Meiji Women Seeking Freedom = A Promise to Their Mother for "Just One Year"

On the evening of November 5, 2013, the Ibirapuera Auditorium in São Paulo was filled with applause and excitement. Otake Tomie (99, Kyoto, naturalized citizen), who received the Order of Culture, the highest honor bestowed by the federal government, together with the late Oscar Niemeyer, received the biggest applause of the night. It was an expression of the honest admiration of the Brazilian people, who had accepted her as one of their own. The next day, all of the Brazilian newspapers reported that "Otake Tomie is one of the most prominent figures representing Brazilian visual art."

There is no other Japanese female artist who has been so widely revered in Brazilian society as she is, and she is still active today, celebrating her 100th birthday on the 21st. I began interviewing her with the desire to leave behind a record of her in Japanese, which is surprisingly few, while she is still alive.

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Tomie Ohtake in front of a blue painting hanging in her studio

Just a three-minute walk from José Dinis Avenue, the 100-year-old master still heads to the campus three times a week from his studio and home in the Campo Belo district, which was designed by his eldest son, Rui.

When Morena's housekeeper invited me to visit her studio, I found him in his usual black suit, sitting in a wheelchair, waiting for me. "Don't be shy, eat up. Futoshi (my assistant), make me some coffee. Do you want some sugar?" He eagerly welcomed the reporter himself, and then, munching on a cookie himself, looked at me with an expression that said, "So, what do you want to know?"

There are many things I want to ask. But first, let's start with the safe question of how he came to Brazil. When I said that, Tomie-san began to speak eloquently, as if reading from a script, in a strong, slightly hoarse, low voice, as if to say, "Leave it to me."

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Tomie was born into a family of lumber merchants in Kyoto and was a university graduate (Doshisha University Faculty of Letters), which was rare for a woman at the time. She visited Brazil in 1936 at the age of 23, following her fourth brother Masutaro, who had moved there two years earlier.

Masutaro, who made a living as a taxi driver despite his unfamiliar Portuguese, went out of his way to invite his younger brother, who was a newspaper reporter in Manchuria, to join him in starting a new trading business. It was his fifth brother, and as they "got along well," Tomie tagged along when he came to Brazil and crossed the ocean.

Her mother, Kimi Nakakubo, gave her son some freedom, but she wanted her daughter, the youngest of six siblings, to be happy as a "normal woman." Her mother would not listen, saying, "What's the point of becoming an artist? Get married," but her daughter said, "I really want to go. I'll be back in a year," and left Japan, promising her.

Although she was born into a good family in Kyoto, she recalls, "I learned flower arranging and the tea ceremony. They said it was a woman's hobby, but I didn't have the desire to sit still and do anything." It seems she was not a modest "housed young lady" wearing a kimono, but rather a tomboy.

"Even now when I go back to Japan, I end up like this," he says, shrugging his shoulders in an uncomfortable manner, and then he declares firmly, "If I had stayed in Japan, I wouldn't have become an artist. I don't want to go back anymore."

I hear that the Japanese art world in particular is a rather unique one, with titles determining the selling price of paintings.

"Soon after I came here, the war with China started, and I couldn't go back," Tomie said, as if she had no choice. When I pressed her, "Were you really planning to go back after one year?" she jokingly dodged the question, saying, "I don't know. I just wanted to go out and work." She probably never had any intention of going back in the first place.

Marriage and childbirth are turning points in destiny = Familiarity is important

You never know where your fate will turn... Tomie's fifth brother, who came to Brazil with her, was drafted when the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, just one year after arriving in Brazil, and he returned to Japan to serve on the battlefield - where he was killed in action.

The fourth brother, Masutaro, who did not receive a warrant, stayed in the area and ran a pharmaceutical company called Wakamoto in the Liberdade district of Sao Paulo. People who knew Masutaro say he was a large, powerful man. When he first came to Brazil he worked as a taxi driver, but because he could not speak Portuguese, he would drive around without knowing the addresses given to him by passengers, and get them to say things like, "That's not it! It's this way!", which is a funny story.

When Masutaro emigrated to Japan in 1934, it was a time when militarism was growing stronger with each passing year, and anti-government sentiment was being strictly nipped in the bud, not only among communists but even among liberal intellectuals. It was a turbulent time, with the Great Depression that followed the Showa Depression, a succession of events that shook the country, from the Manchurian Incident to the May 15 Incident and the February 26 Incident, as the military stepped up its efforts to advance into the continent.

"My brother couldn't find a job after graduating from university, so he decided to move to Brazil to see what it was like," said Tomie, who seemed to not know the details.

Tomie herself says she "doesn't remember," but her second son, Ricardo (70, second generation), reveals a surprising side to her: "When Brazil was under military rule, my mother participated in anti-military government demonstrations. Rui and I were both very active, and we were even arrested once." It's a typical story of a "high-collar" Meiji-era man who fled the traditions and conservative atmosphere of Kyoto.

If Tomie had participated in anti-military government demonstrations, it is easy to imagine that Masutaro also hated the Japanese trend of militarism and restricting freedom. He may have been conscripted if he had stayed in Japan, so he may have come to Brazil in search of freedom.

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War clouds were beginning to gather in the area as the European war broke out in 1939. Tomie stayed in the area and began living with her brother, but for a time she put her dream aside, saying, "War is no time to become an artist."

Then she met her brother's roommate, Ushio, and married him in 1936 when she arrived in Brazil. "He looked just like my fifth brother. His name was Muinto Bonito and his name was Bonginho," she says, smiling as she recalls those days.

When the reporter pressed her, "Which one of you made the first move?" the 100-year-old "maiden" blushed and said, "That's not true..." Since she's the opposite of a Yamato Nadeshiko, I made the unnecessary assumption that she must have made the first move.

When her first son was born in 1938, she reflected, "I thought carefully about whether my family or my work was important in my life, and decided to put work second." She decided to choose the path of being a wife and mother for a while. The blood of a Meiji woman still flows through her veins.

At the time, the Ohtake family lived in a house in the Mocca district, where many families of Italian immigrant factory workers lived. It wasn't until 1962 that they moved to what is now the Campo Belo district.

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I also asked Ricardo, the director of the Tomie Ohtake Institute, about those days. After returning from a busy lunch, he recalled in his office, buried under a pile of books, "My mother was a strict mother who demanded everything from herself and her children to be done properly."

"They told us, 'You can't go back to Japan. Let's become Brazilians,' and gave us a Western education. The school we went to was also Christian. There was not a single Japanese student there."

The Otake family at that time

Part 2 >>

*This article is reprinted from the Nikkei Shimbun (November 20th and 22nd, 2013).

© 2013 Nikkey Shimbun