Brazil-Maru

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Takeo Okumura had been chosen by Momose-sensei to pioneer the initial clearing and construction of Esperança. He was a quiet but very firm man. He made deliberate and very careful decisions, spoke little, and worked tirelessly to help new settlers. He was very relieved to see my father and mother arrive in Esperança and mentioned this many times in his very curt and direct way. As soon as we were established in our own house, Okumura brought over his supply of medications and gratefully turned the responsibility of the settlement’s health over to my mother and father. “It’s about time you arrived and took care of these things for me, Terada-san,” Okumura said gruffly.

  I had heard many stories about the difficulties of that first year, when Okumura, his wife, and three other men first came to live in Esperança, then entirely forest. Okumura was not one to talk about it much, but Tomi Okumura told my mother, “At first we built a kind of roof to live under, but that was all. Just a roof. When it rained, it rained into our shelter, and there was no place to go. What could we do? We slept in wet blankets. In the daytime, we were attacked by bees, but at night, it was worse. Grasshoppers and rats crawled all around and even on top of us. I could never sleep. In the morning, their droppings were everywhere.”

  My mother shuddered as she spoke. “Thanks to you, we don’t have to suffer that way.”

  “Do you know I was all alone in the camp while Okumura and the others set fire to the area? A big boar wandered into camp and I killed it myself with a big stick.”

  My mother wondered at the courage of this woman, who added as she smiled, “It was very good eating, you know.” She paused to think. “Things are changing for the better. Especially since you are here now. We’ve only had this book about first aid.” Tomi Okumura showed my mother the book. “Here is the chapter on childbirth.” She sighed, “It’s such a relief that we can depend on you now.”

  My mother turned the pages of Tomi Okumura’s book and smiled. Already she had seen two expectant mothers. Her work as a midwife in Esperança had already begun. Most likely anyone who was born in Esperança between 1925 and 1950 was brought into this world by my mother.

  An important part of our lives in Esperança was invested in the cooperative. The co-op naturally evolved from the very structure of our settlement, which was something of a Japanese village. As soon as there were enough families congregated in Esperança and producing more than their personal needs, family heads gathered to pool resources for proper storage, seeds and tools, and to bargain for the best prices. And from the very beginning, all families in Esperança joined in association to make and get loans. The co-op became the economic and political heart of Esperança, and Takeo Okumura was its director. As time went on and Esperança grew to some 250 families, the activities of the co-op grew, and the Esperança Cooperative itself became a very important and profitable entity in the area.

  When Okumura first went out to show my father the boundaries of our new land, I went along. He pointed out the measurements across the front of the land along the road. The lots were all measured out in long strips of sixty acres, each lot having access to one of several roads which crisscrossed Esperança. Now we were only a handful of families, but soon there would be over two hundred of us. Our lot was several miles from the long house which marked what became the center of Esperança with its co-op offices, store, warehouses, and eventually a school and church. Okumura’s house was located in this center, and soon, so were the houses of others who worked at the co-op.

  My father and I looked at the acreage. It was a green wall of dense forest, trees and vines and brush rising high into the sky. We could not see farther than several meters in from the road. What might be behind that wall of green life, we could not say. When we set fire to the forest, droves of yellow and green parakeets and clattering orange-beaked toucans swept up in great clouds above the flames, while small animals, armadillos, snakes, and lizards stumbled and scurried from the smoke. From time to time, wild boar and even a panther might be seen. When the fires died down and the earth was only warm to the touch, the men took long saws and hatchets and cut down the large trees that had not succumbed to the fire. Across the road could be seen the results of the labor of other settlers further along in this enterprise—the charred stumps of enormous trees now hidden in a field of green rice. Soon everything would be very different.

