In São Paulo, Nikkei Chefs Are Finally Getting Their Due

Kasato Maru is a familiar name at many of São Paulo’s Japanese restaurants. It commonly shows up on menus, referring to an assortment of sushi and sashimi. The dish isn’t named for a person, but a passenger ship that brought 781 immigrants from Japan to Brazil in 1908, kicking off decades of steady migration across the Pacific.

The ship has become a symbol of cultural exchange between the two nations and helped define the largest Japanese community outside Japan, but the contents of the ship-shaped sushi platter that bears its name — California rolls, avocado uramaki, and other globally popular items — don’t reflect Brazil’s Nikkei (Japanese diaspora) community. Nor does much of the food at São Paulo’s thousands of Japanese restaurants, which, according to the Brazilian Association of Japanese Gastronomy, outnumber the country’s ubiquitous steakhouses.

“In many restaurants, we primarily observe a replication of the sushi trend and the adoption of the American model,” says Telma Shiraishi, chef at Aizomê, a Japanese restaurant in São Paulo’s Jardim Paulista neighborhood. “The proliferation of combinations involving cream cheese, jalapeño, and avocado — which I personally consider aberrations — has become commonplace. Dishes frequently include ingredients that are neither Japanese nor Brazilian.”

Telma brings a considerate, locavore approach to Japanese cuisine, routinely taking trips around Brazil to learn about ingredients and cook alongside Brazilian chefs. She prepares saikyo yaki (fish marinated in seasoned sweet miso) with pirarucu (an Amazon River fish), opts for palm heart instead of bamboo sprouts in nimono (items simmered in stock), and has developed a version of kuri gohan (chestnut rice) using Brazil’s araucaria pine nut.

She’s part of a growing movement among chefs with Japanese heritage in Brazil who are trying to cook in ways that reflect the history and contemporary culture of the Nikkei community. Building on the rise of Brazilian gastronomy, they’re blending Japanese techniques with native Brazilian products, expressing culinary relationships between the two countries, and advocating for thoughtful, exciting Japanese Brazilian Nikkei cuisine more than a century after the arrival of the first immigrants.

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The passengers on the Kasato Maru, along with the waves of immigrants that followed, primarily moved to work on Brazilian farms, especially coffee plantations, which needed workers after the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the decline of immigration from Europe.

“Japanese emigration was also encouraged by active recruitment and propaganda efforts, which was concerned with overpopulation and poverty in rural [Japanese] areas, and by the establishment of ‘emigration companies’ to recruit and transport emigrants to Brazil,” writes Takeyuki Tsuda in “The Benefits of Being Minority: The Ethnic Status of the Japanese-Brazilians in Brazil.” At the same time, the U.S. (today the second-largest Japanese diaspora community) was clamping down on immigration from Japan, making the choice of destination even more obvious. Although many immigrants intended to return to Japan after earning their fortunes in Brazil, they found themselves locked into low-paying, restrictive contracts that kept them from leaving.

Immigrants brought some food with them, as well as seedlings of plants that had previously never reached the Americas, such as Fuji apples, persimmons, Ponkan mandarins, and some varieties of grapes. But for the most part, like chefs who developed other migratory cuisines, they used the ingredients they found in Brazil.

“The cuisine of the first immigrants was characterized by adaptation as its primary feature,” Telma says. “Faced with limited access to [Japanese] ingredients, their solution was to craft recipes reminiscent of their Japanese fare utilizing locally available ingredients.” They might add green papaya to tsukemono (pickled vegetables) or use Brazilian fish for sashimi, not only in São Paulo, but in other regions, like the Amazon, where local resources differed. Though they used Brazilian ingredients out of necessity, most Nikkei chefs remained rooted in traditional Japanese cooking, doing their best to maintain culinary traditions under stressful conditions.

For decades, non-Japanese Brazilians didn’t taste any of that. Residents were slow to gain interest in Japanese food due to significant xenophobia against the immigrant community. In the early 20th century, newspapers generated fear over transplants, representing the newcomers as a “yellow peril.” Following World War II, congressmen at a National Constituent Assembly in 1946 approved an amendment that barred Japanese immigrants for years. Japanese communities kept mostly to themselves in areas like São Paulo’s Liberdade.

“Consequently, it took longer for immigrants to assimilate Brazilian gastronomic culture and vice versa,” says Simone Xirata, founder of JoJo Ramen, a chain of Tokyo-style ramen restaurants in São Paulo, and vice president of the Brazilian Association of Japanese Gastronomy. “However, this perception has changed. Speaking from my own experience and that of those around me, we now seek recognition as Brazilians. This transformation began with the deeper integration of the Nikkei community into Brazilian society.”

After Japanese cuisine became popular in the U.S. in the 1980s, the hype spilled over into Brazil by the following decade, marked by the emergence of new restaurants offering a variety of Japanese dishes, including sashimi, temaki, and sushi. Then came rodízios, or all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants, that propelled Japanese cuisine into the mainstream. Other styles of Japanese cuisine previously tucked away in the streets of Liberdade, such as izakayas, ramen shops, and yakitori bars, began to flourish as well.

