Japanese Murders in Brazil
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 15 November 2018
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When WW2 was over, a fanatical group of Japanese immigrants living in Brazil refused to believe that Japan had lost the war. They decided to punish their more prominent compatriots who accepted that Japan had lost. The extremists killed 23 people. Aiko Higuchi remembers the tragic day in February 1946 when her father became their first victim.
Photo: Some members of Shindo Renmei (Tokuichi Hidaka is the first from the right) in picture taken by Masashigue Onishi in Tupã, state of São Paulo, Brazil, in the beginning of 1946, before the killings. Credit: Masashigue Onishi/Historical Museum of Japanese Immigration in Brazil
Transcript
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| 0:29.7 | Hello, you are listening to the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service with me Thomas Papon. |
| 0:36.0 | Today we go back to the end of World War II in Brazil to a wave of murders committed by a group of Japanese immigrants who believed that reports of Japan surrender in 1945 were fake. |
| 0:51.0 | Their victims, other Japanese Brazilians who accepted that Japan had lost the war. |
| 0:57.0 | In August 1942, Brazil joined World War II on the side of the Allies, |
| 1:07.0 | declaring war on the axis countries, Germany, Italy and Japan. |
| 1:12.0 | Immigrants from these countries were seen with suspicion. |
| 1:16.0 | It was a hard time for the more than 160,000 Japanese immigrants in Brazil, most of whom worked on coffee farms. This is Aiko Higuchi, at the time a 23-year-old farmer who lived in the northwest of the state of Sao Paulo. |
| 1:34.0 | We weren't allowed to receive letters from Japan. |
| 1:38.0 | They took our shortwave radios away. Japanese newspapers were forbidden. |
| 1:45.9 | We were in the dark. We didn't know anything about what was going on in Japan. |
| 1:51.0 | If you spoke Japanese on the street, you were jailed. |
| 1:55.0 | Japanese inter-cadir. |
| 1:57.0 | Japanese Brazilians weren't allowed to travel or to drive. |
| 2:01.0 | Japanese companies had their assets confiscated. The harsh conditions |
... |
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