Brazil-Maru

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  The next day, a troop of soldiers came through Esperança. We were forced to give them food, and they took Kantaro’s horse. A few weeks later, we heard that President Washington Luís had fled the country and that a man they called the Gaúcho from the South, Getúlio Vargas, was now President of the Republic. Several months after that, representatives from the new government came with stores of food in return for our “contribution” to the cause, but we never saw Kantaro’s horse again.

  With the advent of his marriage, Kantaro’s thoughts seemed to return to the land and the labor that would make it productive, rather than leisure. It was Seijiro Befu, the young agronomist, who gave Kantaro a new set of ideas on which to form the great project that would eventually occupy all of us in some way or another.

  Momose-sensei, far away in Japan, had convinced a man of wealth and standing of the great potential of Brazil. Baron Tamaki had bought an enormous parcel of land in Esperança for the purpose of creating an experimental ranch. This was akin to a similar experiment the baron was attempting in Manchuria. The baron was an absentee landlord, sending funds and hiring men to administer plans formed a half-world away. Seijiro Befu was hired especially to work on Baron Tamaki’s ranch in Esperança. He had specialized in small farm animals: pigs, goats, and fowl, in particular, chickens. Befu had become disenchanted with the prospect of working in Japan, where the smallness of the farms prohibited the modern large-scale projects of the United States and Europe, projects Befu had studied intently but without hope of ever implementing. The opportunity to work on the baron’s enormous ranch in Brazil was a dream come true.

  Such a dream it had been that when Befu met Kantaro for the first time, he could not contain the intensity of his satisfaction, his words spilling out with emotion. It was a moment, they later said, marked by fate. Befu somehow knew, upon meeting Kantaro, that this was the friend and the companion with whom he must share his dream. It is not as if Befu would have shared his ideas with just anyone; these ideas were carefully guarded, as one might guard the secret whereabouts of a vein of gold, too precious, too personal to divulge to a stranger with the wrong motives. But Kantaro Uno was a man who understood dreams; his talent was in his ability to articulate visions with the exuberant assurance of a future that must, we thought, be captured in his very movements. If Kantaro knew your dream, it seemed that he must also be capable of making it a reality. Seijiro Befu told Kantaro everything. “Of course, it’s nothing new; we have been doing this with our so-called intensive agriculture in Japan for centuries. Can you imagine the same principle applied to a land like Brazil using modern equipment and innovations? We can operate on a much larger scale.”

  Kantaro listened intently. “Our production could be enormous. But most important, it would mean a commitment to the land, to Esperança, to regenerating the soil. Why hasn’t anyone thought of it? Chicken manure by the tons! Enough to fertilize, well, what would you calculate?”

  “We’d have to make a projection, but I’d say two hundred chickens will easily fertilize four acres of land.”

  “Every year we seem to need more land to produce the same amount. The Brazilian method of cut and burn and plant is no longer feasible for us.”

  “A sixty-acre plot of land, subdivided, can easily house an operation of two hundred chickens and provide an ample field of corn with any number of diverse cultivations.”

  “A single family could probably operate it alone,” speculated Kantaro.

  “It would require some large machinery—tractors, incubators,” Befu wondered, but Kantaro brushed his doubt aside.

  “The cooperative could provide that sort of assistance. This is exactly the kind of project the cooperative should be involved in.”

  “If there were some central incubation center to research a strong strain of poultry and produce chicks for distribution to farmers . . .”

  “Why not? What would it take?”

  “Well, at first, not much. A generator of some sort for incandescent lights would be the best, but we can incubate off the heat of smoldering compost. Then, we’d need shelter and an enclosed pen and feeders and—”

  “The physical part we can build,” Kantaro interrupted with growing excitement. “What about the chickens themselves? Do we pull these red hens off the road?”

  “We can ship a strain in from the United States. One with a good record of disease resistance and which would adapt to the climate here.”

  “How long would it take to generate a base population?”

  “Well, you can get a hatch every twenty-one days and maturity in three to six months, depending on the strain. It would be slow at first, but it would only take a few to start.”

  Kantaro stopped for a moment to mentally add the population growth of chickens over a period of a year. “In a year, we’d be in business!” he exclaimed. “Meat, eggs, and manure!”

