O Súdito

O Súdito (in Portuguese) by Jorge Okubaro. I read this book during my trip to Brazil and it was the first time reading a book in Portuguese in about 10 years!

Jorge is the youngest son of Massateru Okubaro, a Japanese/Okinawan who emigrated to Brazil in the early 20th century. The book recounts his life since coming to Sao Paulo as a teenager, with the false belief that Brazil was the land of opportunity and one could get rich quickly and return to Japan. The reality is that he struggled financially and was never to set foot back in his hometown in Okinawa.

Massateru was a nationalist who, among many, refused to believe Japan lost WWII and ended up being implicated in an investigation of terrorism attacks to other Japanese immigrants who accepted the defeat. He had a big family of 8 children, 2 of them adopted from a distant cousin who was murdered. In an interesting turn of events, his eldest son became part of the Brazilian military and he was very proud, being the apex of his gradual transition into a Brazilian citizen.

This book provides some great detail (to a fault, when it discusses the investigation process in too technical terms) on the Japanese immigration to Brazil. My ancestors were also Japanese (Okinawan from my dad’s side) immigrants to Brazil, so this bit of history is particularly interesting to me.

This entry was parsed from an older retrospective post.