eighty percent of Japanese-Brazilians live in São Paulo. So you have a rather concentrated community, which up until more or less the forties was essentially an agrarian one. Then there was a process of urbanization. And today, for example, we can talk about, if we compared ourselves with Peru, for example, or with the United States, we could say that it was always a much more closed community, and now, on the verge of a hundred years of history, it’s beginning to open up a bit more to the rest of Brazilian society.

Brazil identity Nikkei São Paulo United States

Date: October 7, 2005

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Ann Kaneko

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

Interviewee Bio

Célia Abe Oi was born in Itapetininga in 1950. Her grandparents had arrived in Brazil in 1929. Originally from a family of fishermen on the island of Atatajima, near the city of Hiroshima, upon their arrival they began working in the Brazilian countryside, initially in the cotton fields and later growing potatoes. Her parents and siblings also worked in agriculture. In 1968, she began studying History in college, and in 1979 completed her course in Journalism at the Cásper Líbero College. In the mid-1970s, she began working in the editorial room of the Portuguese section of the Diário Nippak newspaper. Célia contributed to various journals and publications tied to the Japanese-Brazilian community, until she became the director of the Museum of the History of Japanese Immigration in 1998. (July 26, 2006)