6. Cut Off From the Outside World
Brazil joined the Allies in 1942, which further deepened the isolation of the country’s Japanese immigrants. All communications with Japan were severed, and no new Japanese were admitted. The immigrants’ radio sets were confiscated. Those living in the more urban coastal areas, where access to news was easy, were expelled and relocated to the more rural interior, where access to news was quite limited.
Cut off from the outside world and reliable news, Brazil’s Japanese immigrant community became ripe for, and ready recipients of, unreliable news. As a result, many were hurled headfirst into a world of alternative facts – one in which Japan was winning WWII. By the time the war ended in 1945, many Japanese-Brazilians sincerely held the lunatic belief that Japan had triumphed. Those who disagreed or said any different were in for rough – at times lethally rough – treatment.