Peculiar and interesting is the Yuba Community, in the city of Mirandópolis, in São Paulo. There are many stories to tell from those who lived there. One of them is from a family that emerged from the community.

“The best school of my life”

Silvia Sasaoka, 57 years old, from São Paulo, tells how she discovered Yuba and the reasons why she decided to live there. “I was studying Fine Arts at FAAP in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I discovered the Yuba Community. At that time, through college friends and teachers, I discovered the depth and richness of Zen philosophy and Japanese art. And this strengthened the desire to learn more deeply about Japanese culture 'before the culture of immigration'.”

As she was always distant from traditional Japanese culture and studied in Brazilian schools, being the only one of Japanese descent or one of the few Nikkei in the classes, the artist says that she missed an identity in which she could find anchor in ancestral knowledge and have cultural references to understand who she was.

After getting to know the Yuba community, he started going there all the time. “I was enchanted, because I saw art as part of everyday life in agriculture”, he says. Silvia also says that at her parents' house she didn't have the habit of taking care of household chores and, quite suddenly, when she was 22 years old, she was waking up at 6am, plowing the land, planting, washing clothes, cleaning the house, etc.

And his routine began to be divided between work and culture. During the day, he worked in the garden and, at night, he practiced ballet and participated in the choir. After three years trying to adapt to life in the community and rural work, she says she missed applying what she had studied at art school and started an activity that was a studio for children of all ages.

According to Silvia, the free time she had – like everyone else who worked on the farm – was on Sundays. The artist liked to go to the library and read as if she could enter other universes.

The artist formed her family within the community. There, he met Paulo Yusaku Yuba, now deceased, who held the position of vice-president of the Deliberative Council of the Brazilian Center for Japanese Language, was a professor of Japanese Language at the Association of Tottori Province and at the Seikôkai Japanese Language School. She married him and they had two children, Pablo Kadji Yuba who was born in 1982 and Thomas Len Yuba, born in 1985. In 1992, Silvia and her children left Yuba.

The family relationship was something that Silvia admired. “I liked the relationship with the obachans from different families, they were my great teachers. I learned to work on the farm, to care for and educate my children, to understand children and all the idiosyncrasies that existed in a community life of more than 70 years.” Another point that I found interesting about the community was the obligation to be equal to everyone.

In addition to this appreciation of the collective, the artist defines Yuba as a “community of Japanese people who enjoyed art and culture before any other activity with a simple and rural way of life as a value”.

Silvia also reveals that the experience of community life was the best school of her life. “I owe what I am today to everything I learned from community life in Yuba”, he adds.

“Japanese-redneck” identity and culture

Pablo Kadji Yuba, 34 years old, is Silvia's eldest son. Born in Yuba, he lived there until he was 10 years old. His daily life was made up of studies, sports and childish things. “My routine was to wake up, have breakfast, catch the school bus, study (state school in the Aliança neighborhood), go back to the community, play until the end of the afternoon.” In addition, there was baseball and judo training once a week. Kadji reveals that sometimes he hid “until he was dragged by an adult to ballet class”.

Among his childhood memories are the games he played. “I liked playing baseball. Get on the tractor trailer with your cousins ​​and walk for 2 km until you reach the field. Was funny. In my free time, I spent time in the library reading manga.”

Kadji considers his own identity to be Brazilian, despite having lived intensely with Japanese culture. Humorously, he says: “Japanese-redneck to be more exact”. Their identity has much in common with the culture of the Yuba Community. The yubense justifies: “rice and beans on the plate, miso soup on the side”. It's true that this is a typical Nikkei meal, mixing Brazilian and Japanese dishes.

A great lesson he learned from Yuba and should carry with him for the rest of his life is “being good at what you love opens doors and takes you far. The community has friends and relatives around the world who show this.”

Thanks to this, he had a “great” experience in Japan. “I was hired by a Brazilian publisher to be a writer/translator in the Tokyo unit”, he says. He worked for two years and then became a scholarship holder and completed a Master's degree in Communication at Meiji University, but without completing it.

“The big motivator was my insecurity with the Japanese language. I concluded that, to raise the bar, I needed to live there.” Kadji explains that he was willing to go as a dekassegui , just like his father, to save money and then study, but ended up opting for the publishing opportunity.

So, certainly, the Yuba Community and its cultural richness have a lot to teach all of us, Japanese descendants or not. We just need to let ourselves be inspired.

© 2016 Tatiana Maebuchi