Japanese immigration in Brazil

Japanese–Brazilians

Juniti Saito[1] Mitsuyo Maeda[2] Tomie Ohtake[3] Hugo Hoyama Sabrina Sato[4] Juliana Imai[5] Yudi Tamashiro[6] Daniele Suzuki Paulo Nagamura Lisa Ono Fernanda Takai[7] Daniel Matsunaga
Total population
~2.084 million descendants (1.09% of the Brazilian population)[8]
Regions with significant populations
São Paulo, Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul. Distributed throughout the national territory through internal migrations.
Languages
Portuguese, and a minority of descendants speak Japanese.
Religion
Predominant Catholicism[9] A small proportion follow Buddhism and Shintoism[10]

Japanese immigration in Brazil officially began in 1908. Currently, Brazil is home to the largest population of Japanese origin outside Japan, with about 1.5 million Nikkei (日系), term used to refer to Japanese and their descendants.^[11] A Japanese-Brazilian (Japanese: 日系ブラジル人, nikkei burajiru-jin) is a Brazilian citizen with Japanese ancestry. People born in Japan and living in Brazil are also considered Japanese-Brazilians.

This process began on June 18, 1908, when the ship Kasato Maru arrived in the country bringing 781 workers to farms in the interior of São Paulo. Consequently, June 18 was established as the national day of Japanese immigration.^[12] In 1973, the flow stopped almost completely after the Nippon Maru immigration ship arrived; at that time, there were almost 200,000 Japanese settled in the country.^[13]

Currently, there are approximately one million Japanese-Brazilians, mostly living in the states of São Paulo and Paraná.^[14] According to a 2016 survey published by IPEA, in a total of 46,801,772 Brazilians' names analyzed, 315,925 or 0.7% of them had the only or last name of Japanese origin.^[15]

The descendants of Japanese are called Nikkei, their children are Nisei, their grandchildren are Sansei, and their great-grandchildren are Yonsei. Japanese-Brazilians who moved to Japan in search of work and settled there from the late 1980s onwards are called dekasegi.