By Sushma Joshi São Paolo is the third largest city in the world – after Mexico City and Bombay, according to some commentators. São Paolo is also the city with the largest population of Japanese outside Japan. Immigrants usually come from poorer countries, in my experience. Urban metropolis from New York to London have neighbourhoods named Chinatown and little Italy and little India – countries where large number of residents faced poverty and fled to a better land. So it was a surprise to see a neighborhood of immigrants composed of people normally considered wealthy and privileged – in this case, the Japanese. Liberdade, a neighborhood in central São Paolo, hums with the Sunday fair common to Brazilian cities – except these stalls are full of paper origami, t-shirts with kanji calligraphy, red banners with Katakana and Portuguese signs. The stalls are manned by elderly Japanese, who sell their wares in jerky Portuguese. Stalls sell a sizzling yakissoba. The Japanese in Brazil...
The civil wars of the twenty-first century: Sushma Joshi's slightly twisted perspective of the universe.