Three Years Documenting the Daily Lives of Japan's Brazilian Community

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Three Years Documenting the Daily Lives of Japan's Brazilian Community

Brazil is home to the largest overseas Japanese population. But for those who decide to return to Japan, the country is often anything but welcoming.

This article originally appeared on VICE Japan.

Japan has a complicated relationship with its diaspora. In the early 1900s, when Japan was dealing with a rising population but limited jobs, Japanese workers began to seek out new opportunities overseas. At the time, their options were pretty limited. Countries like the United States and Japan had implemented racist immigration policies barring the arrival of Asian or non-White immigrants.

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Meanwhile Brazil was on the economic upswing and hurting for laborers. The country had tried and failed to attract European immigrants to work on the coffee plantations through a sponsored immigration program that had its own racist reasons and was so prone to abuse that Italy banned its use outright.

So when Japanese immigrants arrived they found plenty of job opportunities, but not a lot of pay. Fast-forward through decades of Brazilian history and freeze for a moment in 1980s Japan. The country was an economic powerhouse, far surpassing Brazil in terms of its GDP. Now it was Japan that was in need of new workers, but the government wasn't exactly keen on opening the doors to millions of foreigners. They instead looked toward Brazil, which by then was home to the largest Japanese ethnic population outside Japan.

The government offered contract-based work visa to Brazilians of Japanese descent. A decade later, the immigration program was expanded to anyone of Japanese descent living in Brazil who was no more than three generations removed from Japanese soil.

Then the economy stagnated and many of these contract workers lost their jobs. Suddenly, Japan no longer wanted so many "foreigners" hanging around, regardless of their ethnicity. In 2009, they offered jobless men and women $3,000 USD each—and $2,000 USD for each child—if they would return to Brazil. Plenty chose to remain in Japan instead, and tensions have plagued the community since.

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The heart of the issue has to do with Japan's cultural views toward "foreigners." Even people of Japanese descent are considered foreigners by many if they were born overseas. Soon tensions started to rise between the Japanese and the Brazilian-Japanese residents of the city of Toyota City, in Aichi prefecture.

In few places is this more evident than in Toyota City's Homi Danchi apartment complex. About 40 percent of the Danchi (the word basically means a large apartment complex) is occupied by Brazilian-Japanese immigrants—a huge percent in a country as homogenous as Japan.

Photographer Keisuke Nagoshi spent three years documenting the daily lives of the Brazilian-Japanese community living in Homi Danchi, snapping more than 40,000 photos, some of which eventually made their way into his photo book Familia Homi Complex. Our Tokyo office caught up with Keisuke to talk about what drew him to document the life of Brazilian-Japanese teens in Toyota City.

VICE: What was it about Homi Danchi that initially caught your attention?
Keisuke Nagoshi: I had done a lot of photo shoots overseas, so this time around I wanted to shoot a subject matter that related to Japan. I happened to be free at the end of the year when I heard about these Brazilian street racers in Nagoya. Apparently they were racing down by the pier and I thought it would be fun to spend the end of the year taking pictures of them racing while riding on the back of the bike.

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So what made you choose the Brazilian-Japanese community as your subject?
I think it was the summer of 2000. I was driving around Hamamatsu and, since it was hot, I was looking for a place where I could sleep outside instead of sleeping in the car. There happened to be this sand dune and there were a lot of people having what appeared to be a carnival on the beach. It was like a beach party. There were like 3,000 Brazilians, all in their bathing suits. I didn't see a single Japanese person. It didn't feel like Japan at all. I previously had the opportunity to shoot in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador during Carnival season and it left a lasting impression on me.

You previously shot a series on Filipino immigrants as well. What is it about foreigners that attracts you as a photographer?
With foreigners there are parts of them that are the complete opposite of what it means to be Japanese. I know that 'haphazard' is sort of a bad word to use here, but that is what this is. [Laughs]

What was it like the first time you arrived at Homi Danchi?
It was the middle of the night and there were all these kids with different skin colors running around. There were five of them who had squeezed themselves into a phone booth. They were just hanging out, talking amongst themselves. I managed to get a few snapshots that I liked and that's how I ended up going there so often.

The kids thought you were a cop, right?
It's not like people still think I'm a cop. [Laughs] They were all convinced at one point though that I was an undercover cop. But from the perspective of a Japanese person there is no such thing as an undercover cop. Still, I was taking so many pictures that I must've looked pretty suspicious.

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Yet your photographs always feel so close to the subjects. How did you shrink the distance between yourself and your subjects—especially if they were so suspicious of you from the start?
Well, I initially felt that I was getting a positive response from the photos that captured the normal everyday life of the youths in Homi Danchi. I simply wanted to continue shooting something along those lines.

Shooting more photos of normal life?
Yeah. When I decided that I wanted to capture their everyday lives, I was worried that if I was to commute from Tokyo every time I wanted to shoot I would only scratch the surface. That we would never be able to truly understand each other. So I rented a room at Homi Danchi so that I would be able to live where my subjects lived. But it's not like I could just take photos of events that had no impact whatsoever. I that sense, it might seem obvious now, but it was the days when nothing much was happening at all that were the most common.

