[Personal Portraits #21] 😢 The story of a boy who crossed the ocean at age 5

🖋 From a sudden fragment of memory

Hello, this is Bell note.
A little while ago, I wrote about my mother's older sister, Shizuko, in "Personal Portraits."
It was an attempt to trace the life of a relative I had never met, about whom there were few clues, using the power of imagination.

Actually, while writing that piece, there was another person I had been thinking about for a long time.
That person is Goro, a paternal relative whom I met only once, and whom I will write about this time.

Using those few memories and several facts I learned later as clues, I would like to gently trace the contours of the person named Goro.

In a corner of my memory, the figure of a man remains.
He was an old man who was tall, rather thin, with tanned skin and sharp features.
That person—Goro—was my paternal grandfather's younger brother, and I met him only once for a very short time when I was in elementary school. I believe Goro was well over 60 at the time.

I believe the location was a gathering of relatives. Outside the circle of adult conversation, I spent my time feeling out of place, as children do. What did I talk about with Goro? What did his voice sound like? Honestly, I don't remember much. Only the atmosphere of someone who had returned after a long journey and his appearance, which carried a somewhat foreign air, left a strong impression on me.

The story I heard at that time was, "Goro is a man who moved to Brazil, and he is now a coffee farmer there with his family." And one other thing that remained strongly in my childhood heart was the story that "Goro apparently moved to Brazil alone at the age of five."

At five years old, alone to a foreign country?
Without understanding the meaning or the weight of it, I think I just listened blankly.

Looking back now, the memory is vague and incomplete. But even so, it has remained submerged within me for a long time.

Recently, in particular, I sometimes remember relatives I don't know well on a whim.
Rather than "remembering," it feels more like a question that had been stuck somewhere in my heart for a long time is asking me, "What actually happened with that story?"

Perhaps it is because I was pushed by such a question that I am trying to trace Goro's story again now.

🖋 Goro in my imagination

"He moved to Brazil alone at the age of five," someone among my relatives said, and I just listened from nearby.
I don't think I truly understood the meaning of those words. It just left a strange impression on me that a small child would leave his family and go to a country far away.

I was of the generation that grew up watching the anime "3000 Leagues in Search of Mother." That story where little Marco travels from Italy to Argentina in search of his mother. In my mind, Goro's figure eventually overlapped with Marco's. A small back heading to an unknown land, rocking on a ship, without even knowing the language—perhaps I had created such images in my head on my own.

Later, I think I was around middle school age, I suddenly remembered this story. It was during a scene in the NHK serial television novel "Oshin," which was so popular at the time that it was called a social phenomenon. In it, the father, Sakuzo, played by Shiro Ito, talked about his plan to seriously consider emigration to Brazil with government support and move as a family. However, because the grandmother, Naka, was driven to the point of trying to throw herself off a cliff, saying, "If only I were gone," deep conflict arose within the family, and the development ultimately led to the "emigration being scrapped."

When I saw that scene, I suddenly remembered Goro. Even that poor Oshin family in Tohoku gave up on moving as a family. Yet, Goro—all alone, and at the age of five, which is more of a "toddler" than a child—actually crossed the ocean. What on earth happened in Goro's family? I have a memory of thinking things like that. But I feel like I had forgotten it again by the time the drama ended.

As a child at the time, the best I could do was borrow images from anime and dramas and vaguely think, "Goro is an amazing person." I was still too young to ponder the real circumstances, systems, history, and background.

In that sense, the memory of Goro remained in the "form of imagination" within me, drifting thinly and vaguely.
However, I feel that it is precisely in that "vagueness" that there is the power as a starting point for trying to trace this story now.

🖋 Fragments I learned as an adult

After that, it was not until I was quite an adult that I remembered Goro again. I think I was in my 20s. One day, while I was casually talking about the past with my father, I asked, "By the way, why was Goro able to go to Brazil at such a young age?"

According to my father, it was an era when the government was actively recruiting immigrant groups, and regardless of age, as long as the paperwork was in order as a member of the group, even children could travel abroad.
While that may have been true in terms of policy, I was still left speechless when I thought about the reality of a five-year-old leaving their parents to go to a foreign country.