  Although this conversation seemed to be but the bantering of two farmers, with each word Kantaro and Befu bound their separate destinies together. It was a blood pact like no other; the intensity of feeling between these two men cannot be fully described. And to those who listened to this talk, the ideas indeed sounded revolutionary. This was at a time when neither eggs nor chicken meat were produced in quantity for sale in Brazil. Many people simply fattened chickens and gathered their eggs in their own backyards. Or they went to the open-air market and haggled for live chickens or a basket of eggs. The production of eggs and chicken meat for large-scale sale, as we know it today, did not exist. Befu and Kantaro were the first to think of it in our corner of the world.

  Seijiro Befu was a small intense young man with dark eyes under a set of very thick black brows. He had an unusually thick head of blue-black hair which he never quite combed in any particular direction. When he arrived in Brazil, he began to grow a beard which soon bloomed into a thick bush about his face, giving him the appearance of a black bear. As Befu never again shaved his face, his distinguishing feature continued to be his tremendous beard, which grew slowly down his chest to his waist. In later years, Befu’s beard and hair continued to flourish, an uncontrollable tussle which would one day become white. As such, Befu was an impressive sort, a young man inflamed with his own discoveries, eager to pursue new ideas.

  I soon took Befu’s ideas about recycling the land’s resources and creating a self-sufficient way of life for granted. They became the physical basis for our life on the land. Then, with the coming of agribusiness and the use of chemical fertilizers and large machinery over vast areas of land, those ideas were set aside as antiquated. Yet much of what Befu said then has recently returned to vogue. After all, Kantaro and I and many others like us embraced a plan that was simple but sensible with timeless value.

  The talk went around and around, and the excitement over Befu’s ideas and so many other proposals began to take shape. “Land. We need our own land,” announced Kantaro. “Okumura has not partitioned the area to the north, where there are plans to link another road into Santa Cruz d’Azedinha. When that road is opened, it will be the gateway to Esperança, and this land will double in worth. That is where we must try to get an option to buy.”

  “We need a down payment. How are we going to get that much money?”

  “We can draw our resources together. We’ve done it before,” Kantaro smiled without embarrassment. “We can do it again.”

  Kantaro Uno, Seijiro Befu, the poet Akira Tsuruta, Kantaro’s brother Jiro, and oddly, Kimi’s brother, Heizo Kawagoe, became the core of the group. There were others of course. There were always others, but these men formed the foundation for Kantaro’s next project, a project that sprang from Befu’s ideas about chickens and manure and Kantaro’s ideas about human beings and the earth. Each of these men seemed so very different from one another in character. Tsuruta was an extremely refined and gentle person who gave our rustic setting an air of timeless elegance, while Befu was a small intense man who never quite rested. Heizo Kawagoe was the youngest. He was a quiet sort who said
very little and seemed overpowered by his family—his exuberant father, his invalid mother, and his talented sister, of whom he did not like to speak. He would simply say that Kantaro had made a choice a man must make. Kimi’s disappearance had cast a long shadow over his parent’s lives. Unable to remove this shadow or to replace his sister’s presence, Heizo tarried further and further from home, spending more and more time with Kantaro. Then there was Jiro, who was committed to Kantaro. Unlike my good friend Saburo, Jiro—only two years younger than Kantaro—was devoted to his older brother. It was as if Jiro had relinquished his own personality to be Kantaro’s shadow. If the truth were to be told, Jiro was actually rather silly. This was not something I noticed as a young boy. In fact, Jiro got along quite well with the young boys like myself, and in later years, when he did not carry the burden of the Uno family farm, a troop of boys was always following him around. Jiro organized baseball games and expeditions and seemed happiest among the youngsters.

  Yōgu’s brief return to Esperança produced a mixed reaction, but it satisfied everyone’s sense of being in the right. Those who had sent Yōgu to Japan with money were able to say that he had returned with the baseball equipment he had promised, and those who had refused to participate in Yōgu’s venture were able to say that his conduct at Kantaro’s wedding was just an example of the things they feared and had long warned others about.

