TOKYO 30 August 2008 Asakusa Samba Parade Carnival creates bit of Rio in Tokyo. Reverse migration 

The annual Asakusa Samba Carnival parade is a four-hour sliver of Rio de Janeiro's famed Carnaval, but it is just as colorful and tells a bigger story. The bare-bottom event reflects changes in the fortunes of Brazil, which has the largest community of Japanese and their descendants outside Japan -- some 1.5 million. In 2008 it will be 100 years since the migration began.

The first Japanese immigrants (791 people - mostly farmers) came to Brazil in 1908 on the Kasato Maru from the Japanese port of Kobe, moving to Brazil in search of better living conditions.

In the early 20th Century Brazil needed laborers for its booming coffee plantations, while Japanese companies needed new countries to send excess workers after exclusion acts ended legal immigration from Asia to the United States. The faltering Brazilian economy and strengthening Japanese economy in the 1980s reversed the tide, sending Portuguese-speaking Japanese-extraction Brazilians to Japan to satisfy that country's need for laborers. They carried with them a taste for the samba and Carnaval. The annual Samba Carnival Parade event in Asakusa is the result.

It has been held each year since 1981, when the mayor of Tokyo's Taito ward invited the winner of Brazil’s Rio carnival to the city to put on a display. The event has grown. Some 3500 samba dancers, mainly from Japan and Brazil, strut their feathered-and sequined stuff to drums and whistles for some 500,000 sightseers.

Visa stipulations keep the Brazilian Japanese workers in their place in Japan. Nonetheless, they now number nearly 300,000.

For the Asakusa, 30-40 teams compete for prizes and they are divided into three leagues. The top league comprises professional and semi-professional Samba dancers. The second tier participants parade mainly for the fun. Oct/07

RELATED READING:

Japan and Brazil: a case study in global interdependence (Ashbrook Center Jul 1998)
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/respub/v8n2/ellis.html