Barrio Liberdade, Brazil's Japan Town

One of many food stands that line the streets

Before I even have a chance to reach the intersection of the street, the whiff of roasting meat, teriyaki shrimp and the shouts of a crowd tempt me to come hither.  With the idea that there is a good time to be had now implanted in my mind, my legs start to carry me faster and faster down the road.  I turn the street corner and I am immediately assaulted by billowing smoke.   It wafts around a row of brightly red and white striped food stands that line the street and take over the sidewalk.  People crowd around them, overflowing into the road while throwing up their hands trying to signal to the fast speaking vendors what they desire.  I move closer and distinguish the distinctive chatter of merchants tallying orders but, they are not speaking Portuguese; it is an inimitably Asian dialect.  I am very confused. 

I pause for a moment and take in my full surroundings; little around me has remained Latino from the previous city block.  Red, oriental street lamps now edge the narrow avenue giving a stark contrast to the green and yellow of a Brazilian flag whipping in the wind above. The country I was just gaining a sense of familiarity with has violently reverted back to a place that is once again entirely foreign and new.  People of Asian descent seem to outnumber the traditional looking European Paulistanos and the food stands display through foggy glass windows various meat skewers.  For a moment I start to lose myself and forget that I am in South America.  Nevertheless, I am quickly snapped back to reality by the solitarily recognizable thing, the traffic; forever locked in the stop and go motion that is the Sao Paulo commute.  I realize then that I have stumbled into the area of Sao Paulo called Barrio Liberdade (Liberty Neighborhood).

                The neighborhood is home to the Nikkei, the descendents of Japanese immigrants that flocked to Brazil a little over 100 years ago lured by clever coffee plantation owners.  In 2004, there were approximately 2.6 million Japanese and people of direct Japanese ancestry living abroad of Japan.  1.6 million, about 62 percent, live in Brazil, according to the Association of Nikkei and Japanese Abroad, an organization that tracks Japanese people across the globe.  In 2008 the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics released a book about the demography of the Brazilian population.  The book claims that in the year 2000 there were 693,495 Japanese living in Sao Paulo, thus giving the city the densest Japanese population in the world outside of Japan.

A popular side street that possesses many restaurants

                The majority of the Sao Paulo Nikkei, along with other Asian inhabitants, live in Barrio Liberdade.  Over the past century, they have taken a little slice of the grand Sao Paulo metropolis and made it their own.  Injecting their architecture, art and cuisine into the Brazilian cultural scene.  In the artisan market that borders the food stands, vendors attempt to sell definitively Asian style trinkets to both tourists and locals alike. Colorful dragons and phoenixes woven from wires line tables, wooden name planks smeared with black calligraphy are made to order and bamboo wind chimes hollowly clunk together in the breeze.  I am not much of a shopper though and do not often take interest to many artisan fairs.  After walking through once, whilst marveling at how some people manage to find room for such colorful debris, I made my way towards another narrow street lined with juice stands, sushi restaurants and….a shopping mall? 

                As a side note, shopping malls are all the rage here.  The malls, more commonly known as “shoppings,” are everywhere.  They follow the exact same design of malls everywhere across the world; big, crowded, filled with materialistic crap and totally unnecessary.  American brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Nike and Abercrombie Fitch have found a cozy niche in the Brazilian market and milk it for all its worth. 

As put by a Brazilian saleswoman I spoke with one day, “Who doesn’t want to wear what the North American actresses are wearing?”  She could not be more right, despite an average pair of Nike sneakers fetching the equivalent of US$150; the Brazilians want them and buy them without qualms. 

A woman in a mall shop sews together anime costumes

This mall was a little different though.  Packed into what appeared to be an old office building, the “shopping” is narrow and tall; five floors of tiny shops that can barely fit four to five people inside them and two floors of Asian buffets and restaurants.  Each floor’s shops offer the similar commodities and lots of it; anime and manga (Japanese cartoons and comics).  Bootlegged kung fu DVDs with Portuguese subtitles play on old clunky TVs that hang in the hallways, illuminating the young window shoppers eyeballing the newest action figures from the Marvel and DC Comic franchises.  I was a bit shocked to see the Mighty Morpin Power Rangers dubbed in Portuguese battling enemies I can recall from my own childhood.  This is truly globalization at its finest. 

But of course the Japanese would have a strong influence in the Brazilian culture.  Right after the US Navy’s Commodore Mathew Perry demanded that Japan open their ports to trade in 1854, many Japanese started to immigrate across seas to the Americas.  During that time in Brazil, Italians and Portuguese were working the coffee plantations for extremely cheap labor.  Someone had to harvest the beans though because slavery had been abolished in Brazil in 1850; just before the “War for Southern Independence” in the United States did the same in 1861.

Eventually though, the Italian government got fed up with their citizens working for dirt cheap wages and living like slaves in the new world.  Consequently, Italy eventually enacted the Decree Prinetti in 1902, thus greatly limiting the amount of Italians that were allowed to start anew in Brazil. 

With African slaves no longer an option and the Europeans tired of the shenanigans, coffee plantation owners went to the Japanese with promise of profit and a better life in Brazil.  The Japanese fell for it and in April 1908, the ship Kosato Maru with its 781 Japanese passengers, departed from the port in Kobe, Japan.  Three months later the boat docked at the Port of Santo, approximately 60 km south of Sao Paulo. 

The first Japanese had arrived but, they had just begun to find their home in South America.  When the United States enacted the Johnson Reed Immigration Act in 1924, which greatly adjusted the amount of Japanese that were able to obtain citizenship in the United States, the Japanese all but flooded into Brazil.  According to the Association of Nikkei and Japanese Abroad, between 1908 and 1941 approximately 190,000 Japanese immigrated to Brazil; most of them forging their homes in Sao Paulo and beginning the Japanese’s new found home away from home.

Despite the joy I was having in a poorly lit hallway reliving my chaste memories of high-school kids fighting with giant robots on TV, the “shopping” was still a mall and there is only so much I can take.  Returning to the street, it was time to hunt down some food and explore Brazilian-Asian cuisine.  I hungered after meat on a stick and a beer, making the food stands an ideal place to venture back to.  For US$4, I got a tender meat skewer and a beer; I’ll take that any day.  Yet, my hunger is not so easily satisfied and my curiosity for Brazilian sushi drew me to a restaurant named Musashi.   I ordered two salmon temaki.  A traditional Japanese way of preparing sushi; rice and salmon are wrapped together in seaweed that resembles an ice-cream cone.  I will give it to those Japanese-Brazilians; they pulled it off right and gave a lot more fish than is normally common in the dish. 

Beer and steak, what more do you want?

             Barrio Liberdade’s main attraction though, is its bridge that stretches over a highway marked by a large Torri; the traditional wooden structure found at Shinto shrines all around Japan.  The structure is an entry point into the heart of the neighborhood and the bridge offers views of even more tall skyscrapers in the distance.  It seems that is a common theme with Sao Paulo.  Along the bridge, more people tried to sell me brightly colored things that I politely turned down, but secretly, enjoyed being shrieked at from across the street.  It is the little things, ya know?  If you cannot smile after being hollered at by an old Asian lady attempting to sell you Peruvian hat in Brazil, I don’t know what will make you happy.

The popular bridge in the neighborhood from a distance

           Yes, Barrio Liberdade is a place in Sao Paulo like no other; maybe even the world.  Filled with a delicate mix of Asian business sense and laid back Latino attitude, the neighborhood is an interesting find in a predominantly industrialized western city.  From traditional shrines, delicious food and of course, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, this neighborhood is not to be passed up while in Sao Paulo.