  One thing that Yōgu’s return accomplished was a renewed interest in baseball. Once again, the Esperança men and boys were vying for field time in the late afternoons and on the weekends. Everyone was anxious to try out Yōgu’s new equipment, to feel the touch of a real baseball falling from the sky, to swing the unmarked ashwood bats, and to fit the neatly sewn gloves over their hands. Kantaro himself returned to the field to coach Esperança’s team. Word came that a new player on the São Paulo team by the name of Susumu Kubo was beginning to be the talk of the town. Kubo was the new baseball sensation, and people were saying that Kantaro’s era was over. Kubo was now king. Kantaro was not oblivious to this challenge. He knew that his days with baseball were numbered, but he would not leave the field on anyone else’s terms but his own. Everyone was anxious to see a big showdown, and a date for a final game in São Paulo was set. Outside Esperança, bets were made all around; Uno versus Kubo, Esperança versus São Paulo. But for those of us of Esperança, beating São Paulo became a matter of honor.

  Once again, Kantaro set up a rigid training schedule. During the last month of training, the team camped out on the north side of Esperança, clearing large areas of land in the mornings and practicing ball in the afternoons. Kantaro’s purpose was twofold: to train for the baseball game and to begin clearing the land he and Befu and the others hoped to establish as their own. Saburo and I went up to the campsite several times to bring messages and food to the team. I liked to imagine I was part of the team and observed the training closely. Saburo and I often settled down with our tins of food to watch. Everyone had come to accept the rigidity and hard physical exertion of any training with Kantaro, who had never asked anyone to work harder than he did. But this time, I saw Kantaro box ears, slap heads, as he pushed and punched his men into shape. There seemed to be, in the middle of the forest, a small tough army of men training for a war. The team members accepted this treatment as natural to the preparation for a baseball game; in fact, we thought nothing of Kantaro’s violent methods in those days. I believe now that that violence in the mid-1930s was a sign of the times. On the other side of the world, young men like Kantaro and his teammates were preparing for a long war.

  While we were removed by distance from these events, we were not untouched. My father read Shigeshi Kasai’s paper the Brazil Shimpo with great interest. “Kasai is right,” my father said. “The Japanese preparations for a war are the first steps to suicide.” But others did not agree. “Japan deserves greater respect in the world. We showed the Russians; now we will show the Americans.” War seemed to be a way to show the world something, but I was not sure what that something was. Young men who had arrived recently from Japan spoke of something called national socialism, a man named Hitler, and the proper worship of the Emperor.

  For the moment, the coming tide of war was set aside in favor of the coming showdown between Kantaro and Kubo. Many people in Esperança were preparing to go to the game in São Paulo. After a great deal of persuasion on my part, my father agreed to take my youngest brother Kōichi and me to São Paulo to see the big game. He thought that he might also be able to replenish his medicinal supply on this trip, and my mother sent with him a shopping list of goods and material that she needed.

  Those of us who saw this most controversial of games can never forget it. The tension in the air and the suspense of this game made all others pale in contrast. Kubo was indeed a wonderful pitcher and hitter, a young man with superb form and speed. From the newspapers and gossip, everyone knew that Kubo lived for no other reason than to play baseball. Kantaro Uno was not the same sort of athletic machine, but he was not to be knocked aside by a young upstart. For Kantaro, winning that particular baseball game was more than a display of physical talent; it was proof that Kantaro had chosen the correct path. Winning at baseball sent an important message to everyone: that Esperança was not just an idea, but that we were alive and well and strong. Baseball was a test of worth and spirit; Kantaro would not treat it any other way—he would not lose. And of course he did not. He struck Kubo out. The crowd went wild. My father lifted my brother Kōichi into the air, and we all ran onto the field, following the team members as they held Kantaro aloft over their shoulders. It was a triumph we would never forget.

  While in São Paulo, Kantaro once again met Shigeshi Kasai, the publisher of the Brazil Shimpo. Kasai, who had discovered Kantaro’s enthusiasm for photography, made him a gift of a reporter’s camera—a folding-bellows-type Voightlander with a Zeiss lens. That Kasai should make such a gift in such an automatic and generous way certainly impressed Kantaro. The forming of friendships was a ritual bonding to Kantaro, a bonding so complete in the minds of Kantaro’s friends that they would later be able to assert unquestionably what they felt to be his deepest feelings or his true thoughts about this or that matter. This tying of spirits, this sensation of great love transmitted, was no simple matter. But it seemed even more complicated for Kasai, who had by nature a very critical mind. Yet it was Kasai who ultimately came to know more than all of us about Kantaro, and because of this friendship and his own deficiencies of character, he could not later lay judgment on his friend.