So you made that connection by spending all those empty days together?
Well, even if I say that we got along well, I was still often twice their age. And when you consider their relationships with the Japanese residents of Homi Danchi, for those kids, the ones who suddenly had to move from Brazil during elementary school or middle school to live in Japan, it wasn't exactly an optimal situation to just accept this Japanese man who suddenly showed up from Tokyo. I mean when I was following them to school taking photos, the cops and parents up there noticed me. Eventually there were posters warning people to 'beware the camera-toting man with the black hat.' Stuff like that happened. But the biggest find those days was stumbling across the open space under building No. 142. There was always someone hanging out down there.

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A lot of the photos in this series were shot at building No. 142.
Maybe it was because I had way too much spare time. You know, it can get lonely to spend all that time by yourself. I was practically alone. So when I needed someone to talk to, I would go to the space under building no. 142. There was always someone around if I went there. It wasn't really about taking photos at all. It had more to do with the mental aspect of living at Homi Danchi. I guess they had a lot of spare time as well, so it wasn't like we were planning to gather somewhere, we were all just hanging out.

Here in Tokyo, I feel like we lost touch with the meaning of 'spare time.'
But Danchi life is full of it. I usually don't take photos of scenery and landscapes, but when I look back at the photos I took at Homi Danchi, there was quite a lot of scenery. I guess I had that much spare time. [Laughs] In Tokyo, I would fall asleep late—sometimes well into dawn—but during my time in the Danchi, I usually fell asleep before midnight.

How were you able to get in there and shoot the childbirth scenes? You must've been pretty close to the family by that point.
The childbirth was quite interesting. The father couldn't get inside the maternity room. Apparently only one person is allowed to inside at a time, and his wife's mother was already inside, so the father wasn't allowed to enter. He was very upset and started to punch the wall. Eventually he went home after screaming 'bitch' at his wife's mother.

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There's this great photo where everyone in the room is kissing each other and another where all the members of this motorcycle gang are hanging out in this cherry tree. What's the story there?
People always look at those two photos and ask if I set them up. But I was simply taking those pictures as the events occurred. The group kiss photo had an interesting back story. I was invited to this party and when one of the couples started kissing, everyone else just followed suit.

For the biker gang picture. The Brazilians living in the Danchi hated the Japanese biker gang. If the gang ride their bikes inside the Danchi, they would get beat up. [Laughs] That's why they loitered instead outside the Danchi and I took that photo after they climbed up this cherry tree that happened to be there.

And here's another shot of a passionate kiss.
Well, compared to the Japanese, Brazilians are so much more straightforward in how they express their feelings. I might be overstating things, but Brazilians do flirt around a lot. I can't be that straightforward with my own feelings, so I'm rather jealous.

Like take Ricky's dad. He was from Peru and when he first came to the Danchi, he said it felt like heaven. He was always good at dancing and he would tell me how much money he made just dancing in the streets. I guess he grew up in a rather poor environment.

How did you first meet him?
There is this public hall space underneath building No. 107. Ricky's kid had a birthday party there and when Ricky's dad took the dance floor all the girls went crazy. He was so good at dancing. Later he told me about how he battled terrorists in Lima as an ex-soldier. He showed me the bullet wounds from his battles. I didn't know someone like that was living in Danchi.

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Myself, having lived in Japan for more than 20 years and grown up in this environment where you're told to not to do this or that, it was so refreshing to see someone who without becoming more 'Japanese' in a weird way, was able to stay so true to himself. Someone who could just dance all night long and approach strangers like me with such an open mind. That's why, to me he's like the best person ever.

So what made you finally decide that this project was finished. I mean you were documenting their daily lives, so, presumably, it could've gone on forever.
I decided to stop shooting because the boys I got close with no longer hang around the Danchi. Homi Danchi isn't all that strategic, from a transportation standpoint, but when you're 16 or 17 it's hard to really venture outside since you can't drive yet. But now everyone is all grown-up and they have drivers licenses so they no longer hang around the Danchi all that much. There's barely anyone at the open space under building No. 142 these days, so I guess I was around during the golden years of the Danchi.

And did you change at all during those three years?
I don't think so. But my relationship with the boys from the Danchi definitely changed. I mean at first I was just this suspicious-looking middle aged man before we eventually got along better. But then I was on television and I became 'the man who appears on TV.' There were some of them who continued to interact with me naturally, but others made things hard by getting camera-shy. It was much easier shooting when everyone was like, 'oh, here's this weird middle-aged man.'

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I think some of them still think of me as a friend. Whenever I would hear someone say they were wondering what I was up to or why I wasn't around, I felt like our relationship had changed in a positive way.

I believe that humans are interesting after all and that by documenting human emotions and the peculiarities of their lives, I'm showing that interesting people still exist in this world. To that end, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to the people of Homi Danchi—my photo subjects and my friends.

Familia Homi Complex is a photo book released by VICE's Japan office. You can buy a copy here.