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]

Since childhood, he has been interpreting for his father.

Well, I couldn't speak Portuguese at all. So my father lived in Brazil for 50 years and died without being able to speak Portuguese properly. I was 5 years old then. I learned languages quickly, so I was made to translate right away. I was already made to translate when I was 6 or 7 years old.

So, how should I put it, after my father left the scrubbing factory, he would go around to Japanese people to take orders for clothes, then sew them at home and deliver them. So he would buy fabrics and accessories, and then deliver the finished products, but in the end, even if he went to the morning market, it was full of Japanese people, so he could buy groceries even if he didn't speak Portuguese. And since he needed to speak Portuguese to buy fabrics and accessories, he would take me with him to act as an interpreter.

Living in São Paulo meant that I didn't really need to learn the language.

interpreters languages linguists

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)