Brazil-Maru

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  When Mizuoka arrived with us to see the large mound, he was delighted. One other family had discovered a similar site, but the tractor had largely destroyed the contents of the mound. This mound was virtually intact, an excellent opportunity for study. He was sure that Esperança had long ago been inhabited by Indians and that these hidden mounds were burial sites. He excitedly applied the techniques of excavation he had learned in Hokkaido, carefully digging and picking to unearth ancient pottery and bones and tools.

  Saburo and I became very interested in his work. Saburo’s older sister Ritsu, too, became interested. She came out, usually with lunch for us, and stayed to watch. Saburo and I were there every day helping Mizuoka dig himself into a large hole, pulling shards and bones from the earth. One day he handed a small human skull to us. Saburo and I examined the thing in amazement. “Small,” he remarked. “A child’s skull.” Saburo and I realized that our schoolmaster was after all a whimsical romantic sort. While digging around the mound, he liked to talk and tell long involved stories about Indians. It was from Mizuoka that I learned that the land we lived on had a past of unwritten words, a silent spirit that lived in the forest we cut and burned and changed forever.

  After several days of careful digging, Mizuoka pulled a large urn from the earth. Mizuoka reverently turned the old thing in his arms, his eyes wandering over the designs that appeared after careful brushing. “This is a real find!” Mizuoka announced triumphantly. “And there is more. So much more.” Mizuoka sighed. It was already growing dark.

  We left the mound, but as I walked into the house, my father was at the door looking into the skies. “Looks like a downpour is coming,” my father shrugged. “It’s that time of year.”

  As my father predicted, the rains came that night. I suddenly remembered the Indian mound, and ran out into the increasing downpour to see Saburo. “Go home, Emiru,” said Saburo. “We can’t do anything about it. It’s too far from here, and we’d never find our way in the dark.”

  I nodded and sloshed back to the house, tiny rivulets of water now washing down the path in a small muddy river.

  That night, Kantaro came all the way from the north end on a tractor. “Terada-san!” he yelled above the sound of the rain. He had come to get my mother to deliver Haru’s baby. In the rain, my father hoisted my mother and her satchel up beside Kantaro. The lumbering machine with its giant tires cut deep gashes into the slogging road and was soon swallowed up by a dark curtain of water.

  Anxiously I waited for the daylight, and holding my shoes under my coat, I ran barefoot through the mud to get Saburo. It was still raining when we got to the site. Mizuoka was already there. He was looking sadly at the place where the mound had once been. The mound had caved into the hole we had helped Mizuoka dig. Every trace of our work was washed completely away. We ran around searching in the puddles, but we could find nothing. Saburo pulled his cap over his forehead and punched his hands into his pockets. “Emiru,” he shrugged, “it’s useless.”

  Mizuoka nodded unhappily, “Useless. Such a shame. Such a shame,” he repeated hopelessly.

  We walked down the road, all of us soaked to our skins, saying nothing. The rain was now a thin mist, and we could see the brightening lines of a complete rainbow before us. Behind us came the chugging sound of a motor and voices. Kantaro with my mother seated next to him on the tractor passed us along the road. Kantaro’s face displayed a glow of exhilaration and triumph which could not have comprehended our disappointment. “A boy!” he announced happily. “A boy!”

  But I could not forget that Mizuoka’s carefully wrought work had been washed away in the torrential downpour, the invaluable contents of an unknown past lost forever. Had it not been for Mizuoka’s inexperience with the Brazilian seasons, many precious artifacts of the peoples who lived long ago on the land we settled as Esperança might have been preserved. Nevertheless, Mizuoka was able to salvage a few shards and some bones and that one good pot in its entirety. Mizuoka built a room for his collection and a shelf for the special funeral urn. Every now and then, I visited the collection of pots and shards, ancient tools, and feathered headdresses that he began to collect and bring back to Esperança with every trip into the Mato Grosso. I would look at everything, touch the things Mizuoka said we could touch, and wonder if anything of me would, like this, be left behind when I am become an ancient ancestor in my grave. Would my bones be unearthed, my skull displayed, my story told?