Moreover, it seems that Goro was not the only such case.
At that time, the term "kuchiberashi" (reducing the number of mouths to feed) was still being used in a raw and realistic way.
Life was difficult, and the whole family could not survive—in such circumstances, there were families who had to make the decision to send their young children far away to a foreign land.
Of course, that is something that cannot be easily measured by today's standards.

But the more I heard, the more unsettled I felt deep in my chest.
Although immigration policy was promoted as a "national strategy," the ones who actually crossed the ocean were nameless individuals like Goro, and behind them were countless "family circumstances."

National systems, the currents of the times, family choices, and individual destinies—while each was moving according to different scales, a single five-year-old child was quietly placed on a ship. That fact remained in my heart, suddenly feeling heavy and heartbreaking.

🖋 The History of Brazilian Immigration as Background

For a long time, I knew almost nothing about the meaning of the term "Brazilian immigration" that Goro had experienced.
By looking intoelectronic exhibition materials from the National Diet Library, etc.I was able to gradually learn about the systems and history behind it.

Formal immigration from Japan to Brazil began in 1908. It is said that it started when an immigration agency called the Kokoku Shokumin Kaisha (Imperial Colonization Company) signed a contract with the São Paulo state government and sent the first group of immigrants under the name of "family immigration." However, the reality seems to have been quite different.

Even though they were called "families," in reality, there were many fake couples and fake siblings on paper, and it is said that quite a few people traveled alone. Even so, because they could not get permission to depart without taking such forms, people seem to have used various ingenuity to stage a "family-like" appearance.

Also, those who applied were limited to people with a certain amount of assets or credit, and the list included not only farmers but also people from various occupations such as former police officers, teachers, monks, conductors, and printers.

Travel at that time cost a large amount of money, roughly estimated at over 130 yen per person (plus train fare from their hometown to the port of embarkation). Of course, it was not just that; the system design was extremely complex, involving subsidies and advance payment systems from the government and the state of São Paulo, Brazil, as well as repayment from wages after arrival.

The more I learn about this background, the more the question, "In what position and how did Goro board this immigrant ship?" presses on my heart as something heavier and more realistic.

The Kasato Maru, which the immigrants boarded, departed from Kobe in 1908 and arrived at the port of Santos in Brazil after about 50 days. However, what awaited them was a harsh reality that exceeded their imagination.

After arriving at the port of Santos, Brazil, the immigrants traveled by train to the city of São Paulo, and were then sent to six large farms in São Paulo state as "colonos" (agricultural laborers). Each farm was accompanied by a Japanese interpreter who acted as a bridge for life and work.

However, the reality that awaited the immigrants was by no means peaceful. The housing provided was a shack without furniture or even floorboards, and the foundation for life was not even in place. Life on the farm was managed by bells and horns, and it is said that some supervisors practiced labor management that carried over from the days of slavery.
As a result, some immigrants were repatriated to the city of São Paulo and reassigned to other farms or railway construction sites, but it is said that there was no end to those who ran away at night.

In the midst of such harsh realities—if Goro had been included in the early immigrant groups like the ones here, what kind of days would he have spent? In a daily life that defied imagination, with what thoughts did he try to survive? Just imagining that a "single child," a small existence that would not remain in the records, was in the midst of that, a quiet restlessness spreads deep in my chest.

Of course, I do not know in detail exactly when Goro traveled or which immigrant group he belonged to. However, judging from my age and Goro's age when I met him, I think he probably went to Brazil sometime around 1915. If he had placed himself in this history of immigration during the early days, the process of how Goro, who crossed the ocean alone, "settled" in that land and eventually came to have a family as a coffee farmer—while it remains in the realm of imagination—could not have been very smooth.

Why was Goro, a five-year-old alone, able to take root and survive in that land amidst that harsh reality? I think that question will remain one of the doubts that will stay with me forever.

