You can still stroll down Liberdade in the evening and pick up the strong smell of soy sauce spilling from an apartment or shop for groceries without speaking a word of Portuguese. Even signs at McDonald's restaurants and other multinational chains are written in Japanese, making it appear like a little Tokyo. Drug traffickers, prostitutes and the homeless have infiltrated from Sao Paulo's dilapidated downtown district, threatening to turn the once orderly haven into a den of crime.
Somebody has to do something about the town getting dirtier and the community ties disappearing.
Big cities are planning numerous events to commemorate the date, April 22. The Japanese came to Brazil some four centuries after the Portuguese when the South American country banned slavery and was looking abroad for labor to farm its vast interior. From Liberty to Little Tokyo Japan's government, facing an overpopulation problem, encouraged Japanese to move to Brazil and some 190,000 had done so by the Second World War. Another 63,000 came in the postwar era until Japan officially stopped sending immigrants in 1973. The influx resulted in today's large population of Brazilians with Japanese ancestry, estimated at 1.3 million, or almost 1 percent of Brazil's population of 160 million.