Why Do Japanese Games Love Brazil?

have you ever noticed that many Japanese games seem to rather unusually have Brazilian characters settings or music well why shouldn't Japanese games feature Brazil Mooney Brazil is a large country of many people don't Japanese games also feature tons of characters from say Mexico and what do you mean by unusually well Japan is literally on the other side of the world from Brazil and one would expect Japanese Society to have little understanding or concern for Brazilian culture no other South American country except occasionally Peru is almost ever featured in Japanese media and no my American viewers Mexico is not South American Brazil is special to Japan and the two countries have a lot of shared history and shared culture that has resulted in Brazilian music like Samba and Bossa Nova being present in many video game soundtracks and Brazilian characters making their way into Japanese games in a time period when even Europe wasn't represented in Japanese games indeed Japanese society and by extension and Japanese media seldom concerns itself with the goings-on of many places including much of Europe all of Africa and almost all of South America due to how insular Japanese Society can be before we continue with Japanese Society though I'd like to talk to you briefly about this video's sponsor honkai's star rail if you've ever watched my videos in the past you know that I do indulge in the occasional mobile game and honkai star rail is a game that I am actually playing in The Limited free time that I have it's got an exciting story strategic RPG combat lovable characters Pom-Pom and more honkai star rail is the new multi-platform Galactic fantasy RPG from hoyoverse the makers of gentian impact the game is playable on PC and mobile devices and you'll be able to play honkai Star rail from your PS5 in quarter 4 of 2023. version 1.3 of the game released not long ago and in it you get to experience the epilogue of the Shinzo luo full Arc and potentially obtain two new characters in inhibitor lunae and master diviner Fu shrin if you log in for seven days you'll even get 10 star rail special passes to pull with if you can join me and my bestie the character that most reminds me of my sister's silver wolf here in honkai Star rail by downloading the game from my link below and entering the promo code shown here to get your hands on an extra 50 Stellar Jade and with that we now return to our regularly scheduled Broadcasting Japan is a pretty curious country to study and that it is well integrated into the global economy but it maintains a very distinctive insular culture most Gaijin with even a passing knowledge of Japan and know that Japanese Society has many rules and that Japanese popular culture is we'll say charmingly different from Western culture but many in the west I think underestimate how closed off Japanese Society can be to the outside world how Japan exists in a cultural bubble that can often present itself in rather curious ways consider for example Japanese technology the stereotypical idea of Japan is that it is this Ultra high-tech country of bullet trains and electronics but if you step foot into a Japanese office you may be shocked to discover that every single office in Japan has a fax machine in fact a survey run by NHK the Japanese public broadcaster found that as of 2020 34 of Japanese households still have a fax machine by comparison in 2019 only 31 percent of American households still even have a landline more Japanese households have a fax machine an American households have a landline you might also be surprised to discover that the Japanese still largely purchased their music not digitally but on physical CD-ROM in 2019 a 70 of Music sales in Japan were on CD and even during covid-19 in 2021 and 2022 when one would expect Most Japanese to have made the transition to digital music sales or streaming in the absence of physical media accessibility the CD music Market generated substantially more revenue and the digital Market did how did this cultural Quirk come to be well some say it's a result of the bubble era or babaruchi die which you may remember from a previous video on Japan or that Japan's rapidly aging population is in fact to blame but the young people are also buying CDs and CDs are more expensive than streaming it's not just age and it's not just economics this cultural insularity is a product of economics and geography and history and much more and it is this cultural insularity that combines at times with Japanese history to create certain perceptions of the World At Large that can be a bit at odds with reality that is nothing too unusual right cultural misperceptions and misunderstandings are hardly exclusive to Japan every American has heard stories of the European tourist who comes to New York for the weekend hoping to drive to Los Angeles on Saturday to see Hollywood only to discover that it takes longer to drive from New York to LA than to drive from Lisbon to Moscow and many Europeans will scoff at Americans who depending on their politics see certain European countries trees are somehow being either social Utopias or too dangerous to even set foot in but the thing about these misperceptions and misunderstandings is that one expects these misperceptions to get more and more outlandish the further one's culture is from the culture they are misperceiving and relative to how insular one's own culture is my personal experiences in Europe for example have revealed that there is a not very well developed understanding there of East Asia at least not in the places I've been to including but not limited to the Netherlands Belgium Denmark Austria northern France the UK and Western Germany I once stopped to ask for directions at a fry shop in einhoven only to discover that the shop owners didn't speak English that was my cultural misperception that the Dutch could all speak English the owners however it turns out were Chinese and so Logan Thomas I spoke to them in Mandarin and got the directions that I needed during our discussion on their experiences in the Netherlands they scoffed and told me that the Dutch don't understand East Asian culture very well but the Dutch themselves insist that they do this perhaps is a Dutch cultural misperception sorry in advance for picking on the Dutch by the way I only pick on you because I know you can take it my understanding is that we here in the colony of New Amsterdam get our thick skins from you with regards to Japanese misperceptions you may have heard of Paris syndrome for example where first time travelers from Japan to Paris are so shocked by how unlikely Japanese Paris that Paris actually is that they have severe panic attacks that manifest at times in the form of hallucinations fainting vomiting and even tachycardia KT is a 30 year old woman presenting to the emergency room in Paris with tachycardia tacky meaning elevated and cardia meaning action of the heart elevated action of the heart in any case just as the rest of the world tends to have some rather strong rather bizarre misperceptions of life and culture in Japan Japan has some equally strong and equally bizarre misperceptions of the rest of the world but perhaps doubly so due to its cultural insularity this brings us then to the topic of our video Japanese video games and Brazil you see the most common manifestation of cultural misperception