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]

Japanese language education for children

While we were living in São Paulo, my father passed away in 1989, and my mother asked my family and my brother's family if they wanted to come and live with her, but my mother chose to come with me and started living with us. Then, my third son was born in 1990, and he was a grandma's boy, and my grandma tried hard to speak Japanese to him. Then the two older ones also spoke Japanese. My mother contributed to the children's Japanese education, but the couple always spoke Portuguese. Only my mother could speak only Japanese, so I wonder if my mother and my children, my mother and grandchildren, knew that my mother spoke Japanese.

In the winter, I was invited to Tokyo University. That wasn't a bad thing in itself, because I was given lodgings, so I took my young children to Japan and took my mother with me. So, I didn't have a clear educational policy of directly teaching my children Japanese and a certain level of morality, but I did indirectly take them to Japan and expose them to Japanese culture.

children families Japanese

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)