Family · Marcio Miike Jr.

My family name is Japanese and my first name is Portuguese. The reason is a coffee farm in Bandeirantes, a small town in the state of Paraná, in the south of Brazil. My great-grandfather cleared it around 1930, and my family still runs it.

This page is what I know about how we got there, how we came back, and the history around both crossings.

In short

1908The first emigrant ship from Japan reaches Brazil
1926A Japanese company opens a coffee estate in Bandeirantes
Around 1930Shigeru Miike, my great-grandfather, leaves Japan for Brazil
1930The railway reaches Bandeirantes
1975The black frost kills Paraná’s coffee in one night
1990Japan opens its doors to the descendants of emigrants
2026I go back to see the farm

The poster

A Japanese poster showing a farmer pointing at Brazil on a map of South America, with the words Let’s go, the whole family, to South America — “Let’s go, the whole family, to South America.” A recruiting poster by Kaigai Kōgyō, the emigration company. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

In the 1920s the Japanese countryside was poor and crowded. The United States closed its doors to Japanese immigrants in 1924. Brazil, whose coffee farms needed hands, was the best destination left.

From February 1924 the Japanese government paid the passage: 200 yen for every emigrant aged twelve or older. Posters went up in villages across the country. The best known shows a farmer pointing at Brazil on the map.

It worked. Between 12,000 and 27,000 people a year made the voyage. By the time the war stopped the ships, about 190,000 Japanese had crossed to Brazil.

My great-grandfather, Shigeru Miike (三池茂), was one of them. He left in the first years of the Shōwa era, around 1930.

The crossing

The ships left from Kobe. From 1928 emigrants spent their last days in Japan at a government center on the hill above the port, with medical checks, vaccinations, and a few lessons in Portuguese.

A crowd of emigrants and their families on the pier at Kobe beside a ship — Emigrants boarding at Kobe for Brazil, from a magazine of January 1921. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Then the ship went south and west, past Singapore and around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Atlantic to the port of Santos. The first emigrant ship, the Kasato Maru, took 51 days in 1908. Twenty years later the voyage still took about seven weeks.

Nobody went alone. The contracts were for families, with at least three people old enough to work. So the ships were full of children.

Dozens of Japanese children posed on the deck of the ship Santos Maru — Children on the Santos Maru in 1930, about the year my great-grandfather sailed. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

I don’t yet know which ship he took, or who stood on deck with him. It is the first thing on my list at the bottom of this page.

Red earth

Most families began as hired hands on the big coffee estates of São Paulo state. Almost all of them meant to earn money and go home. The pay was thin, and the plan changed: save enough to buy land of your own.

Two Japanese women and a child hoeing between rows of coffee trees — Japanese immigrants working between coffee trees, around 1930. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The land they could afford lay just across the state line, in the north of Paraná. It was cheaper than in São Paulo, and nobody there forbade planting new coffee. Under the forest was terra roxa, a deep red soil that coffee loves.

Japanese families founded their first settlement in the north of Paraná in 1920, at Cambará. From there the coffee frontier moved west along a new railway, one town at a time.

The work was the same everywhere. You cut the trees, burned what you could, and planted coffee between the stumps. The first real harvest came four or five years later.

Two men standing in a young coffee field among the stumps and trunks of felled trees — Young coffee among the stumps of cleared forest, 1955. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Bandeirantes

Our farm is in Bandeirantes, a town of about 31,000 people in the north of Paraná, some 80 kilometers east of Londrina.

Until about 1920 this was the land of the Kaingang people. Then the coffee farms came.

One of them was Japanese. In 1926 the Nomura company of Japan opened a coffee estate here, the Fazenda Nomura. By the next year Japanese families were living and working on it.

In 1929 the settlement was a district called Invernada. In July 1930 the railway opened a station three kilometers away and named it Bandeirantes. The town grew around the station and became a municipality in 1934.

A crowd in hats under a wooden arch with a banner from the Companhia de Terras Norte do Paraná welcoming the railway to Londrina — The same railway, four years later and further west: the tracks reach Londrina, June 1934. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Bandeirantes was a starting point for others too. In 1932 five families left the Nomura farm to open a new Japanese settlement called Três Barras. Today it is the town of Assaí.

