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GH: I was in a special, well, it turned out to be the seventieth anniversary of Brazilian immigration in 1978, in December. And I was one of those invited to come in. So it was an interesting conference for me. I was a sociologist, professional sociologist and here I was going as a subject matter, 'cause the topic was "Overseas Japanese." And by that time Brazil had the largest number. And Brazil started seventieth year. I thought seventieth year and that was 1978, so seventy minus seventy-eight, 1908. So I said to the MP from there, there was one who was an MP already, member of parliament in Brazil. Nomura, his first name, I thought, "What a strange name," Diogo, Diogo and they had Pancho Nakamura, and so on. [Laughs] They sounded funny until I realized what they would think, "Gordon, what a funny name for a Japanese." Well, they picked up Spanish names. And so he was the MP there. And for example I got acquainted with him. I attacked Brazil un-diplomatically, [Laughs] of their treatment of native, you know, native, equivalent to native Indians. And they were practically decimating them with operations. You know, anti-fertilization programs and so on. And I was raising questions about that 'cause we were discussing that [Laughs] up, with some concern. Well, with that we developed a kind of a friendship.

And I was in a bus waiting to go to a reception at one of the imperial quarters, and somebody knocked on the window. And I looked down -- I was sitting in a bus already -- and he says, "Come on." So I came out to, wondering what he was saying, and he says, "I got a car here. The Brazilian embassy sent me a car and a driver." So he's an MP, so they're treating him nicely. [Laughs] They wanted a good report back. So he says, "I'm the only one in the car so come and join me." [Laughs] So I joined him and drove out there in a private embassy car. And in talking with him, the, we're -- "You got going because immigration in North America stopped." They had to find some other place, so they started to go through... Peru had already started, but they're on the West Coast. So they started to go through Panama Canal into Brazil. And that's -- Brazil started in 1978. So we were having the seventieth anniversary. And we already had finished our 100th anniversary in Canada, in 1977. So the year earlier we were having our 100th, but we didn't have that kind of relationship with Japan. See we had, we had hands off. We don't want Japanese influence that much. In Brazil, the Japanese government, the Japanese teachers were involved right from the beginning. When the contractors, labor contractors brought Japanese in, well -- for families they had kids, and there were no schools. Brazilian government couldn't have a school established just because Japanese laborers had kids. So they brought in teachers.

BF: Japan did.

GH: Yeah. And so Japanese -- at that conference, the Japanese didn't need instant translation like we did. They had it for the conference, primarily for Caucasians and [Laughs] Japanese participants. We didn't, we couldn't pick up those complicated terms. They could, for most purposes they could follow the language even though they couldn't read it, and because they had Japanese training. Schooling was Japanese. I started my English with, I'd started to learn English with public school. Until then the community language for the early Niseis were Japanese because we were growing up in Japanese homes and community language was Japanese.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.