  When I think about the old forest, I invariably think about the incredible variety of insects in those days. Along with the occasional appearance of some unusual bird, the great variety of insects that yet remain are a reminder of the wonderfully complex living space the forest once was. When the forest was still intact, you could not light a candle or a lamp at night without being visited by a small dense cloud of moths, butterflies, beetles, mosquitoes, flies, crickets, and spiders of every color and description. They flew and crept through our open windows and doors in the hot evenings or congregated near the seeping lights on the walls of our houses. They seemed to us a terrible nuisance, lighting on our bodies to suck our blood or buzzing frantically around, falling into our food and clothing. In the mornings, my mother was forever sweeping out their brittle carcasses. As more and more of the forest was cleared, the number and variety of insects slowly diminished.

  Every immigrant remembers the bicho-de-pé, an insect which laid its eggs, usually, in your toes or the balls of your feet. We were plagued by these tiny foot worms which grew in soft blisters under the skin and itched terribly. In the evenings, we would gather around a lamp with a needle or the sharp point of a knife and extract the larvae from our feet. When I speak of the bicho-de-pé to young people, they always grimace, but old-timers like me became used to this evening occupation. It was something like getting a good massage, if not a new pair of feet.

  Berne, however, is something more painful. It too will lay an egg somewhere on your body, and the resulting larva will then penetrate the skin. The skin in that area becomes raised in a painful bump containing a tiny hole in its center. My father was called upon to treat a child with berne in her eye, but that was a very extreme case. Berne was treated by the locals with a compress of nicotine and soap which would, after a few days and some pressure on the spot, force the berne to literally pop out. The Japanese called berne the takenoko bug because the larva looked very much like a tiny sprout of bamboo, or takenoko, about the size of a grain of rice.

  It’s not possible here to name all the strange bugs we had never before seen. There were the giant sauva ants, who came in small armies and could destroy in one evening an entire crop of anything we might have planted. There were poisonous caterpillars whose furry bodies burned our skin. There were giant hairy spiders, sometimes as large as fifteen or twenty centimeters across. There were large ticks whose hard bodies were the size of large watermelon seeds. Those insects that could find food despite the clearing of the forest can still be encountered today, but the strangest and most interesting of them have disappeared with the trees.

  Looking out on these endless fields of pasture and planted land today, it is hard to imagine this land as it was then, known only to the wild animals and the Indians. In those days, we thought that the forest was so wide and so deep that it would never end, that carving out our small piece of it wouldn’t make such a great difference to something so immense. Besides, we had come to create a new world, and starting on new land was a special and sacred gift given only to a chosen few. Perhaps it was a great sin to destroy the forest in this way. Ever since, we have tried to replace the forest with a new life—growth, sustenance, call it what you will. I have lived here a mere lifetime, but the forest had peacefully existed here for many centuries. What we have taken from the earth will, I think, take many more lifetimes to return in kind. When my father talked of the sin of the immigrant, I believe he meant this sin of clearing the forest away forever.

  Toward the end of that first year, Grandma Uno died. Just a month before she died, however, she seemed suddenly to recuperate from a long period of ill health. Just as she had
pushed Kantaro aside to walk down the gangway alone to Brazil, she seemed to make a decision to leave her bed. Everyone commented on having seen her riding sidesaddle in Kantaro’s lap on the white horse. You could see the two of them riding slowly down the road, Grandma Uno, a gaunt and emaciated remnant of her former self, sitting in Kantaro’s lap like a small child, happily looking over the countryside as Kantaro pointed to one thing or another. These rides were never very long or very far, but people still commented among themselves that this must have quickened the end for Grandma Uno. My parents did not support this view, and I myself think that Grandma Uno found great pleasure in these excursions with Kantaro. Sometimes, as I went to the bathhouse near the end of the day, I would see Kantaro and his grandmother slowly returning. Kantaro would stop the horse a little way from the house, and they would both watch the sun set over Esperança, the soft rising swarms of mosquitoes and fireflies speckled against the glowing tones of orange and purple spreading across the darkening sky.