and or cultural awareness is through exclusion we in the United States are often accused of being very unaware of what happens in the rest of the world and of being very america-centric we Americans seem to have a vague understanding of other countries only if they have some cultural relevance to the American Experience Japan being a country of very high cultural power projection and high cultural insularity also has this same issue there are places in the world that are so outside of the Japanese cultural scope that the average Japanese person doesn't know anything about those places and there is no continent of the world that one would expect to be more unknown to the Japanese than South America it is literally on the opposite side of the world from Japan indeed if one looks at Japanese video games once he's very limited South American representation therein except 4. Brazil and very occasionally Peru if one does see South America represented it is usually in a very mishmashed uninformed way that often is more representative of Japan's stereotypical perception of Latin America as a whole and not South America as a region separate from say Mexico and the Caribbean I could tell you about it but instead let me just make it easy for you and show you what I mean here is the opening to the hit game Samba G amigo [Music] thank you you will note this monkey named Amico is evidently Mexican and given his Sombrero Maracas and Spanish pronounced name except he's not according to the game Amigo the monkey is Brazilian keep that in mind as the clip continues [Music] thank you the average Japanese person knows a little to nothing about South America greater than half of the cultural references in this clip are Mexican and everything else is Brazilian unless that big smiling Sun counts as a reference to Argentina and Uruguay which I strongly doubt Brazil is the one South American country whose culture often Finds Its way into Japanese games and it happens with surprising frequency albeit often in a perhaps culturally mixed up way you may also be familiar with Splatoon 3's Anarchy rainbow a song that combines Japanese odori and Brazilian Samba delivered in-game during splatfest a festival which itself combines the style of Japanese Matsuri and Brazilian Carnival in fact big man noted ambulatory manta ray and hero of the people is often said to be Brazilian another perhaps more traditional example of such a video game character is Brazilian a video game Icon Blanca the electric green ape man who debuted in a street fighter 2. now you might see Blanca as a bit of an insulting caricature but I mean this was the 90s Street Fighter 2 only had eight characters in its playable roster Japan was represented twice with Ryu and E Honda the USA was represented twice with Ken and guile the Soviet Union China and India each got a character and these are all very important populist countries with a lot of cultural relevance to Japan and then there's Brazil with Blanca seemingly out of nowhere consider how odd that is if you exclude the USSR the entire continent of Europe doesn't get a single character the entire continent of Africa doesn't get a single character and it loses Madagascar Australia doesn't get a character and New Zealand doesn't even get to be on the map or Iceland or any part of Denmark including but not limited to Greenland nowadays of course the street fighter roster is much more diverse Africa and Europe have characters now New Zealand gets to be on the map and according to the street fighter Wiki we have like something between 7 to 11 whole characters from South America including DJ and who is this Rick guys you know that Jamaica is in North America right it's okay let's take a look at the other characters repping South America we have Blanca of course who is from Brazil Carlos Miyamoto from final fight who's from baraju Peter zonta from Brazil Sean from a Street Fighter Alpha the animation who is hmm from Brazil and finally Sean matsuda the matsuda family and his sister Laura who are from Brazil That's right The Street Fighter Wiki has 11 entries on South American characters two of which are North American and the rest of which are Brazilian This Is Not Unusual for Japanese games or their representation of South America South America is basically only Brazil and sometimes Peru to the Japanese but why what makes Brazil so special to Japan is it the beautiful beaches and people is it the warm sunny weather and sunnier dispositions is it the commenters in all of their YouTube videos constantly asking them to go to Brazil no it's actually a curious Quirk of History that's right this is a history video and it's actually quite a fascinating story once you've learned the history you will come to understand how strongly linked Japan and Brazil really are and how that cultural heritage manifests itself in all kinds of ways you may not have previously noticed Our Story begins with someplace Moon Channel viewers might find familiar the year is 1854 and commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy has just forced Japan to open its ports to American Trade by negotiating in the traditional American fashion give us what we want or be subject to incredible violence the shogunate the bakufu is in total disarray and a complete economic collapse is looming on Japan's Horizon you see prior to 1854 Japan had adopted an isolationist foreign policy called sakoku which prohibited trade and foreign relations between Japan and most of the rest of the world there were some exceptions which my previous video didn't get into like rangaku or Dutch learning but the Western innovations that came to Japan through rangaku did not come close to Preparing Japan for the unimpeded influx of Western ideas technology and capital thrust upon Japan by Matthew Perry in other words nobody told Japan that life was going to be this way and the consequence was their Taxi joke of their broke and their foreign relations are DOA so let me ask you if you were in the Japanese government's shoes here how would you get yourself unstuck from second gear when it hasn't been your day your week your month or even your year well the first thing you'd probably want to do is get yourself caught up catch up technologically catch up economically and build a foreign presence but how does one go about that we'll get back to this question shortly in the meantime we need to take ourselves to the other side of the world and see what is going on in Brazil the year is 1850 it has been only 28 years since Brazil declared its independence from the kingdom of Portugal the first emperor of Brazil Don Pedro the first suddenly abdicated and left for Europe leaving his son the five-year-old Don Pedro II as the child emperor of Brazil the Empire of Brazil appears to be on the very precipice of collapse and yet Despite All Odds Pedro II Pedro the magnanimous one of modern History's Greatest and most noble leaders manages to turn the country around Brazil is beginning to stabilize and the global market for coffee brings a period of new profit in Industry into Brazil known as the coffee cycle the railroads are expanding the ports are being developed the absolute value of Brazilian exports are the highest in Latin America triple those of Argentina at the time Brazil's future is bright how bright well by 1880 the Brazilian per capita income was similar to that of the United States and