There are various reasons why people who lived in the resettlement areas decided to leave Japan in the first place.

As KY tells us the circumstances that led him to decide to come to Brazil, a certain image seems to come back to his mind vividly.

KY's hometown was in the mountains. It was a place where the villagers' lives were closely linked to the mountains. KY's family also worked in the mountains, so he grew up thinking that when he was old enough to work, he would go into the mountains. He had no resistance to that, and never questioned it.

It was when he was in his mid-teens that he started to feel uneasy about growing up in this situation. The trigger was a certain scene he often encountered on his way home from school.

There was a mountain entrance on the way to school. The men who worked in the mountains would enter the mountains and spend days cutting down trees and carrying them away. The sight of the men was familiar to KY.

However, at some point, things began to change a little.

On his way to and from school, the KY boy began to see a group of strong men hanging out at the entrance to the mountain. Instead of going into the mountain, the men were drinking and gambling while it was still light outside. Their behavior was unhealthy, and they created an atmosphere that made people not want to go near them. The boy felt extremely disappointed by the sight of adults who spent their days playing without doing any work.

"The thought of having to join them in just a few more years makes me feel so repulsed," he said, as if he had remembered not only the video but also the unpleasant feeling he had experienced there, and he could not help but feel that his decision to emigrate to Brazil was not wrong, at least he had not ended up joining those groups. It was clear that the experience had made a very strong impression on him.

Looking back, KY-san must have encountered a scene from the early days of one of the great economic depressions in modern Japanese history. The men hanging around were not living a lazy and hedonistic life of their own volition, and there must have been no jobs available even if they had wanted to work. The impoverishment of Japanese rural areas actually progressed from there, and this became the background to the peak of Brazilian immigration in the early Showa period.

KY had a brother who had moved to Tokyo, so he could have thought of other ways to escape his hometown. His uncle was the reason he skipped Tokyo and went all the way to Brazil. Hearing a rumor that his uncle's family was going to Brazil someday, KY visited the family secretly and begged them to take him with them when they went. There were many twists and turns, but KY finally stuck to his will. He joined the group that was settling in the Japanese settlement.

KY's uncle was an honest man who worked for the city hall, and had no ambition to leave Japan and go abroad. His connection with Brazil was through his work at the city hall.

At the time, the Japanese government had just announced a policy to focus on Brazil as an alternative destination for immigrants to the United States. They created a law that allowed Japanese money to buy land in Brazil and even build schools and hospitals. This is how Japanese settlements were established.

To live in a resettlement area, one must join a union in the prefecture in which one lives. These unions, which were established as a national policy in Japan, were usually set up within the town hall. One day, "Brazil" suddenly showed up at my uncle's town hall, and he was given the task of gathering people who wanted to emigrate.

If you become a member of the union and go to Brazil with your family, you will become a large landowner. Since only Japanese people live in the settlement, you can live the same life as you would in Japan. According to the memories of someone who entered the settlement at the same time as KY, there were even movie theaters and girls' schools there.

My uncle was probably recruiting people while telling them exactly what he had been told. The conditions were not bad. It seemed that the planned number of people would soon be gathered. However, contrary to expectations, not many families showed up to go to Brazil. Perhaps they thought the offer was too good to be true (in reality there were no movie theaters or girls' schools there) or perhaps Brazil was just too far away, but I'm not sure why.

However, the uncle decided to take his family to Brazil with the few families that managed to gather. KY says that the reason for this was that "I had encouraged so many people to go to Brazil, so I couldn't not go myself." The uncle was taking responsibility towards the town office for the fact that the number of families who applied did not meet the expected number, but at the same time, he was also taking responsibility, so to speak, towards the people who had decided to go to Brazil after being persuaded by his persuasion. KY says that's how he understood it. There were certainly people in old Japan who felt that kind of responsibility in their jobs.

In this way, people who came to Brazil for various reasons gathered together and the settlement was formed.

KY, who was so impressed by the sight of the men hanging around that he decided to come to Brazil, answered with confidence that he was "glad I came." He made the most of his natural athlete talent, which probably would not have blossomed in his hometown, and was a big star in baseball, sumo, and track and field. Now, at over 90 years old, he is known as a leading figure in the gateball world.

© 2007 Shigeo Nakamura