  CHAPTER 3:

  Baseball

  After we arrived in Esperança and had settled on our own plots of land, I missed seeing my friend Saburo Uno. Even though we were neighbors, we were separated by sixty acres of land and many chores. But as life settled into certain consistent daily tasks, my parents and other parents in Esperança began to talk about the need for a school and for a proper education for the children. As always, everyone came together to build the school, which they decided to locate a short distance from the old long house. Benches and tables were all hand-carpentered. When the school opened, I could, happily, be with my friend Saburo during a part of each day.

  All agreed that Shūhei Mizuoka must be the person to create and maintain our school. I myself now wonder at this unanimous decision (although Saburo, even in those days, contested in his childish way the worthiness of Mizuoka as a teacher). Indeed, Shūhei Mizuoka was a man of tremendous learning, but he was essentially immersed in his own philosophical pursuits. He enjoyed acquiring students in order to talk about his own studious interests, which we often found confusing and thus uninteresting. As Saburo would argue years later, many of us simply needed to learn to read and write and count, and then to learn the skills that would make us good farmers. But Mizuoka insisted that the cultivation of the mind and spirit was essential to the creation of a new civilization, that we, the youth of Esperança, were part of a wonderful new experiment. It was the old Emile experiment: a new breed of youth with clean slates, natural men from a special handful of young Emiles. Mizuoka had the grave responsibility of building the foundation for a cultivated and educated people who took their sustenance from both the fruit of their labor on the land and the joy of their educated minds. Well, Saburo and I had been exposed to this sort of thinking. Even from the time we arrived, Saburo liked to taunt that I was the Japanese Emile. That’s how I got the nickname “Emiru.”

  “Oh, Emiru,” Saburo would address me after school as we walked together, “how about this!” He pulled his cap tightly over his head and proceeded to mimic Mizuoka’s manner, “Young students of Esperança! A new world of your own making awaits you!” However, other children often wondered what to make of Mizuoka’s long digressions into the nature of the Mormon Church as established in the state of Utah in the United States or Tolstoy’s asceticism and spiritual beliefs as they developed in the later years of his life or a comparison of the lives of Rousseau and Voltaire. After all, we were farming children, and our ability to survive depended on our skill in turning and sowing the earth’s surface.

  Still, as the years have passed, many an idea from Mizuoka’s old digressions have come to mind and have sustained me in ways I did not expect. Saburo would probably laugh at my example, but the other day while milking a cow, I recalled a few lines that Mizuoka had taught us from the English playwright Shakespeare:

  To thy own self be true,

  And it must follow, as the night the day,

  Thou canst not then be false to any man.

  I now wonder at this statement, but Saburo is no longer around to talk of it.

  It was Mizuoka’s assistant, the poet Akira Tsuruta, who understood our perplexity and who painstakingly worked with each of us to help us read and write and count. Because of Tsuruta, most of the children of the Esperança of those days, unless they were kept away for work at home, received a very refined education. We were taught to read from the works of all the great Japanese poets and writers. And when Mizuoka’s great library arrived, we had, I believe, access to all the great literature, philosophy and history of the world that had been translated into Japanese at the time. In addition, Mizuoka, who could read in English, French, and German, often produced significant translations of his own, readings to which I politely listened while Saburo nodded off to sleep. Often, people—especially Japanese from Japan—are surprised by the sophistication of my Japanese, my grasp of ideas or my knowledge of foreign countries and writers, but these are largely due to my unconventional tutelage under Shūhei Mizuoka and Akira Tsuruta. Many of the children educated in those early years in Esperança were no different from me.

  I think I had greater respect for Mizuoka’s learning than did Saburo because of my admiration for his brother Kantaro. When Saburo saw Kantaro, he saw only a young man who happened to be his oldest brother, but I, who was the oldest in my family, felt a great attraction to Kantaro, to the idea of having a strong older brother who rode a horse and recorded our life on a Carl Zeiss box camera. I knew that Kantaro and Tsuruta were close friends and that Kantaro had great respect for Mizuoka. Kantaro thought of Shūhei Mizuoka as his personal teacher, and though he might not have admitted it in later years, I believe that Kantaro received his formal education and established the pattern of his ideas during those many long afternoons and evenings in concentrated discussion with the thinker Mizuoka.