  CHAPTER 7:

  New World

  Early in 1935, ten years after our arrival on the Brazil-maru and on my nineteenth birthday, Saburo came to tell me that he was leaving Esperança. “I don’t believe you,” I said playfully. “You’ve been saying the same thing for years, probably since the time we first got here,” I laughed.

  “This time I’m really leaving, Emiru. I’ve got to get out and see the rest of Brazil.”

  I didn’t understand what Saburo could mean about the rest of Brazil. Of course, it is far bigger than I could ever have imagined, and we were one isolated colony in the middle of nowhere. We were connected to other Japanese colonies by occasional communications from travelers, but we lived great distances from each other, many days over dirt roads or by train. The closest Brazilian town was Santa Cruz d’Azedinha, but we only occasionally found need to go there for medical treatment or supplies, which we usually found in Esperança at our local co-op store. It was possible to never leave Esperança, to never speak Portuguese, to ignore the rest of the world. This sort of life was much too confining for my friend Saburo. So he announced to me, “I met this man from Palma. He’s here visiting. He’s got a big commune of people, something like this thing Kantaro and the others have got going. They want someone to go over and see what it’s like, so I’ve volunteered. I’m leaving with this Palma man, Gustavo, tomorrow morning.”

  Palma was a large commune of Latvian immigrants. These people had come from Eastern Europe to escape the First World War. There were many people who had lost their families in the war. They had come together to Brazil to find a new life. Like us, they were a Christian community, and they had come to live in the rural outlands of the state of São Paulo. Kantaro had met and visited these people while traveling with our baseball team. He was very impressed by their way of life and their productivity. We heard that Palma had electricity generated by a water mill; a large dairy industry producing milk, cheese, and butter; and that all their needs, including woven cloth for clothing and a cobbler who made shoes, were taken care of within the community.

  That Saburo should be sent to study Palma’s way of life was no coincidence. Kantaro, I believe, was looking for some way to be free of Saburo, who paid Kantaro none of the respect an older brother might expect. I knew that Saburo had more than once gotten into arguments with Kantaro. Saburo’s disagreeableness always put Kantaro’s leadership into question. Saburo hated to be compared to Jiro. “Jiro! Jiro!” Saburo laughed scornfully. “If it weren’t for Kantaro, Jiro would shrivel up and disappear!” In the years after Yōgu’s disappearance, Saburo gradually became more and more vocal about his differences with Kantaro. I did not like to argue about these things with my friend. Once I suggested to Saburo that his disagreement with his older brother was nothing more than jealousy. “Emiru, you don’t understand,” Saburo turned to me. “You don’t live with Kantaro. You don’t know. One day you’ll see what I see.” Saburo stomped off; he would not talk with me for several days after that. That Saburo would one day leave Esperança seemed to be inevitable, but when the day came, I did not really want to believe it.

  “Will you be back?” I asked, wanting to be invited to come along but knowing that I would not and could not leave Esperança.

  “I can’t promise anything, Emiru.” Saburo looked at me significantly and then turned away.

  I recognized Yōgu’s old trusting-but-not-promising line. I wanted to tell Saburo I trusted him. I put my hand on his shoulder and spat on the ground as Yōgu might have done.

  At that,
Saburo smiled. He hopped into the truck and nodded at the old Latvian. The truck swung around in a great U-turn and came back. Saburo hung out the window and handed me his old cap. “Maybe you could use this?” he asked.

  I nodded. Saburo looked suddenly naked, defenseless without his old covering. He was twenty-one, older than I was and, I always assumed, wiser and tougher. In some ways, ours had been an unlikely friendship, pulled together by circumstance, by the notion that we had experienced and seen the same things—or had we? I pulled his cap, still warm with his unspoken thoughts, over my head to reassure him, and watched the truck trundle away. It was a long way to Palma, and I would not see Saburo again for many years.