and many economists of the time predicted that Brazil under the leadership of the very people-minded Pedro II would become as wealthy and developed as the wealthiest of the Western European countries but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves returning to the 1850s the coffee trade at the time was heavily Reliant upon slave labor but Pedro II abhorred slavery and he made it his mission to abolish slavery in Brazil even if he had to do it without any public support in 1850 Pedro II made his first move he threatened to abdicate the throne unless the general assembly declared the Atlantic slave trade illegal having stopped the flow of New Slaves from abroad Pedro II then sought to end a slavery by birth and to do so he spoke openly about the eradication of slavery in speeches and pushed a bill which would consider all children born to Slaves Freeborn this abolitionist stance was deeply unpopular amongst the Brazilian people at the time and Pedro II was heavily criticized for his insistence on abolition slavery supporters claimed that higher labor costs might lead to job cuts and worse production and weaker harvests but the Emperors skilled leadership would Prevail over his detractors even as his own health seriously declined the late 1800s saw Brazil's economy grow to new heights women gained unprecedented rights in Brazil during this time and slowly but surely the edifice of slavery was also crumbling by 1888 the emperor was so ill that he was lying on what many presumed to be his deathbed in Europe being treated by the very best positions available in Milan yet even while deathly ill he pushed for the abolition of slavery and when slavery was finally abolished in Brazil on May 22 1888 it is said that the emperor wept tears of joy perhaps this moment helped to heal him as he recovered enough to return to Rio De Janeiro from Milan in August of 1888 where he was greeted with never-before-seen enthusiasm and love from his people the predictions of economic disaster and labor disruption that were supposed to come from the abolition of slavery never happened and the coffee Harvest of 1888 was Bountiful you would think then what the Brazilian economy soaring to never before seen Heights the international Prestige of Brazil reaching in Apex and the people of Brazil totally unified behind a kind and Brilliant leader that the former harshest critics of slavery the wealthy land-owning coffee Farmers would fall in line and enjoy the fruits of a Brazilian golden age instead though the wealthy landowners were furious at losing their free labor and these landowners organized a coup d'etat in hopes of instituting what they called a republic when the coup happened it is said that those in attendance believed it to be a joke the rich Elite land-owning revolutionaries seized the Prime Minister and instituted the Republic of Brazil on November 15 1889. the emperor himself old and tired having given everything of himself for his country lacked the will to resist he foresaw the Bloodshed and suffering that Civil War would bring to his beloved people a so when the revolution came Pedro II merely said it is so it will be my retirement I have worked too hard and I am tired I will go rest then it historian Lydia bessouche writes on the coup d'etat rarely has a revolution bin so minor we'll stop here for a moment before we get into the consequences of the First Republic keep these takeaways in mind though number one Brazil in the 1850s had just abolished the slave trade-in was on its way towards abolishing slavery for good number two Brazil's economy was developing at an astonishing rate under the guidance of a brilliant leader and number three Brazil was rapidly industrializing with a standard of living that appeared to be approaching Western European standards it is with this context in mind that we now return to Japan Japan had just been forced out of a greater than quarter Millennium long period of isolation from the rest of the world and its agricultural techniques and economic systems were completely unprepared for global trade Japan suffered simultaneously from severe famines and massive unemployment attempts at agrarian reform and mechanization of agricultural of thousands upon thousands of peasants unemployed just as new Western diseases also swept across Japan do you remember the question I asked earlier given all of this chaos how did Japan manage to catch up both technologically and economically while also stabilizing its Foreign Relations while you catch up by learning from others you build up by bringing the pay you get from others back home and you stabilize Foreign Relations by building a foreign presence all three of these things can be done if you send your people abroad as immigrants now immigration in the late 1800s and early 1900s is quite a different animal than it is today and back then it was not only okay but encouraged to do the racism part of the calculus out loud the Japanese of the time were poor unskilled at Western labor and decidedly not white the United States for example barred Chinese immigration in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese immigration to the United States as per the informal terms of the gentleman's agreement of 1907 which was later formalized in the Immigration Act of 1924. Australia at the time had implemented the rather on the nose white Australia policy but it just so happens there was one country out there one shining City on a Hill one Bastion of Liberty that chose to open its doors to specifically permit Japanese immigration and that country was Brazil but it wasn't necessarily for the most noble reasons you see after the abdication of Pedro II the fledgling Republic of Brazil was plagued by corruption and poor economic management as one might expect when your coup d'etat comes not from the people but from wealthy landowners the rich got richer the poor got poorer and the shortage of slaves and an economy now run by former slave owners meant that a labor shortage had developed where there had not been one before the Japanese government was eager to send its people into the world to learn and bring money and Technology home to Japan the Brazilian government was eager for cheap Expendable labor and so in 1907 the Brazilian and Japanese government signed a treaty permitting Japanese migration to Brazil in 1908 781 Japanese people mostly Farmers sailed from Kobe across the Indian Ocean and South around the Cape of Good Hope before finally arriving in Brazil and not long thereafter the floodgates opened by 1914 an additional nearly 15 000 Japanese arrived in Brazil many bringing with them their whole families and the outbreak of World War One saw even even more Japanese coming to Brazil to work on Brazilian coffee plantations by 1940 there were already nearly 200 000 Japanese immigrants living in Brazil but life was not easy for the Japanese in Brazil many Japanese imagined that they'd be going to Brazil to get rich before going home to Japan at newly wealthy the Brazilian plantation owners though you must remember were looking to replace the labor of slaves in the previously High wages these Brazilian plantation owners had to pay two Brazilian laborers the very same wages responsible for Pedro II's expanding economy were reduced to nearly nothing you can pay whatever you want if your worker has no better option Japanese immigrants to Brazil were worked