In Tokyo’s Little Brazil, Nikkei Restaurants Serve Japanese Brazilian Food

As a train trundles north from the Japanese capital, through the nondescript concrete of greater Tokyo, you might catch a whiff of churrasco or a few bars of samba emanating from Ōizumi. Following generations of on-again, off-again immigration, the town has the greatest concentration of people of Brazilian descent in Japan, approximately 10 percent as of 2015, compared to less than 1 percent in major cities like Tokyo and Nagoya. One street is lined with enough Brazilian restaurants and clothing stores to make visitors believe they’ve teleported across the Pacific.

“To us, it seems natural that so many Brazilian people are in one little town,” says Mieko Ono, a staff member at Restaurante Big Beef. Like everyone else who works at the restaurant, Ono is Brazilian Nikkei, meaning she has Japanese ancestry that predates her family’s time in Brazil. “At first, our restaurant was only popular with Brazilian locals, but since Ōizumi became known as Little Brazil [in 2007], people have traveled from all over to enjoy the many Brazilian shops and restaurants here.”

While restaurants in town serve Brazilian staples like pasteles and coxinhas, at places like Big Beef, Japanese and Brazilian cuisines also fuse into dishes like buradon, a portmanteau combining the Japanese pronunciation of Brazil, “Burajiru,” and “donburi,” the catch-all term for Japanese rice bowls. As opposed to common staples like gyudon (beef), katsudon (pork cutlet), or tendon (tempura), a buradon in Ōizumi may contain linguica sausage, oven-baked costela, or beef Parmigiana, almost always with some feijão (black beans). It might be served atop Japanese rice or imported Brazilian rice, and it will likely come with a knife and fork.

At Kaminalua, an upscale eatery in Ōizumi — owned by local celebrity Norberto Semanaka, a Brazilian-born former professional baseball player for Nagoya’s Chunichi Dragons — a buradon-like dish comes as a platter called baião de dois (“dance for two” in Portuguese). Beef ribs are displayed like chirashi on top of rice, beans, and cheese.

Though many customers love it, the dish also reveals clashes between the dining habits of customers from different cultures and generations. Kaminalua serves the platter with Brazilian vinaigrette (a tangy salsa made with tomatoes, peppers, onions), intending customers to add it as a topping to their own rice; but pedantic older diners accustomed to lighter applications of sauce in traditional Japanese cuisine might throw side-eye at anyone excitedly ladling the vinaigrette on. Younger Japanese customers bring their own prejudices, like the expression “chigyu,” which is used online as a pejorative for people who add cheese to beef bowls. The tray also comes with a small dessert of mango and blueberry cream, which the staff say non-Brazilian Japanese newcomers sometimes put on their rice by mistake.

This sort of confusion is standard in Ōizumi, where it’s often unclear whether a dish is Japanese, Brazilian, or something in between. While that doesn’t make the food any less delicious, it does put restaurants in a bind. In a country that is incredibly homogenous (97 percent of the population identify as Japanese), Japanese Brazilian restaurants seem split on whether to adjust dishes to non-Brazilian tastes, as has happened with other types of yōshoku (Western) dishes, or proudly serve “authentic” Brazilian dishes, which don’t always reflect Nikkei culture and may turn off some customers. Every plate is a negotiation between cultures, geography, ingredients, and tastes.

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Of the approximately 210,000 Brazilians in Japan, about 95 percent are Nikkei. Their ancestors may have left Japan for Brazil along with the first wave of immigrants in 1908, who joined Europeans, predominantly Italians, working in coffee plantations following the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, which created a labor shortage. After a pause in immigration during World War II, Brazil welcomed more Japanese skilled workers, and Japanese Brazilians generally became increasingly affluent.

The migration tide reversed in the 1980s, during Japan’s “economic miracle.” The economy was growing faster than the population; after a long history of isolation and immigration restrictions, the Japanese government accepted foreigners to make up the difference. Workers from Pakistan, Iran, and a few other nations were allowed to live and work in the country without visas. In Ōizumi, the mayor and a group of local business leaders spearheaded an effort to recruit Nikkei Brazilians.

“Many of these workers intended at first to only stay for a few years and then leave, but the Brazilian economy was in shambles and the outlook for Japan was still good. So people decided to stay,” says Masaki Nakayama of the Ōizumi Tourism Association.

By 1990, it was obvious the miracle was really a bubble, and many in Japan argued the immigration experiment had failed. The country revised the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, stopping visa-free entry and kicking out many of those above third-generation Nikkei (those with Japanese parents or grandparents). Others in the Nikkei community left willingly as well. In Ōizumi, things didn’t go the same way.

“Ōizumi is unique compared to the rest of Japan” in that it has a support system for Brazilian immigrants, says Mario Makuda, CEO of Ōizumi-based Promotion Brasil, an organization that fosters Brazilian events and community outreach. “There are Brazilian schools, and there are Brazilians working everywhere from McDonald’s to the town hall. There is always someone willing to interpret so that Brazilian immigrants won’t have much trouble adjusting to daily life in Japan.”

A location of the Takara Supermarket chain serves double duty as an import shop, where Nikkei residents shop for fresh sausage, Brazilian beer, beans, rice, and household goods like detergent. As night falls, vendors come out with carts selling hot dogs and caipirinhas. Elderly residents lounge around outside conbini (convenience stores) where vending machines are stocked with Guarana Antarctica, a soda flavored with guaraná fruit from Brazil.