  My father, Kiyoshi Terada, was, for lack of any other person of such title, a doctor to the Esperança community. People still tell me that my father was better than any doctor, that he had more experience than most doctors in those days and that he had cured many ills and saved many lives. My father was very modest about his duties. He was always very careful to say that he was not a doctor, only a pharmacist, and that you could get professional care from the Brazilian doctor in Santa Cruz d’Azedinha. But the Japanese of Esperança were hesitant to go to Santa Cruz and see the Brazilian doctor. They would only go to Santa Cruz if my father strongly suggested it. Many Brazilians from outside Esperança had heard about my father. After a while, Brazilians began to come from far away to see my father. They called him Doctor Terra, probably because they had misunderstood our name, Terada. Because of his name among the people as a healer, my father became rather famous. As time went on, my father became more and more busy helping people who lived great distances from Esperança. There was a great need for medical help and few to provide it. Poor people knew that my father would not ask for anything in return. They showered my father with gifts and food and often came purposely to repay my father with their labor.

  Unlike most other Japanese in Esperança—with the exception perhaps of Okumura—our family formed friendships and dealings with Brazilians outside our Japanese colony. Because of this, my father felt it important that I go to a Brazilian school and learn the Portuguese language. In those days in Santa Cruz d’Azedinha, you could get schooling up to what might now be the equivalent of the eighth grade. After that, only those who could afford it sent their children to São Paulo to get a private education. Unlike other Japanese of my time, I was taught to read and write in Portuguese. This ability to deal comfortably in both languages has since been invaluable to me. I am grateful to my father for this. He urged me to get the tools to live in a new country, a country which he knew and I began to realize would be the only place I would ever call home. “Brazil is a rich, wonderful place to make a home,” he would say. “We are very fortunate to be welcome in such a country. It is our responsibility to give it something in return.” When I reflect upon these things now, I realize that my father saw beyond Esperança, which seemed to me to be the entire world.

  My father died a few days after Saburo left Esperança. It seemed to me that my world was being overturned, my old sense of security tossed away. I thought that suddenly I knew the loneliness that Saburo had always felt despite our friendship. I had been to see Mizuoka, who had recently returned from the Mato Grosso. He had some interesting tales to tell about the Indians there, and I was looking to fill that part of my life which Saburo had suddenly left empty. Coming from Mizuoka’s place, I could see a large crowd of people coming from the direction of Santa Cruz d’Azedinha. It might have been a crew of laborers returning from the fields, but they lacked their usually jovial and spirited quality. In fact, an eerie silence hung over them, and I could see that they were carrying something on their shoulders. One of them pointed at me, “There he is! Doctor Terra’s son!” I recognized Batista, the man whose daughter my father had treated for malaria. Batista ran out of the crowd toward me, but I could finally see that the thing they were carrying on their shoulders was my father. Blood was splattered over Batista’s shoulders, and he was nearly weeping as he approached me. “It was his horse. Down by that swamp near Clovis’s place. A snake, I suppose. Spooked the horse. Doctor Terra fell. And the horse . . . and the horse . . .” Batista could not finish, but he did not have to. I could see where the horse’s great hooves had fallen upon my father, crushing his ribs. I wanted to grab my father and run with him back to the house, my head flooding with thoughts of medications and bandages, a flashing sense of terror rushing about me. He had given his life to care for people in need, to heal their wounds and to relieve their pain, but I could do nothing for him now. Batista held me securely by the shoulders as I stared in disbelief. “Son,” he whispered sorrowfully, “he’s gone to God.”

  Takeo Okumura presided over the funeral for my father. He was buried in the graveyard beside our little church, where Grandma Uno had long ago been buried. Everyone in Esperança was surprised by the large number of Brazilians who came to pay their respects. It was only then that people realized how much my father had done, not only for Esperança, but for the Brazilians in the surrounding areas. I myself did not know many of these people, poor simple folk who stood shyly outside the chapel, crossing themselves in the Catholic manner and leaving small bouquets of flowers with my mother.