My great-grandfather arrived in these same years. As my family tells it, he cleared the land and planted coffee with his family and the people who came with him. What brought him to this town in particular, I don’t know yet.

Bandeirantes seen from a hill: red-tiled roofs among trees, a yellow church tower and three tall buildings — Bandeirantes today. Photo: Luiz Henrique Jacobucci, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Japanese community is still there. Its association, ACEB, turned 77 in 2026.

The farm

The farm is small by Brazilian standards. In Japan we say it is two Tokyo Domes, which is about nine hectares.

It has stayed in the family for more than ninety years. Today my father’s older brother runs it.

I am the only grandchild. Sooner or later the farm becomes my question to answer.

I am visiting this month, after the race in Rio. Photos of the farm will go here when I am back.

The black frost

By the 1960s Paraná grew more coffee than any other state in Brazil. Then, on the morning of July 18, 1975, a frost killed nearly every coffee tree in the state in a single night. The leaves turned black. People still call it the geada negra.

Many farmers never replanted. Soy and wheat took over the fields, machines replaced hands, and people left the countryside for the cities.

Bandeirantes went the same way. Its fields now grow mostly soy and corn, with sugarcane and table grapes.

A satellite image of Bandeirantes: a pale town in the center, surrounded by green fields with patches of red earth, and a winding river to the north — Bandeirantes from space. The town is the pale patch in the middle, and the red squares are bare earth between crops. Image: Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016 and 2017), CC BY 4.0, brightened.

A farm that stayed in the same family through all of that is not common.

The road back

In 1990 Japan changed its immigration law so that the children and grandchildren of emigrants could come to live and work. Within a few years, hundreds of thousands of Japanese Brazilians had made the journey in reverse, most of them to factory towns.

Aichi, the home of Toyota, has more Brazilian residents than any other prefecture in Japan.

I was born in Brazil and grew up in Okazaki, in Aichi. So my family has now crossed in both directions.

What I carry

My company is called Algoboa, from the Portuguese algo and boa: something good.

What I noticed on the farm is how much of the work is judgment that nobody has written down. Reading the soil and the weather. Knowing the state of a plant. Keeping a buyer’s trust. It works until the person who knows it is gone.

That is the problem I work on now with AI: putting what people know into a form that outlasts them.

With RIKYU I export Japanese matcha. My great-grandfather went abroad to grow a crop. I send one abroad.

One of my principles is to start with things people really need. People will not stop drinking coffee or matcha.

Still looking for

The ship my great-grandfather took, the year, and who traveled with him
Where in Japan the Miike family lived before he left
Where he worked in Brazil before the farm, and what brought him to Bandeirantes
Any record of the family in Bandeirantes: the land registry, the Japanese association, the local papers
Photographs and papers kept at the farm

If you know the Miike family of Bandeirantes, or you are part of it, please write to me at miike@algoboa.jp.

Sources

What is said about my own family comes from my family. The history around it comes from these.

100 Years of Japanese Emigration to Brazil, National Diet Library of Japan: the government grant of 1924, yearly numbers, the voyage of the Kasato Maru, the Nomura farm of 1926, and the settlement of Três Barras
Consulate-General of Japan in Curitiba: Japanese families in Paraná
Bandeirantes (Paraná), Wikipedia in Portuguese: the district of Invernada, the railway station of 1930, the municipality of 1934, and the town’s crops today
Câmara Municipal de Assaí: the five families who left the Nomura farm in Bandeirantes in 1932
Gazeta do Povo, April 24, 2015: the Japanese settlement at Cambará and why families moved to Paraná
Rádio Cabiúna, July 15, 2026: the 77 years of ACEB, the Japanese association of Bandeirantes
Wikimedia Commons: the photographs and the poster, credited under each one

A page of the National Diet Library’s online exhibition on Japanese emigration to Brazil, with scans of consular reports from 1915 and 1916 — The National Diet Library’s exhibition, with scans of the consular reports it draws on.