The cheap Japanese cuisine that became popular in North America and Europe eventually evolved into ambitious fusion restaurants and luxurious omakases. But Brazil never developed high-end Japanese cuisine because it lacked the supply chain to deliver fresh ingredients from Japan.

“Unlike the U.S., where I used to have an omakase restaurant [in Miami] with easy access to products, including many direct imports from Japan, access in Brazil has always been more challenging,” says Japanese Brazilian chef Tadashi Shiraishi (no relation to Telma Shiraishi), founder of eight-seat omakase restaurant Kanoe in the Jardins neighborhood. While that’s starting to change, he still doesn’t have full access to many types of sea urchins, fish, or seasonings common in Japanese restaurants elsewhere.

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Historic disinterest among Brazilian customers and shoddy supply chains aren’t holding back chefs like Tadashi or Telma from crafting new types of Japanese dining in Brazil anymore. At Kanoe, Tadashi offers a contemporary style of cuisine that blends Japanese techniques with local ingredients like serra Spanish mackerel, yellowtail amberjack, and various herbs and nuts.

“It’s not a novelty that Brazilian ingredients are integrated into Japanese cuisine as practiced in Brazil. What has shifted in recent years is the emergence of more technical, well-planned, and consequently more successful approaches,” Tadashi says. “Ignoring Brazilian ingredients and failing to experiment and innovate with them would be regressive.”

Chef Uilian Goya doesn’t ignore those opportunities either. At his intimate namesake Goya, another ambitious Japanese Brazilian restaurant in the hip Pinheiros neighborhood that opened in 2022, the chef utilizes fish from the Brazilian coast (in combination with Japanese fish) and relies on Kappaphycus seaweed, abundant along the Brazilian coast, for his dashi. He also uses wasabi from Minato Wasabi, which began cultivating the root in Brazil in 2021.

“With more guests traveling abroad, especially to Japan, their expectations have risen,” Goya says. “Consequently, chefs have been compelled to seek out better products, resulting in an increased availability of top-quality ingredients, many of which are native to Brazil.”

Goya says even traditionally conservative Japanese chefs who cater primarily to the Japanese community have shifted their mindset on Brazilian ingredients, reconceptualizing them from an unfortunate necessity to an opportunity. That’s true at places like Keito, located in the same building as the Consulate General of Japan in São Paulo, which has been a favorite dining spot for Japanese diplomats since 1988. For much of that time, the restaurant has remained faithful to traditional Japanese cuisine. However, chef Nobu Ozaki has recently added a few Brazilian twists.

“I created a dish featuring raw blowfish sashimi served with a sauce made from its liver,” he says. “To add a playful twist, I included jambu in the sauce, an herb native to northern Brazil known for its tingling sensation on the tongue. Initially, this surprised some of our Japanese customers, as they mistook it for poison. However, after sampling the herb and learning about its properties, they embraced it, which became a unique aspect of our cuisine.”

He’s continued experimenting with Brazilian ingredients, such as pimenta biquinho (kiss pepper), and increasingly relies on local products, like deep-sea fish.

“São Paulo boasts a more traditional and deeply rooted Japanese cuisine than other countries,” Ozaki admits, but “this tradition emphasizes working with high-quality ingredients. With the improvement of the Brazilian supply chain, we’ve seized the opportunity to incorporate more local products.”

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“In various fields, such as gastronomy, but also in art, cinema, advertising, and fashion, Nikkei people are excelling,” Xirata says. “This empowerment stems from the community members’ recognition of themselves as Brazilians, fully part of the broader Brazilian society, rather than as an isolated group.”

As Nikkei residents have increasingly expressed their Brazilian culture, the Japanese government has shifted its position toward the diaspora community as well. In 2017, a century after the Kasato Maru docked, Japan extended the Japan House initiative to São Paulo; the museum and community hub, with locations in Los Angeles and London, operates as a soft-power tool to promote Japanese culture, including cuisine.

Rafael Salvador

Xirata says that following this promotional campaign waged by chefs and government officials, she’s seen more non-Japanese Brazilians become interested in Japanese cuisine, develop a taste for umami, and delve into Nikkei foods specifically. The most recent Michelin guide to São Paulo included eight Japanese restaurants, a mix of traditional omakases and contemporary Nikkei cuisine, among its 12 one-starred venues. Xirata also gives credit to chefs who have incorporated Japanese techniques into other cuisines, helping boost the popularity and awareness of Japanese food by association.

“I believe Japanese cuisine has exerted far more influence than it has received,” Xirata says. “Perhaps now it is our turn to reciprocate and showcase that Japanese cuisine is so rich and versatile that it can embrace more local flavors as well.”

Rafael Tonon is a journalist and food writer living between Brazil and Portugal. He is the author of the book The Food Revolutions.