to the Bone for little to no wages often times these immigrant workers had to buy their food and goods directly from the landowner Company Store style such that instead of wealth the immigrant workers would slowly work themselves into debt the immense Poverty of the Japanese immigrants also caused the average Brazilian person to view them with contempt after all to the average person these immigrants appear to be coming unmasked without their consent taking their previously high paying jobs for almost nothing and reducing the prosperity of their country we know now of course with the benefit of hindsight that it was the landowners enforcing a slave owning mentality with massive violations of already limited labor laws vanishingly low pay exploitative business practices like company stores and threats of physical violence all but enforcing poverty amongst the Japanese population the Japanese though would very slowly crawl their way out of this desperate situation some Japanese would very literally crawl escaping their indentured servitude by fleeing their plantations in the dark of night process which would become known as yoniga other Japanese had the fortune of encountering landowners who had more land than greed and so offered more hands-off contracts to Japanese immigrants wherein these immigrants would DeForest land and grow coffee for their landlords a little bit like a feudal peasant but these immigrants were able to accumulate a bit of capital leading to the first land purchased by a Japanese person in Brazil occurring in 1911. as more and more Japanese people began to purchase land together forced to do so really as they were seen as undesirable by the Brazilian population at large they developed ethnic Enclave communities known as Shoku minchi and the Japanese finally able to work their own land for their own benefit proved to be very productive indeed historical documents show that in 1940 despite the Japanese making up only 3.5 percent of saobaolo's population they were responsible for nearly all of the production of silk peaches strawberries mint tea potatoes assorted vegetables and eggs the Japanese also controlled a not insubstantial portion of the market for bananas at 50 percent cotton at 40 and even coffee at 20 percent but again these communities of Japanese were still seen as Troublesome unwelcome poor Outsiders and so many Japanese children born in Brazil would be educated in the Japanese language run by the Japanese Community many of these immigrants never learned to speak Portuguese in almost none of these Japanese and Brazil would marry outside of their ethnic enclaves not because they wouldn't have liked to but because the Brazilian population at large considered them detestable and undesirable the Brazilian media at the time called these Japanese enclaves kistos hacies racial cysts like a cancer the Brazilian public opinion of the time was that Japanese were too different too zealous too uneducated to be integrated into the more sophisticated and worldly Brazilian Society with the Brazilian government unwilling to provide any assistance to these Japanese communities the Japanese government stepped it and provided funding to these enclaves by 1933 there were 150 000 of Japanese in Brazil and almost all of them lived and these ethnic communities where they spoke Japanese eight Japanese food more Japanese clothes and learned in Japanese schools funded by the Japanese government which brings us now back to but as you the Brazilian Republic with its slavery supporting Plantation owning leadership pulled its policies away from the more Progressive thinking of Pedro II where under Pedro II Brazil saw the abolition of slavery more right for women a celebration of diversity and massive growth in both economic prosperity and quality of life the landlord leadership of the Republic encouraged divisions in society that last in some capacity even to this day attempts were made by Brazilian representatives to prohibit and I quote the immigration of individuals from the black race to Brazil other attempts were also made to limit Asians and by the 1930s the government of the authoritarian president jetullio Vargas who has a mixed Legacy in Brazil will say instituted forced assimilation of immigrants stating and I quote the concentration of immigrants anywhere in the country is prohibited the law should govern the selection location and assimilation of the alien as Brazilian nationalism grew under the leadership of jetullio Vargas in the late 1930s many of these so-called Japanese cysts were systematically assimilated Japanese newspapers and teaching the Japanese language and schools were banned all Japanese would learn only Portuguese the Japanese had a much higher level of Education than the average Brazilian by this time with nearly 90 percent of Japanese being able to read newspapers while the average Brazilian was illiterate yet still the Japanese were considered undesirable Oliveira Viana a Brazilian historian describes the Japanese as being like sulfur insolvable the Brazilian magazine omario compared Japanese people in Brazil to a disease and described the Japanese as a race diametrically opposed to ours in 1941 the Brazilian Minister of Justice Francisco Campos wrote concerning the Japanese their despicable standard of living is a brutal competition with the country's worker their selfishness their bad faith their refractory character makes them a huge ethnic and cultural cancer located in the richest regions of Brazil and once Brazil declared war on Japan in World War II well you can imagine that the treatment only got worse Japanese Brazilians were simultaneously not permitted to live in ethnic enclaves but were also not allowed to travel the country without special permits hundreds of Japanese schools were forcibly closed and the government outright seized sir certain Japanese companies Japanese Brazilians were prohibited from driving any Motor Vehicles even on their own property thousands of Japanese were arrested and even deported without cause on suspicion of Espionage many Japanese lived in what were essentially concentration camps their former enclaves turned into prisons with armed guards Brazilian politicians even called for all Japanese in Brazil to be directly transferred to American style internment camps yet in spite of this throughout this entire period there was never a single confirmed act by any Japanese against Brazilian national security not a single one Mooney I can hear you say uh this is not what I signed up for I wanted fun Brazilian stuff this story is so sad so heavy how could the Brazilians do this to the Japanese did the Japanese ever manage to successfully integrate well let me set the record straight for a moment Brazil is a beautiful country with beautiful people and a beautiful culture it has historical problems absolutely but these problems this othering of a whole group of people this cruelty is not unique to Brazil in fact I hope that in the upcoming portion of the video as we explore how Japanese Brazilians eventually did integrate into Brazilian Society on their own terms that you non-brazilians in the audience might reflect upon the history and present circumstances of your own countries and your own immigrants and your own ethnic enclaves and the ways divisions develop in your societies sometimes by the purposeful design of people who can profit from those