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]

What made your parents decide to move to Brazil?

My father's family had seven members, but at one point five of them went to Brazil. There was a girl called Ninomiya Koto, who was my father's older sister. Then there was Ninomiya Tokuichi, who was two years older than my father. All of these people went to Brazil in 1926 or 1927 as part of the family of my uncle, Kumatsu Harumi.

So, Ninomiya Koto married a man named Shimuta, who was from Fukuoka Prefecture, in Brazil.

The Shimuta couple, who came to Japan at the end of 1952 or the beginning of 1953, seemed to be incredibly wealthy, and when they saw our lifestyle, they must have said something like, "You'd be better off in Brazil. Japan had already lost the war, and there was no future for Japan, so come to Brazil and you'd be able to live a good life." So, how should I put it, my parents were persuaded by their words and said, "Well, then, let's go to Brazil."

We left Yokohama on a ship called America Maru on November 28, 1953, and arrived in Santos on January 16, 1954.

Brazil migration postwar 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)