Japanese-language daily newspaper in Brazil closes

(6 Jan 2019) LEADIN:
The Brazilian newspaper that for more than 70 years has been an opinion leader in the largest Japanese community outside Japan has ceased to be printed.
The Sao Paulo Shimbun's special January 1 edition was the last to roll off the printing presses in Sao Paulo's Asian neighborhood of "Liberdade."
STORYLINE
It's the end of an era as one of the final editions of the Sao Paulo Shimbun Japanese newspaper rolls off the printing press.  
For over 70 years the newspaper has been keeping the Japanese community in Brazil's biggest city informed about news and local information.  
Sao Paulo is home to the largest Japanese community outside of motherland.
The owner of the paper, Helena Mizumoto, resisted closing it for years but decreasing circulation made her decision inevitable, with the print run dropping to below the 5,000 papers she needed to stay afloat.
Standing in an empty newsroom, after having let go a dozen reporters, Mizumoto says the paper was, for decades, the main reference for the Japanese community in Brazil.
Before the age of internet and cable TV, the Sao Paulo Shimbun was the place Japanese immigrants would call to find out where they could find Japanese-owned business.
"The Google of the community was here," Mizumoto says recalling that the paper kept a person just to answer such calls.
Japanese immigrants starting arriving in Brazil, at the port of Santos, in 1908. Over a century later, Brazil's community of Japanese descendants is about 2 million people, the largest Japanese community outside the island.
But main reason for the closure was the aging —and death— of its readers.
"The sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants who learned at home to read and write Japanese are our readers, but they are also very old. They have 90 years old," explains Mizumoto.
The Sao Paulo Shimbun was created in 1946 shortly after the end of World War II and the lifting of the ban on Japanese language.
It was instrumental in letting the Japanese immigrants know that their country had lost the war.
At six every morning a group of Japanese immigrants practice Radio Taiso exercises (warm up calisthenics) in the Liberdade square, in the heart of the Japanese Liberdade neighborhood, which is decoarted with Japanese inspired street art.
Nobukazu Kanomata, 83, a massage therapist who leads the group, stopped buying the paper a year ago.
"The quality of articles has gone gradually deteriorated," he complains.
As the population ages, there are fewer residents who speak and read Japanese fluently.
Yoshikatsu Yamashita, 74, is a regular reader of Sao Paulo Shimbun, but he says he struggles to read in Japanese.
"We mostly read the part of the newspaper that is in Portuguese, because the part in Japanese it's a bit difficult. But we manage to read some."
Eduardo Nakashima, secretary of the Cultural Alliance Brazil Japan says that up to the 1990s, Japanese expats got most of their national and international information from the Sao Paulo Shimbun.
But he says that that ended with advent of the internet and access to Japanese television news channels.
"Most of the Japanese expatriates, the company executives, up to the end of the 1990s, learned about Brazil from the (Japanese) newspaper published here. Because they would watch the (local) television and wouldn't understand. He would read Folha de Sao Paulo (newspaper) but wouldn't understand. English language newspapers, (although) there were some, (reading it) was also difficult. So the local (Japanese) newspaper printed by the community was the reference to learn about Brazil."

Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork
Twitter:   / ap_archive  
Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​
Instagram:   / apnews  


You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...