divisions although the past few sections were very tough on Brazil I consider this video myself to be a celebration of Brazil because this period of persecution of genuine cruelty is not where the story ends in fact in many respects this is where the story actually begins after World War II Brazil began to move away from militant nationalism only to replace the rigid order of the authoritarian Junta with a disorganized New Republic it was this disorganized chaotic time that saw Brazilian populism propped up as a means of maintaining some State identity before it inevitably collapsed into authoritarianism again with the military dictatorship of 1964. this period of the dictatorship was an odd one and it has two names in Brazil this period from 1964 to 1985 is simultaneously called the Brazilian miracle and the years of lead it is called the Brazilian Miracle because Brazil experienced an unbelievable period of nearly 10 annual GDP growth with its peak in the years of 1969 to 1973 fueled as it was by cheaper oil prices and massive government investment into both infrastructure and State industry this period is also called the years of lead because of the horrific human rights abuse is committed by the military government including persecution and torture of dissidents violence against journalists press censorship suppression of ideological adversaries by force of arms and more Brazil was fighting a war to understand itself and it would not be long before external causes forced Brazil to come to New terms as the Brazilian economic Miracle came to an abrupt end meanwhile on the other side of the world although Japan had been devastated by World War II the Japanese were rapidly rebuilding with some help from the United States and a lot of very clever economic leadership Japan experienced its own post-war economic Miracle the story of which I've covered in a previous video it it was ultimately the same single event that brought the Japanese and Brazilian economic miracles to an end the 1973 oil crisis in 1973 conflict in the Middle East which we won't get into led to members of the organization of Arab petroleum exporting countries issuing an oil embargo targeting certain Nations including the United States and Japan thereby seriously raising the cost of oil for everyone everywhere the global price of oil increased from three dollars a barrel to nearly twelve dollars a barrel which seriously stifled industrial output and energy Supply Brazil was immediately devastated but Japan persisted a little longer building a bubble economy which itself would collapse nearly a decade later in Brazil the rising economic power of Japan corresponded directly with a change in the perception of the average Brazilian towards their Japanese population for nearly a century the Brazilian government harshly persecuted its Japanese immigrants and Japanese Brazilians were seen as non-assimilable and undesirable good for nothing but cheap labor but now suddenly Japan had money and people were buying Japanese products Japan was projecting its culture and expanding its soft power and the Brazilian people seemed suddenly to realize well wait a moment our Japanese Brazilians might be more desirable than we thought of the Japanese after all were very educated and desperately wanted to be integrated in spite of harsh treatment by the Brazilian government and the Brazilian people once the mental picture of a Japanese person shifted in the Brazilian mind from the slave replacement Farm labor to hard-working agriculturalist from an economically powerful motherland once the Japanese were invited to live in Brazilian communities amongst Brazilians and not pressured to live in their own enclaves for Safety and Security once the Japanese were welcome in Brazilian schools as friends and peers and not as burdens to the school system once the Japanese were given Fair opportunities at work and access to Government funding and support and opportunities to intermarry and share their own culture the Japanese integrated where the Japanese were once all but confined to rural enclaves by the 1960s the Japanese Brazilian population in urban centers surpassed the rural Japanese Brazilian population by 1977 the Japanese Brazilians who made up only two percent of the population of San Paulo added up to 13 of the student body at the University of Sao Paulo and by 1995 53 of Japanese Brazilians had a college degree compared to only nine percent of the general Brazilian population gazeto de povo a Brazilian newspaper published an article stating that common sense is that a Japanese students are studious disciplined do well at school pass the admission exams more easily and in most cases have great affinity for the exact science careers sixty percent of Japanese Brazilians are now Roman Catholic were once nearly none of them were the Japanese Brazilian branch of martial arts which you may know as Brazilian Jiu Jitsu spread throughout Brazil and into the world the astonishing success lesson efficacy of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is the pride of Brazilians everywhere and it comes from the Brazilian Japanese and as recently as 2017 a survey conducted in Brazil revealed that Brazilians of Japanese descent were the wealthiest group of people in Brazil how does a group of people go from undesirable impossible to integrate and hate it to the pride of the country the wealthiest and most educated and a model minority in what is really only about 20 years how did these Japanese immigrants go from Japanese in Brazil to Japanese Brazilians they were always themselves that's all that they could be it is the Brazilian people that grew not the Japanese it is Brazilian society that evolved past manipulative narratives of nationalism and populism past divisive manipulation designed to create an impoverished replacement for slaves and arguably that remembered the teachings of its great leader Pedro II in his own vision for a diverse inclusive Brazil that once looked as if it could be the world's first nation Brazil isn't perfect it has a long way to go quite frankly and although Brazil moved past nationalism and populism and manipulation when it comes to the Japanese there are still difficulties of this nature to resolve and I think many Brazilians are all too familiar with their chaotic modern history and feel embarrassed or guilty about the seemingly lost potential for greatness that Brazil once had here's another lesson though that the Japanese have for Brazil in East Asia one is generally taught that history is not a straight line from beginning to end it is a cycle good and bad Ebbs and flows one's civilization is sometimes great and it is sometimes small this is the nature of things times might be hard for Brazil right now but there is a greatness inherent to the Brazilian Spirit a destiny forged of Brazilian character that sits just over the horizon awaiting a Brazil that can remember its heart while also progressing towards the future [Music] foreign s for the Brazilian pep talk there Mooney but we haven't talked about Japanese games in Brazil yet I know I know we're getting there remember what I said just now about Cycles well in the 1980s Japan's economy had grown to unbelievable and unsustainable Heights Japan you see weathered the 1973 oil crisis better than most countries but in doing so had fleeted a massive economic bubble you may recall from the