This success story has woven immigration into the town’s fabric; the tourism center even doubles as an immigration museum. As global economic tides turn once again, the town is welcoming immigrants from Nepal, Vietnam, and Thailand, many of them foreign exchange students. The population of Ōizumi is actually stable, a rarity in the steadily depopulating Japanese countryside.

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Japanese diners traditionally reacted cautiously to Brazilian food, but they’re fond of meat. In Tokyo, beloved chains like Alegria, Rio Grande, and Barbacoa charge upwards of 8,000 yen (about $54) per person for slices of beef like alcatra, fraldinha, and the ever-popular picanha, or “ichibo” in Japanese. At the landmark Osso Brasil in Nagoya, diners are also happy to order chickens from giant rotisseries via a Japanese ticket machine. Nearby, Churrascaria Sapucaí taps into the dearth of all-you-can-eat buffets with an array of potato salad, beets, marinated mushrooms, feijoada (bean stew), and mocotó (cow’s foot stew), all paired with live music and dancing.

But restaurants that stray from the greatest hits with more nuanced menus, including those serving fusion dishes, can struggle. Espaço Brasil in Tokyo, which previously boasted a Brazilian-inspired garlic pork rice bowl, discontinued its fusion items due to rising ingredient costs. Likewise, Ginza’s Alegria discontinued its Brazilian fusion curry rice lunch special to focus on its popular buffet. When blended foodways do appear, they’re often options of last economic resort, like places that use cheap Japanese white rice in place of imported yellow rice, or Tokyo’s Gostoso, which has served wagyu when the supply of imported Brazilian beef was disrupted.

Chefs also temper flavors in less familiar Brazilian dishes to try to attract diners, even in Ōizumi. For instance, Big Beef has reduced the amount of salt in its feijoada because it was too much for some non-Brazilian customers.

“Before some of the more recent economic troubles [like the global economic downturn in 2008], restaurant owners in Ōizumi felt free to market solely to their Brazilian clientele,” Makuda says. “[They] realized they would need to make their food more palatable to Japanese tastes to stay afloat.”

This small sacrifice is just one way the Nikkei residents in Ōizumi have had to acquiesce to the larger community. Japanese Brazilians are subject to ire for barbecuing outdoors on weekends when their neighbors are putting laundry out to dry and for loud parties late into the night. Language difficulties also remain a problem for many business owners, who must communicate with customers in English, Japanese, and Portuguese (and, as I discovered working on this story, not even two out of three is always good enough). For Nikkei residents above the third generation, that problem is an existential crisis, since proficiency in Japanese is tied to a work visa.

These clashes aren’t just about barbecue smoke or loud parties, but about who belongs in Japanese society.

“When I first arrived in Japan as an adult, it was as if I had lost my identity,” says Makuda, who was raised in Brazil. “I was basically brought up as Japanese; my parents were born [in Japan]. I grew up with miso soup and soy sauce. I spoke only Japanese prior to attending elementary school. All of my friends were Nikkei. I felt in my heart that I was Japanese — only to be told upon arriving in Japan that I was actually a foreigner.”

Cultural and genetic familiarity hasn’t guaranteed any more inclusion than other minority groups receive. Despite the Japanese name on their residence cards, many Nikkei face the same difficulties as any other foreigner when buying a house or opening a bank account.

“These days, Japanese people in Ōizumi aren’t particularly concerned about Brazilians, for good or ill,” Nakayama says. “I think they’re grateful for how Brazilians have helped the local economy, but are usually reluctant to reach out to them on a personal level.”

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For generations, Brazilians have come to Japan or left for Brazil following the economic wind. Money has shaped relationships between the Nikkei community and the rest of the country. But some of Ōizumi’s food businesses may be establishing deeper relationships.

Kyomei Yajima ate his first cassava, a critical ingredient in many Brazilian dishes, while working part time for another local grower. The tuber is often victim to finicky supply chains, so locals started growing it themselves. After seeing the demand from Nikkei Brazilians (and Vietnamese and Filipino immigrants) living nearby, Yajima joined the industry with Kyomei Farm in 2019. Since starting his business, Yajima has become friendly with many of his Nikkei customers.

The biggest test of the town’s community, though, is Ōizumi’s youngest residents, people like Rodrigo Ito. He’s fourth-generation Nikkei and has been in Japan for only a few years, arriving with his parents after they closed their São Paulo restaurant Espaco Vido early in the COVID-19 pandemic. He grew up eating his grandmother’s Japanese food in Brazil.

Ito works at one of Ōizumi’s newest restaurants, Recanto Brasil, which opened in August 2023. The restaurant doesn’t bother with imports at all, instead making everything on the small menu — beef and chicken parmesan, fish empanadas, pasteles, and the trademark coxinha and bolinha croquettes — from scratch with local ingredients.

“We make everything from Japanese ingredients, so in a way it is actually Japanese food,” Ito says.

Like others in the Nikkei community, he’s had a mixed experience since arriving in Ōizumi, often feeling both embraced and ostracized, especially by one particularly xenophobic Japanese language teacher.

He dreams of returning to Brazil, where he hopes to tap into the love of Japanese cuisine by opening his own sushi restaurant. But, he adds, “The more I’ve come into contact with other Japanese people, the more strongly I feel about staying.”

His decision means everything to Little Brazil.

Alex Ehrenreich occasionally writes interesting tidbits about Japanese culture in between stints working as an English teacher, tour guide, editor, drag queen, and plain ol’ salaryman.