Interviews

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

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

3. How he met his wife

4. Japanese language education for children

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

6. Proud of having been involved in human resource development

7. Brazilians with a Japanese identity

8. I want to restore my Japanese nationality

9. What is Nikkei?

10. From immigrant boy to doctor of Law

11. From scrubbing pad factory worker to tailor

12. Occupations of early Japanese immigrants

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

14. My father forced me to speak Japanese at home

15. Life on board the migrant ship

16. Closed Japanese community

17. Foreign language education was severely restricted during the war

18. Winners and losers

Ninomiya,Masato

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

This page may include translations provided by Google Translate. [Original]

The winners who remained at the beginning of the migration

The year I moved there in 1954 was the 400th anniversary of the founding of the city of São Paulo. We arrived on January 26th. The 25th of January was the anniversary of the founding of São Paulo. I was only five years old so I don't remember it very well, but there was a huge festival.

However, at that time, there was still a group called the Sakura-gumi Imperial Court, and they were protesting that Japan had won the war, but that the road to reconstruction was still difficult, so they marched from the Plaza de Sé in São Paulo to the consulate general's residence at the government's expense. There are photos of that in the Immigration Museum. So, there were still some people who were the so-called winners even 10 years after the war ended.

Brazil Kachigumi (victory group) postwar Sakuragumi Teishintai (Parana victory group) World War II

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)