Location spotlight: The Japanese influence in Brazil

Brazil and Japan have forged a very close bond over the past 113 years since the first few hundred Japanese immigrants stepped off the Kasato Maru ship in Santos Port (São Paulo state) on 18 June 1908 – a date that is now celebrated as the Japanese Immigration Day all across Brazil. Their influence on Brazilian culture is everywhere, from architecture to agriculture, festivities and of course food; sushi is practically a national dish. The world of arts and entertainment, including TV and film, has a very strong Japanese influence in Brazil, too, and there are dozens of cultural centres and organisations across the country that preserve and promote Nipo-Brazilian identity.

Liberdade is where Spectros – an 8-part supernatural thriller on Netflix – was recently shot. Plastic City – a Brazilian-Chinese-Hong Kong-Japanese thriller – was also filmed there in 2008 and made the Venice Film Festival selection. The neighbourhood is known as São Paulo’s Japan town and it bears all the hallmarks from its red and white street lamps to the Japanese papers at newsstands, signs written in ideograms, and the numerous karaoke joints and sushi restaurants. It’s also home to the Historic Museum of Japanese Immigration in Brazil, with its impressive archive of images and documents from over the decades.

A quarter of a million Japanese immigrated to Brazil up until the 1970s in successive pre-and post-war waves. The first immigrants were mainly sent to work on coffee plantations in the interior of São Paulo and nowadays there are 1.3 million Japanese and their descendants living across the state.

Japanese immigration spread much further into Brazil, however, as the new arrivals went to work on major infrastructure projects like railway construction, or to search for fertile land to buy and plant, albeit with varying degrees of success. Colonies were founded as far and wide as the Amazon in the north to Santa Catarina in the south. Small cities like Bastos, Pereira Barreto, Alianças and Assaí were built by Japanese and preserve many of their traditional characteristics today.

Traditional Japanese architecture can also be found in the state capitals São Paulo and Curitiba. In São Paulo, the Japanese Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park is a remarkable feat. It was a gift from the Japanese Government and the Nipo-Brazilian community to celebrate the city’s fourth centenary in 1954. Built using Japanese techniques and with materials brought from Japan, it’s still a marker of the special bond between the two countries.

For productions looking to shoot Japanese scenography, it might seem odd to say but Brazil has a really broad choice of affordable locations. Permission can be granted to shoot at all the locations featured here, and with remote directing now the norm for our crew, overseas clients can control almost every aspect of a shoot in real time.