  My admiration for Kantaro Uno was perhaps singular until the advent of baseball. It was Kantaro who was responsible for starting baseball in Esperança. Until then, baseball in Brazil was played only by a few Japanese living in the city of São Paulo. These Japanese played in open soccer fields among themselves and occasionally with American businessmen who also enjoyed the game. Baseball, unlike soccer, has never gained general popularity among Brazilians, and it is considered by many in Brazil to be, curiously, a Japanese game. It is odd to discover those things that become a part of one’s immigrant heritage. Baseball became a kind of cultural trait to be passed from generation to generation.

  I am not sure whether it was Kantaro who promoted baseball or baseball that promoted Kantaro; it was one of those fortunate combinations that makes heroes of athletes and actors. However, I am sure that it was Kantaro who tied baseball to our way of life in Esperança. That the sport of baseball should become part of our immigrant dream sounds strange, but it is true.

  “There are many of us young men in Esperança who would be united by baseball,” Kantaro affirmed emphatically. “Yes, it’s only a game, but it’s a game with many virtues.”

  Tsuruta nodded. “Teamwork . . . concentration . . . competition . . . spirit . . .”

  “Recreation,” said Mizuoka, closing a book and looking up from his reading. “Leisure!”

  Kantaro and Tsuruta looked at Mizuoka with some confusion.

  “Why are you afraid of speaking about having fun? You, Kantaro Uno, of all people?” Mizuoka laughed.

  “Well,” Kantaro said seriously, “there is such great labor to be accomplished in Esperança, it just doesn’t seem that we can be encouraging people to spend their time playing baseball without a good reason. So I am thinking of good reasons.”

  Tsuruta nodded and repeated, “Teamwork, competition, spirit.”

  Kantaro continued, “The yearly undokai when we get together for outdoor games is about our only excuse for fun or leisure.”

  “Why should you make any excuses?” Mizuoka sniffed. “Do I make excuses for my studies? I know. I know what people say about me: ‘That Mizuoka hasn’t got his seed
s in. Late again this year. All he does is read. If it weren’t for our paying his wages at the school, where would he be?’ Do I care? What is my answer? My answer is: I came here to Esperança to live! So why do you need to make excuses about wanting to play baseball? Play baseball!”

  And so Kantaro Uno played baseball. We all did. It was not as if there were anything to play with. We had to carve our bats from hard Brazilian woods and pack sand and cloth into leather pouches for balls. My three brothers and I marked off a small field and imitated everything that Kantaro and his friends did in their games. Pretty soon there was a commotion over baseball that was to last for many years in Esperança. It was a sort of fever that spread among all the men and boys. Kantaro had soon gathered all of us into teams of varying ages and abilities, and Okumura and the Esperança elders were forced to designate an area of land to be cleared for a legitimate baseball field. On weekends, the baseball field was occupied by a constant string of games, and so many arguments broke out over the use of the field that it had to be carefully scheduled.

  As it happened, Kantaro Uno was an excellent baseball player. In Japan, he had taken a team from his school to the prefectural championships, and he was considered, at the time, one of the best young pitchers in the country. Perhaps people don’t realize it, but baseball has been popular in Japan since the turn of the century. The Japanese in the city of São Paulo had been playing baseball as early as 1916. Playing baseball was a very serious business with Kantaro, even though Mizuoka called it recreation. Kantaro invested all his time and energy into it. For many years, everything that he participated in somehow involved some aspect of baseball. In a very short period of time, Kantaro had formed a representative Esperança team of our best players. Kantaro’s brother Jiro played on the original team as did Tsuruta, who was most likely a bench player. There were others who played on this team, but the player remembered best, besides Kantaro himself, was a young man named Hachiro Yōgu.