🖋 Resonance with the memory of "Shizuko-san"

As I think about Goro-san in this way, I am once again reminded of another relative I wrote about in the past.
My mother's older sister, Shizuko. Her name and a few photographs were all I had of her.

Shizuko-san married into a family in Taichung, Taiwan, before the war and ended her days in that foreign land. I previously traced the memories my mother would occasionally share about her in a character sketch. Although I had never met her directly and had very few clues, I visited Taichung myself, and with the desire to visit her grave that my mother could not fulfill, I wrote a record as if to draw out Shizuko-san's life through the power of imagination.

I think it was because of this experience that I have recently come to realize with conviction.
The weight of the fact that one of my own relatives lived in another part of the world and passed away there.

When I think of Goro-san, that feeling comes back to me once again.
Taiwan and Brazil. Two lands that stretch in completely different directions when viewed on a map. Their eras and backgrounds are also different.
However, when I think that both were places where my own blood relatives truly existed and lived 'outside the framework of Japan,' I am enveloped in a strange sensation.
That a relative connected to me was building a life on a distant horizon, in a place I knew nothing about—it was a mild shock, like discovering that my roots had another dimension.

That realization, while somewhat like a hazy landscape lacking reality, is at the same time very concrete because of our blood ties, and it exists deep in my chest with a quiet weight.

That is precisely why, just as I did with Shizuko-san, I have come to want to reclaim Goro-san's memory within my own connections—not as an item in the system or history of 'immigration,' but strictly as a human being.

Even if memories fade, there was someone who truly lived there.
And that a part of that person's life is connected to my own present.
To feel that, I am taking up my pen once again.

🖋 Searching for outlines in the margins

Why am I writing about Goro-san like this now?
Honestly, I don't have a clear answer myself.

However, as I grow older, I feel that the things I have left unknown have begun to carry a little more weight within me.
It is not that I want to verify something, nor that I want to understand everything. I just want to gently touch that blank space when I happen to pause.
It is with that feeling that I take up my pen.

This text has no 'conclusion'.
Why Goro-san crossed the ocean alone at the age of five—I only know fragments of that background and his subsequent life.
Even so, while connecting the faint memories I know with my imagination, I am trying to bring Goro-san's figure to mind once more.
For me, character sketching is an attempt to 'try to know myself through others'.
By recalling Goro-san, who had been sleeping deep in my memory, perhaps I am confirming the outlines of my own existence.

It is fine if a story does not have a neat ending.
If this memory with its margins could spread like a small ripple in someone's heart somewhere—
I believe that alone makes it worth writing.

🖋 Afterword

In this main text, I have only touched upon a very small part of the information regarding Brazilian immigration, but the content is based on official documents and immigration-related materials from the electronic exhibition published on the National Diet Library's special website, newspaper articles from that time, and research literature on the Imperial Colonization Company.

If anyone is interested, very comprehensive information is posted there, so please take a look via the link below.

Of course, it is impossible to accurately trace Goro-san's footsteps using only historical materials.
This text is also nothing more than something I have assembled from my own perspective, based on only a few fragments of memory and the background of the time.

But just because it didn't remain in the records doesn't mean there was no story—that is what I have been thinking as I wrote this.
I intend to continue asking relatives who might know about Goro-san, or people who might have heard something, as time permits. It will be slow, but I intend to continue this record little by little. If there is any progress, I will report it on note again.

Finally—📚 Gratitude and thanks

In this article, while tracing the memory of Goro-san, I have quoted several images and materials from the National Diet Library's electronic exhibition '100 Years of Brazilian Immigration'.
The exhibition carefully introduces the journey of immigrants who traveled from Japan to Brazil, along with primary sources such as diaries, photographs, and letters. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude for providing such valuable clues to understanding those times in a form accessible to many people.

Through this exhibition, I realized once again that "history is both a record and a memory." By comparing the memories of my relative, Goro, with such materials, I feel I was able to gradually envision his life's outline.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my renewed respect and gratitude to the National Diet Library, everyone involved in the collection and organization of immigration materials, and the immigrants and their families who left behind these precious records.

🔔Bell