  After the funeral, Okumura came to talk with me. I felt confused and burdened with his words. “You’re the oldest, Ichiro. Your mother and your brothers are depending on you now. You must take up where your father left off.” To me, this was an impossible expectation. I did not know how I would be able to continue my father’s work—I was only a nineteen-year-old boy. I did not understand what it was that people seemed to want or expect of me. They did not want me to mourn my father’s death. Instead, they wanted me to be my father, as if this were the proper sequence of events, as if, in this way, he would not die. I too wanted to see my father alive again, but I could not see my father in myself, as much as I wanted to find him there. I could not be the same man. No one seemed to understand. Perhaps Saburo would have understood, but he was not there.

  By this time, the New World Ranch, which most people simply called “Kantaro’s place” and later, the Uno Ranch, was a place of endless activity. Kantaro, Jiro, Befu, Tsuruta, and Heizo all put their names on an initial plot of land of some 120 acres. With time, they acquired the surrounding land, and the ranch grew to more than 400 acres. Besides the founding five, numerous other young men and a few families had joined Kantaro and were housed and working along with everyone else. Where Kantaro’s and Befu’s small wood structures had once stood alone, there was a growing cluster of rustic one- or two-room cottages, each with their flower beds, vegetable patches, and red dirt paths to the kitchen and the bathhouse. A longer sort of bunkhouse was also built for young men like me who came and went. The kitchen had already been expanded twice and the dining hall extended. All the structures were built from large boards and heavy beams—timber we lumbered ourselves from the very forest—unpainted inside and out, with shuttered windows but no glass. Some cottages had polished wooden platforms about a half meter off the ground in the Japanese style for sleeping. Others had dirt-packed floors and required Western-style beds. The roofs were thatched until we could afford tile. The basic simplicity of these rustic and simple structures would remain the same over the years. In fact, except for the use of concrete, I would say that it is pretty much the same today.

  Befu’s barns and chicken pens began to pop up everywhere. Eggs were incubating on compost heaps in every possible corner. Large areas were mapped out for planting vegetables, beans, rice, corn. In time, fruit trees of every species were planted here and there: avocados, oranges, bananas, papayas.

  Haru and Toshiko were now joined in the kitchen by other women; they needed all the help they could get to feed the gangs of as many as thirty young men with healthy appetites who filed in and out and lined the long tables and benches. Kantaro had so many men working around the ranch that he could send crews out to clear new roads around Esperança and still have men to work the n
earby fields.

  My responsibilities at home and my friendship with Saburo had kept me away from Kantaro’s projects, but now I wondered why so many like me were attracted to this work. I drifted over to the road crews and found myself hard at work, sawing, cutting, digging, slashing, hacking through the forest. The work was backbreaking, and no one was paid to do any of it. Still, I went back day after day, challenged by the forest and attracted undeniably to the companionship of others like me, all looking for a place in the scheme of things, full of undirected energy and the same confusion about a newfound manhood. I had never worked so hard in my life. In the evenings I returned home exhausted but strangely content. “Tomorrow, we need you here,” my mother would say accusingly, but I would rise early, finish the chores she might complain of, and wander back to Kantaro’s. I returned to Kantaro’s perhaps to escape, to find the proper interlude that youth claims before adulthood. At Kantaro’s, I was given assurance that this was an interlude to which I had a right. I floundered into the camaraderie of youthful rebellion, a wild and, to me, new disrespect for old ways and conventions. I remember our irreverent name for the Emperor was Ten-chan, or Little Emp, and that I signed my name to a letter sent to the Japanese troops in Manchuria suggesting that they abandon their war and join us here for the work of real men. This mocking attitude toward Japan was unheard of, even though the elders of Esperança were generally thought to be political and social renegades. At Kantaro’s place, up until the period of wartime repression, we forced these issues into the open. Kantaro himself represented a new order in Esperança. It was perhaps not so different from the old days when Kantaro attracted members to his baseball team, leaving his familial duties to his brother and selling his family’s rice to send Yōgu to Japan. The rice, Kantaro had said, belonged to Esperança. In the same way, the youth—taken from so many family duties and responsibilities—belonged to Esperança, to this new idea, this collective responsibility, this New World Ranch. One day, I did not return to my mother and my brothers. I had found a new home.