Ōtake Wasaburō's Dictionaries and the Japanese "Colonization" of Brazil

According to Kokei Uehara, a professor emeritus of hydraulic engineering at the University of São Paulo who immigrated in 1936, there were only two things that every migrant from Japan in Brazil possessed: a picture of the emperor and a copy of Ōtake Wasaburō's Powa jiten (Portuguese-Japanese dictionary, 1918).² The Powa jiten was heralded as the first of its kind, and became indispensable to the nearly 200,000 Japanese citizens who emigrated to Brazil prior to World War II. Though subsequently replaced by more extensive dictionaries, the Powa jiten is a dictionary of undeniable historic importance, facilitating the establishment of a community of persons of Japanese descent that is now the largest outside of Japan. This article will examine the circumstances of the dictionary's creation, the implications of its misleading claim of chronological primacy, and the development of the dictionary over time.

Introduction

Japan is not often considered as central to the history of imperial expansion or of mass migration, despite having been deeply involved with both. The Tokugawa Shogunate, which ruled Japan from 1603-1867 (also known as the Edo period), fell to reformers bent on transforming Japan into a modern nation-state. In the decades that followed, the relative isolation of Japan during the Edo period was replaced by an atmosphere of profound interest in the outside world, driven by a government eager to join an international community of nations. The large-scale migration of Japanese citizens from the main Japanese islands began roughly simultaneously with the creation of the Greater Japanese Empire through the acquisition of Taiwan (1895) and the initiation of state-sponsored migration ("peaceful expansionism" in the parlance of the day) to other sovereign nations, beginning with Hawaii (which in 1885 was still a monarchy.)³ By 1899, the Japanese government was supervising emigration to the United States, Australia, Fiji, Guadeloupe, Canada, Mexico, and Peru. In the early years of the twentieth century, however, the United States, Australia, and Canada all began to curtail or forbid immigration from Japan altogether; the infamous "Gentlemen's Agreement" of 1907-08, for example, dramatically limited Japanese immigration into the United States. A concerted effort to identify a new destination for emigration caused the Japanese government to turn to Brazil. When the United States terminated immigration from Japan in 1924, Brazil became the primary destination of emigration outside of the Japanese Empire.

In addition to this push factor, there were also significant pull factors present in Brazil. In addition to the general desire of the Brazilian government to take greater advantage of interior lands they considered to be underutilized, a faction in the government that was concerned with a shortage of agricultural laborers on coffee plantations in São Paulo welcomed Japanese immigrants as a potential solution to that problem. At the close of the nineteenth century, the Italian government had called back its migrants (who had been the primary laborers on these plantations since the abolition of slavery in 1888) after it received word of their poor treatment. Although there was some resistance, particularly from groups who supported racialist "bleaching" (branqueamento) immigration policies, the labor needs of plantation owners won the day. In this way, the migration of Japanese to Brazil became seen as mutually beneficial for both countries, at least in the minds of certain key politicians, intellectuals, and military figures. Despite the ending of Japan's formal imperial project in 1945 and the dwindling of large-scale migration overseas that coincided with domestic economic growth in the postwar, this period of overseas expansion has led to sizable communities overseas, particularly in Brazil.

Ōtake Wasaburō (1872-1944)

Ōtake's birth followed closely on the heels of the creation of the modern nation-state of Japan, and the story of his life that has been passed down reflects the new cosmopolitanism and expansionist sentiments that marked the Meiji period (1868-1912).⁴ Although he was born in Tokyo to a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, Ōtake took a decidedly different route from his father's: by the time he was entering middle school...