椰子樹 Yashi Ju. O Coqueiro. The Coconut Tree.
Photos taken at the Centro de Estudos Nipo-Brasileiros (CENB).
A community literary magazine founded in 1938 by and for the Japanese in Brazil, Yashi Ju’s wide range of essays and haiku and tanka poetry speaks of life in Brazil for the Japanese community. The magazine published its eleventh issue in 1941, and after a six year hiatus that, according to the Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura Japonese (Bunkyo) 1 was due more to disinterest within the Japanese community rather than pressure from Brazilian authorities, resumed publication of its twelfth issue in 1947 (550).
The magazine still circulates today, but its readership has gotten older, as the number of Japanese-Brazilians who can read Japanese (and who are interested in the literary world of their grandparents) continues to decrease. Nowadays, explains Kenji Matsuzaka, who works at the Center, pieces about family, getting sick, and getting older are becoming more commonplace in the fabric of the magazine.
I’m curious about those six years in which nothing was written. Bunkyo actually writes that there was a “falta de vontade de seus participantes,” which I may have interpreted too liberally as “disinterest” (550). Was it because of economic reasons, or organizational reasons -- or something else altogether -- that there is no record of those six years? I’m curious because from what I’ve gathered so far, the Chinese in Brazil basically have written very little, and I’m intrigued by everything this absence in literature stands for -- a political voice (or lack thereof) different from that of Chinese Americans in the United States, a self-history that is more difficult to piece together, and what, if not In the Year of the Boar and Jacky Robinson, do Chinese-Brazilian children read?
"Bunkyo" is the abbreviated name in Japanese of the Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura Japonesa. ↩︎