jrpg video that at the height of the babadooki die the bubble era the greater Tokyo area had a GDP larger than the entirety of the United Kingdom put together and that the 1.15 kilometer grounds of the Tokyo Imperial Palace had a land value greater than the entire American state of California Brazil in the meantime was struggling economically as many countries were in the Aftershock of the 1973 and subsequent 1979 oil crises the Brazilian economic Miracle ended in abrupt disaster and political upheaval and it seemed that the Japanese were only on the up and up potentially even ready to overtake the United States does this situation sound familiar to you what do you suppose happened next well the Japanese Brazilians seeing the vast economic fortunes being made in Japan decided to return to Japan bringing with them many non-japanese Brazilians in Japan needing cheap labor to fill its needs and happy that the cheap labor happens to also be culturally and linguistically Japanese welcomed these Brazilians to Japan with open arms the Japanese Brazilian Japanese were called the DECA Segi a term that means one who works away from home but that has the same connotations one might say as Gaijin does for a foreigner not necessarily pejorative but still establishing that these people are different from us and it is this massive influx of Brazilian Japanese immigration back to Japan in the 80s and 90s that brought Brazil into the scope of Japanese culture just as Japan was developing its fledgling electronic entertainment industry by 1998 around 222 000 Brazilians were living in Japan and they brought with them their food their music their traditional dress and more have you ever wondered why the Japanese seems so smitten with bossanova or Samba this is in part why now the Japanese government hoped that the dekaseki might be more easily integrated into Japanese Society due to their Japanese Roots after all the dekaseki had spent decades in Brazil being thought of as two Japanese to integrate and so they must still essentially be Japanese right you can imagine what happened next the dekaseki did not fit in very well with Japanese Society at first and the children of these dekasagi in particular were treated no different from complete foreigners the DECA Segi were accused of being not Japanese and of being too Brazilian many Native Japanese even took offense to the idea that these dekasagi were learning Portuguese as a first language and that many could not even speak Japanese at all with the Japanese labor shortage only getting worse thereby requiring more Japanese Brazilian labors many smaller industrial regions in Japan became increasingly populated by these Japanese Brazilians the New York Times quotes toshin an elderly and Japanese Community leader whose Community hosts a public housing complex for Brazilian Japanese called the homies State as stating I never imagined in my wildest dreams that this would ever become a multi-ethnic neighborhood which if you understand the nature of East Asian high context language use you may recognize is just as much a condemnation of the dekaseki as like sulfur insoluble might be in Portuguese many Japanese particularly the elderly do not understand the dekaseki they condemn the dekhasegi for playing Extremely Loud Music and for not sorting their trash properly and for being always late Japanese shop owners will even follow around dekaseki whom they can allegedly immediately recognize to make sure that these Japanese Brazilians aren't shoplifting meanwhile even to this day the children of Japanese Brazilians do not automatically get citizenship as Japan has no Birthright citizenship and thus the cycle of misunderstanding and division continues so thus far this video has been very heavy on the history that's right I've tricked you again but there is a lot of direct relevance here to video games as well now that you know that Brazil and Japan have this unique cultural link like magic you are going to see Brazilian influences in Japanese games and Japanese media everywhere it is inevitable it is so prevalent in fact that we can actually observe Japanese popular perceptions of Brazil and dekaseki through the portrayal of Brazilian characters and Brazil itself in Japanese video games now although the modern interaction between the Brazilian Japanese and the mainland of Japanese begins around the mid-1970s video games back then were still primitive and the video games industry was undeveloped sure there were games like Donkey Kong which ostensibly represented New York but even that wasn't made very clear in the game itself it wasn't until really the late 80s and early 90s when more powerful arcade machines and home consoles were able to support more complicated games and you will recall that it was the year 1990 in which the Japanese government first authorized a legal entry of the dekaseki through special visas this influx of Brazilians into Japan very substantially increased awareness of Brazil in Japanese society and this phenomenon can be directly observed through the genre of fighting games fighting games were really the first genre of video games that necessitated an international cast fighting game developers figured out very early on that a game where everyone fights with the same karate or kung fu fighting style wearing the same outfits is visually and mechanically boring let's look at some fighting games of the late 80s and see what those character rosters looked like prior to the arrival of the dekaseki to Japan and for that matter prior to more wide spread immigration into Japan itself the earliest fighting and beat-em-up games in the 80s like data east's karate champ and iram's Spartan X featured only a single playable character who fought with either karate or gongfu and often had an American name by the late 80s The rosters of these games substantially expanded but limited to the narrow scope of Japanese perception let's take a look at some case studies during this time period we'll start by looking at Street Fighter 1 an arcade fighting game released in 1987 by Capcom there were only two playable characters in Street Fighter 1 there was Ryu a Japanese martial artist and Ken an American martial artist but the same fighting style as Ryu their enemies were retsu and gekki from Japan Joe and Mike from the United States ostensibly New York that might be a topic for another video Lee and gen from China birdie and eagle from England and Adan and Sagat from Thailand it's an interesting cultural selection no this is us Japan this is our biggest trading partner of the United States this is our closest cultural relative in China this is our biggest trading partners closest cultural relative in England and this is Thailand look that's its own enormous can of worms that I really can't get into for this video but to make a long story short there was a period in the 60s where top level Japanese kickboxers held competitions between themselves and three muay thai fighters which ended up legitimizing Muay Thai as a fighting style in Japan but with the stigma of it being a sort of a vicious almost uncouth fighting style which has its own complicated history concerning Japan and Thailand's friendly interactions in World War II contrasted against Japanese society's General stigma against Southeast Asians it's all very complicated but don't worry about it just don't be surprised if you randomly