When you think of Japanese immigration to Brazil, the date that comes to mind is 1908, the ship Kasato Maru arriving at the port of Santos with the first families who would come to work in the coffee fields. It is a fair and well-documented milestone. But it does not tell of the first time a Japanese person set foot on Brazilian ground. That first time happened here, on the Island (Florianópolis sits on the Island of Santa Catarina), and five years before the twentieth century began to be imagined: on December 20, 1803.
What happened at Forte Santana
At the close of that year, a Russian ship on a voyage of circumnavigation had to stop in Desterro, the name Florianópolis carried then, for repairs. On board were four Japanese survivors of the wreck of the Wakamiya Maru, taken in by the vessel somewhere along its long route. It was at Forte Santana (a fort in the city center) that they came ashore and spent some 44 days on solid ground.
They were not colonists; they had come to found nothing. They were castaways, men the sea had thrown far from home and whom the Island took in while their ship was made whole again. In those little more than forty days, they observed what lay before them: the life of the city, the way crops were planted, the rhythm of a place that must have seemed to them the reverse of the world they came from. They recorded these impressions, and that is how we know they were here.
Add up the years and the detail becomes clear. There were 105 years between those four men at Forte Santana and the Kasato Maru at Santos. In other words: the first Brazilian soil a Japanese person set foot on was not São Paulo. It was the Island.
Why the Island forgot this episode
An episode fades for good reasons. This one had all of them. There were only four people; they stayed a few weeks and moved on. They left no descendants, no community, no neighborhood bearing their name. There was no newspaper to report the landing, and the memory of Desterro was busy with larger things, or things that seemed larger at the time.
The story of Japanese immigration, when it was told decades later, needed a clean beginning, and Santos in 1908 is a clean beginning: families, contracts, a project. Four castaways passing through do not fit that frame. So the episode stayed where small episodes tend to stay, in footnotes and in the newspaper features that almost no one reads twice.
Why it matters today
It matters because it changes who came first. And the first here was not a colonization project. It was an act of welcome. The Island took in four foreigners in distress, gave them ground for 44 days, and returned them to the sea. That is an origin less epic and more human than the one at Santos, and perhaps for that reason more like what Florianópolis has always been: a stopping point, a place where outsiders put in, look around, and carry away an impression.
The historical correction is worth making for its own sake. The first Japanese person in Brazil did not land in 1908. He landed in 1803, in the center of a city you cross today without knowing you are treading over this detail.
A closing word from us
Knowing the Island from within is exactly this: discovering that the ordinary sight of a fort downtown holds the first encounter between two countries. At Regente, we treat the city as something to be read layer by layer, because those who understand the ground beneath their feet choose better where they want to be. Memória da Ilha (Memory of the Island) is our way of giving those layers back to you, one at a time.
Read also: the history of Florianópolis.
