Okinawan is an endangered language but in Brazil it is thriving and students come here to study it.
Who would have known that the Okinawan language found a home in Brazil just when it was fading back in Japan? BBC Brasil’s Leticia Mori has this report from Sao Paulo.
Walking around Liberdade district, you would be forgiven for thinking you were in Tokyo. Nowhere in Brazil are the influences of Japanese immigration more visible than in this bustling part of Brazil’s biggest metropolis.
The names on shop fronts are in Japanese and they sell everything from Japanese food and kitchen utensils to traditional home decorations.
Red painted archways and a Japanese garden delight visitors venturing to this little Japanese corner of Brazil.
Japanese migration to Brazil is celebrated annually on the anniversary of 18 June 1908, the date when the Japanese ship Kasato-Maru arrived in the port of Santos, south of Sao Paulo, carrying the first 781 people to take advantage of a bilateral agreement promoting migration.
Half of them were from the southern part of the island of Okinawa, located about 640km (400 miles) south of the rest of Japan, which had its own distinct language and culture dating back to before the island’s annexation by Tokyo in 1879.
Today, Brazil is home to the world’s largest community of Japanese descendants outside of Japan, numbering about 1.5 million people.
Japanese authorities promoted emigration as a national policy until the late 1960s to alleviate poverty and overpopulation and encouraged people from rural areas in particular to seek work abroad.
There had been earlier policies to send migrants to work as labourers in the Hawaiian sugarcane fields, on the US mainland and Canada’s West Coast and, to some extent, in Mexico but they proved short-lived as those countries adopted restrictions on immigration.
Tokyo soon started looking for opportunities further south.
Brazil, where slavery had been abolished in 1888, was looking for cheap labour to work in the coffee plantations of its south-east.