see a lot of Muay Thai and thai fighters portrayed as scary thugs with scars and eye patches we can also look at final fight which was released in 1989. the characters in that game feature almost exclusively Americans albeit with a playable Japanese American for good measure and because the game is set in ostensibly late 80s New York the enemies include a Dominican named damned and a Cuban named Elgato who seems to have a thing for knives and Abigail the Mr T standard there were a lot of those too no we're not going to get into why in this video Once the Japanese government starts courting immigration though and particularly immigration from Brazil The rosters of these games begin to change quite substantially Street Fighter 2 was released in 1991 for arcades and already we can see how the arrival of the dekaseki just one year prior influenced the roster of this game there's Japan three countries of great cultural and economic significance to Japan and also Brazil which you now know is also of great cultural and economic significance to Japan the game's non-playable characters include balrog the American Boxer Vega the Spanish assassin Sagat the eye patch scary Muay Thai Guy and M bison who is allegedly also from Thailand let's return a moment though to the character of blanca because the design and story of blanca tell us a bit about how Japanese Society of the time saw the Brazilians entering their country Blanco was once a regular boy named Jimmy whose plane crashed in the Brazilian Amazon I have the crash he was exposed to electric eels which gave him his appearance and electric powers Blanca is portrayed as this sort of barbaric ape man strange and alien in his ways the product of a regular person mutated by a strange place to become something less than human this is not an intentional comparison I don't suspect but this is how Japanese Society saw the dekaseki at the time remember the jrpg video the Japanese don't voice their issues or controversial perspectives bluntly they do so subtly and often subconsciously Blanca's stage is the Amazon River Basin many of the people in the stage are without shirts and some are without shoes they live in thatched Huts they've caught what appears to be a pirararuku or arapaima gigas to eat another game we can take a look at from this same time period is fatal Fury which was also released in 1991. the main characters of fatal Fury are Terry Bogard his brother Andy Bogard and Joe higashi a Muay Thai champion from Japan of the cpu-controlled characters from the versus mode on SNES and the Genesis we received the character of Richard Meyer a Brazilian capoeira master who loves to dance and founded a nightclub called The bangbang Cafe take a look at this Cafe stage you will note that everything about this stage looks Chinese it's less pow pow and more makkow except for the dancing music men who aren't wearing shoes or shirts playing what I'd guess are capoeira instruments now that's how you know that this ostensibly Chinese Ballroom is actually Brazilian portrayals of Brazilian characters in Japanese games then split along these two archetypes the Blanca archetype and the Meyer archetype we see Brazilian characters portrayed as almost bestial or primitive like Blanca in games like Breakers which features a Brazilian character named raila Estancia who has Rippling muscles crazy hair sharp fangs and long painted cloth style fingernails she also talks like a caveman rila says you weak you can't live in the forest we see the Blanca archetype itself split in two different directions with the characters of rikuo from dark stalkers and the more problematic galleryo from fight fever dark stalkers and fight fever were both released in 1994. rikuo is a merman but one based on the Creature from the Black Lagoon despite his Origins he is quite handsome for a sea monster and he is shown to be a compassionate caring person who keeps his promises and of course dark suckers is dark stalkers everyone is a monster in dark stalkers gaurio from a fight fever represents the more dark side of this archetype it is the quiet part spoken out loud the problem with Blanca back in the day isn't that he was a beast man I don't think rikuo is very problematic at all for example the problem with Blanca is that his design as this half ape half man monster is arguably a negative and harmful representation of a culture that is subject to discrimination in Japan project acted into the form of media the problem with gall Rio isn't that he is dressed like an indigenous Warrior it is that this big fat Native man ostensibly only exists in the game because of the awareness of his culture which there in comes from this immigrant community in other words although this portrayal almost certainly isn't intended to offend it does represent how large parts of Japanese Society viewed the Brazilians in their midst as tribal jungle people another example of the Gaul rail subtype of the Blanca archetype is Lisa from taito's 1994 Kaiser knuckle who is dressed in a tribal Chic leopard skin bikini and can throw both a parrot and a monkey at you as a form of special attack the Blanca archetype and even the gall rail subtype never really die out as we can see even in more modern characters hi Zarina we'll get to you later it is the Meyer archetype though that would break through and become the common portrayal of Brazilian characters in Japanese games moving forward if the Blanca archetype can be recognized through its portrayals of Brazilians as being more primitive and even animal-like the Meyer archetype can be recognized through a few simple characteristics number one Meyer Brazilians are hot blooded and charismatic number two Meyer Brazilians love to dance and their Hobbies almost always include Samba number three Meyer Brazilians fight with the power of dance usually in the style of capoeira and number four Meyer Brazilian men are often allergic to shoes shirts or both Meyer Brazilian women always have bare midriffs let's take a look at a few examples of these Meyer Brazilian archetypes and see how they develop as time goes on here is Bob Wilson from Fatal Fury 3 released in 1995. Bob is described by the SNK Wiki as a cheerful man who loves to combine dancing with his Brazilian style of capoeira let's weigh Bob against our four elements of the Meyer archetype Bob is number one a cheerful and charismatic man number two he loves to dance Can't Get Enough dancing number three key dance fights using caboira and number four he has no shoes and a bare midriff in 1997 we have Tekken 3's first Brazilian character in the form of Eddie Gordo Eddie is a character that starts to break away a little bit from this archetype while it's true that he loves dancing that he fights using capoeida that he has no shoes and a bare midriff he isn't a particularly cheerful guy he's portrayed in the game as cool and collected this is a cultural step forward for Japanese portrayals of resilience and we start to see more balanced portrayals of Brazilian characters as time goes on but uh not in Tekken in Tekken 4 we see Christy Montero erigordu's Apprentice she is described as being white-hearted and joyful with a playful side to her often teasingly asking her opponents if they hurt themselves during her win poses she loves to dance and in Tekken 6 even she can do a short Samba step as a gap closer she fights using capoeida and she has a bare midriff