  It was Kasai who introduced Kantaro to the founders of what would become the largest and most powerful cooperative in Brazil: Sarandi. Sarandi began as a Japanese farmers’ potato co-op on the outskirts of the city. Gradually, more and more small Japanese co-ops joined forces with Sarandi in an effort to get better prices for their produce. The leaders of the Sarandi Cooperative immediately took an interest in Kantaro and Befu’s talk about poultry farming. Sarandi agreed to make the inquiries and arrangements to bring a small sample of initial chicks from the United States for breeding in Brazil. Befu would return to São Paulo and coordinate everything. It was a small but auspicious beginning. Indeed, it was the beginning of everything. Baseball had brought Kantaro and Befu to São Paulo. Now they would return to Esperança with a promise of the future.

  When the team returned to Esperança, Kantaro and his companions immediately went to work, clearing, building and preparing for their chicken investment. Befu, who had originally been hired as an agronomist for Baron Tamaki’s ranch, made his apologies and left his contract. There was a flurry of activity on the north end of Esperança. While in baseball training, the team had already cleared a sizeable area of land and built a spacious bunkhouse with a kitchen to one side. A well was dug, and in a short period of time, three houses went up, one for Kantaro and Haru, the second for Jiro and his wife Toshiko, and the third a dormitory which housed Befu, Tsuruta, and Heizo and a varying number of young bachelors who came and we
nt. The old training bunkhouse was turned into a sort of dining room, conveniently attached to the old kitchen. By now Haru was pregnant, and she and Toshiko could be seen busy at work, preparing meals for the men, sewing and washing in the yard outside. According to Befu’s careful plans, barns and pens were built and several acres of land were cleared for planting corn.

  In Kantaro’s large collection of photographs, there is one photograph in particular of the five men who first cleared and founded what we initially called New World Ranch. Kantaro had set up his Carl Zeiss camera and run back to pose with the group. Heizo and Jiro can be seen smiling at the two ends of a long saw poised across the trunk of an enormous tree. The wistful Tsuruta is seated on one end of the fallen trunk, his legs dangling from his tall seat, while Befu is standing powerfully atop the trunk with his arms folded across his chest. Kantaro stands in the foreground, fists on his hips, on the tree’s giant stump. They all look the part of young lumberjacks, white cotton shirts and work pants hanging loosely from their wiry bodies, tanned dark by the tropical sun. A youthful intensity is reflected in their eyes, a genuine and innocent moment captured for memory. When people talk about the founders of Kantaro’s original ranch, they point to this now-famous photograph.

  A few days after this photograph was taken, the same men, while clearing this field, found a large mound of earth. “We’re going to have to borrow the co-op tractor to push this earth aside,” announced Kantaro. But when it was done, the tractor unearthed a cache of what seemed to be buried Indian remains. Saburo and I, who had been standing around watching, were sent off to find Mizuoka. Now Shūhei Mizuoka had for some time been interested in archeology. As always, he had been doing a considerable amount of reading on the matter, but it was said that he had also worked very briefly for an American archaeologist who was studying the Japanese aborigines, the Ainu, in Hokkaido. Mizuoka had learned a little about classifying pottery shards and how to dig for artifacts and bones. He had once lived in Utah, visited the American Southwest, and knew a slight bit of American Indian history. He now thought it worthwhile to study the Brazilian Indians and make comparisons between them and the Japanese aborigines. He thought he might be able to find connections between the Ainu and the Brazilian Indians which would prove the thesis that the Asian aborigines crossed the Bering Strait into the American continent, eventually moving far down into South America. To prove that the Brazilian Indians were our distant relatives became an ongoing study which Mizuoka pursued for many years. From time to time, Mizuoka would simply disappear from Esperança, abandoning his responsibilities as a teacher, gone on an expedition to find Indians in the Mato Grosso.