Interviews
Repaying Brazil by educating the technicians (Japanese)
(Japanese) The reason why our company (JACTO Group) got big, why we were able to make money, was thanks to the farmers. So, appropriately, we knew part of the profits must be returned to the farmers. We thought there shouldn’t be any land that goes to waste, so we should try to re-fertilize it for them. But as we were thinking about how to re-fertilize the land, we realized that the reason why the farmers were poor wasn’t necessarily because of the land; the land itself is good. There is plenty of rainfall, the weather is pretty good… What was missing was the proper skill. There are technical skills, agricultural skills that I assume are difficult to learn, and there was nobody that had or was able to utilize these skills. There were no técnicos (technicians). There were several agrônomos (agriculturalists), but no técnicos. So I thought the best way to give back to the farmers was to send some técnicos back to the countryside. So I told my students to all go back to their homes, to the farms. Don’t stay in the city. So most of them ended up going back to the countryside.
Date:
Location: Brazil
Contributed by: Caminho da memória - 遥かなるみちのり. São Paulo, Brazil: Comissão de Elaboração da História dos 80 Anos de Imigração Japonesa no Brasil, 1998. VHS.