and she doesn't wear shoes the early 2000s though also gives us one of the more flattering portrayals of a Brazilian woman in any Japanese game and that is the character of pupa salgueru from Rage of the Dragons Pupa is a tomboyish and cheerful girl who loves to dance and fights in her stylized version of capoeida she also has a bare midriff but she is not egregiously sexualized in the way that all of the other Meyer archetype characters have been so far meanwhile back in Japan in the late 90s to early 2000s the presence of the deccase in Japan stops being something between an annoyance and a novelty and starts evolving into the more complicated relationship that we've already discussed now there are still quite a few Meyer archetype characters that get released into Japanese games but we can't possibly cover every single one as you play these games you'll see them and know what they are but the 2000s started to see very distinctive breakthrough Brazilian characters in Japanese games I have one particularly distinctive character in mind a character that is designed with such intention to overcome the stereotypes the Japanese have towards a Deca Segi in Brazil at large but done with such Nuance such subtlety that this character could only be the product of a once in a generation genius I am talking of course about Samuel Jetstream sand Rodriguez the Japanese Brazilian cyborg swordsman designed by hideo Kojima himself and appearing in Metal Gear Rising Revengeance Jetstream Sam is cool and collected but not particularly cheerful he is very Japanese but also very Brazilian he is in fact a Deca Segi we don't know if jet stream Sam likes to dance or not why should we know that why jet stream Sam even wears shoes and there is Nary and midriff in sight Kojima is truly a mastermind now according to the Metal Gear wiki Kevin whoever that is reveals that Jetstream Sam incorporated capoeida into his fighting style which uh way to ruin a good thing Kevin but it goes to show you that even hideo Kojima is not perfect nobody is in modern times Brazilian characters and portrayals have become second nature to the Japanese to the point where as I suggested in the beginning of the video the rest of South America is completely overshadowed King of Fighters 14 for example released in 2016 as a team of South America which consists of Nelson a Brazilian banderus a Brazilian and Zarina who is supposedly Colombian it says here that she lives in Brazil loves to dance samba and fights with a style resembling Capoeira of course she has a bare midriff but no despite being dressed in the literal colors of the Brazilian flag wearing what appears to be a carnival outfit with a pet that is very clearly a common toucan or Ram fastest Toko on her shoulder a species of two can I might add that very specifically doesn't live in Colombia a country of otherwise many different toucans she is indeed allegedly Colombia her Wiki page lists her Hobbies as singularly dance parentheses Samba in fact the only quote-unquote obvious reference to Colombia that I could readily see is from a nightmare that Zarina has in a victory screen from SNK heroine's tag team frenzy Can you spot the Colombian reference that's right those fighter jets are clearly highly stylized f-86 Sabers now it's not a mig-15 look at the tail and specifically these appear to be canadian-built Canadair mark IV f-86 Sabers as we all know the Brazilian Air Force never procured f-86 Sabers as they opted for the British Gloucester meteor before replacing those with fadc shooting stars and those largely with Northrop F5 tiger 2s but what's this the Colombian Air Force did in fact acquire six Canadian belt mark IV f-86 Sabers in 1956 which were then retired from service in 1966 meaning that this stream ostensibly takes place in Colombia between the years of 1956 and 1966. this is indeed the only conclusive evidence that we have in support of zorina being Colombian and not Brazilian sorry what were we talking about oh yes well we can see that Japanese games do indeed love to feature Brazil and that Japanese portrayals of Brazilian characters slowly become more culturally sensitive or more Colombian as the case may be as time goes on reflective of the Japanese coming to better understand their own a Japanese Brazilian population which brings us finally all the way back around to the newest Brazilian character in a Japanese AAA release as of this video big man the manta ray from Splatoon 3. big man is very chill but is also highly charismatic and loves having fun and a good time he loves to dance any fight in the style of uh Super Mario Sunshine and he of course has the barest of midriffs his musical input into the songs of the game have Brazilian inspiration in his dancing style is described as Brazilian big man is beloved in Brazil and in Japan and around the world he has some archetypal issues sure he's a bit of a mire with his love of dance and bear midriff and he's a bit of a Blanca being a Brazilian coated manta ray and a band that otherwise consists of a japanese-coated octoling in a South Asian ostensibly Indian coded inkling but who can look at big man and not think the world of him modern portrayals of Brazilian characters in Japanese games are becoming more respectful which is in line with the status of dekaseki in Japan itself as Japanese Brazilians continue to arrive in Japan and as they slowly reassimilate they are embedding Brazilian culture permanently into Japanese culture in a way that is both processed and celebrated through Brazilian characters and settings and music in Japanese video games Japan and Brazil have a special cultural relationship that spans over one and a half centuries it is a relationship that at times has been very complicated and even antagonistic but in spite of it all it is this cultural relationship and the people involved in that relationship the Japanese Brazilians that we have to thank for The Unique presence of Brazil in Japanese video games the Japanese Brazilians struggled in Brazil for decades but slowly they have become more accepted integrated and even beloved members of the Brazilian Community with Japanese culture having mixed thoroughly with Brazilian culture to create something very beautiful in the process we are now seeing through video games and Japanese media alike the struggles of the Brazilian Japanese as they seek their own acceptance and integration in Japan we then are privileged to experience the fruits of a beautiful cultural intermarriage one that has produced some of the most beloved characters settings and music in all of video games I've been your host Mooney special thanks to our sponsor for this video honkai star Rail and to my good friend piercing's site for his assistance in proofreading and pronunciation and do viewers like you thank you the description has a playlist for this video soundtrack by the way which is in my opinion the best one we've ever had so please enjoy that and thank you for tuning in to Moon Channel [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Moon Channel

Views: 663,210

Keywords: Moon Channel, Moony, Why Do Japanese Games Love Brazil?, Japanese Games, Video Games, Video Essay, Wholesome, Dekasegi, Japanese Brazilians, Brazilian Japanese, History of Brazilian Japanese, Blanka, Zarina, Big Man

Id: 7jTcVpQ-gow

Length: 62min 52sec (3772 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023