A colônia japonesa em Presidente Prudente: sua trajetória, relação com o Estado e a sociedade local (1908-1947)

Abstract

We can not deny that the Japanese colony in Brazil was vital to the socioeconomic transformation of the country in the early twentieth century. Its agricultural techniques have transformed family and commercial agriculture. Their cultural habits were perpetuated in the daily life of national society and other ethnicities, but not everything was positive. The integration of Japanese immigrants into Brazilian society was permeated by conflicts and difficulties, especially in relation to culture, as well as turbulent relations with the Brazilian State, particularly in the period 1930-1947 - when the federal government adopted a tougher nationalist policy about the immigrants and, in the sequence Brazil experiences the impacts of World War II and its consequences - and the great turbulence inside the colony between the antagonistic groups victorious and defeatist (the first denied the Japanese defeat in the war, while the seconds accepted it). Therefore, the purpose of this job is to analyze the history and memory of Japanese immigration in Brazil, particularly in the Alta Sorocabana region, its hardships, challenges and achievements. In addition to making clear the importance of the Japanese to the transformation and socioeconomic development of Presidente Prudente and region, it is also intended to give light to the turbulent moment by which the colony passed in the period of World War II and in the immediate postwar period (until 1947) in Presidente Prudente. However, the aim is not to exhaust the subject, because its complexity, but rather to offer new perspectives and to pave the way for a deeper study of the history of Japanese immigration and how the figure of the Japanese immigrant affirmed himself in the arduous process of guaranteeing his identity in the Alta Sorocabana, a process that was marked by traumas, silences and conquests, and which has to be historicized, since the objective of our research is not to reduce the history of the Japanese to the region of this work, but to raise and encourage new researches this way this part of the history of Brazil is not forgotten.