|
The Brazilian community is the third largest foreign community in Japan today. There are 274.7 thousand Brazilians, 613,791 Koreans, and 462,396 Chinese citizens in Japan.
Based on the last Japanese census, sociologist Ângelo Ishi, Professor of the University of Musashi, published in the Alternativa magazine, in the beginning of the year, a study about these Brazilians that, in 2003, made up the dekassegui community.
This magazine is one of the 12 published by the Brazilian community, who also has two weekly newspapers, a television network, and several Internet radio stations.
In the beginning of the 90s, over 60 thousand Brazilians used to leave to Japan in a single year. Today, the community is still growing, but at much lower rates.
Between 2002 and 2003, the community grew 2.4%, or 6,388 people. According to a psychologist of the São Paulo Catholic University, Kyoko Nakagawa, it is estimated that 3 thousand babies are born per year in that community.
The dekasseguis (or burajirujins, as Brazilians living in Japan are also known) community has 16,771 children of up to 4 years of age. While in the beginning of the migratory movement, men were the absolute majority, today there are 123,564 women among the 274.7 thousand Brazilians in Japan.
More than half of the women are in the 20-39 year age group, and there are almost 7 thousand women who are more than 60 years old.
Os burajirujins are spread throughout 47 Japanese provinces. In some regions, such as the province of Shizuoka, they total over 50% of all resident aliens.
And, according to Ishi, "even though foreigners still represent less than 2% of Japanese population, some cities are becoming real laboratories that allow for Japanese to get used to people from other nationalities, especially Brazilians."
Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.