Nanbei Burajiru Jijo to Toko Annai [Travel Guide to Brazil, in South America]

Tokyo: Kaigai Kogyo, 1931. Very good.. 2,84,[1]pp., plus [16] pages of halftone photographs, three attractive color maps, a two-page folding halftone photographic collage, and a folding printed table. Original textured wrappers printed in black and red. Minor edge wear, some rubbing, spine a bit chipped. Light occasional foxing to text. First edition of a rare and profusely illustrated work on Japanese travel to Brazil during a robust time for Japanese emigration to South America in the early 1930s. In fact, the work acts as an immigration promotional, with the first three chapters focused on the history of Brazil, life on a coffee farm, and the possibility of becoming a landowner in one of the Japanese colonies in Brazil. The fourth and final chapter is a travel guide, offering advice on qualifications for travel, the cost of the trip, the experience aboard ship, and more. The text is greatly enhanced by forty-seven halftone photographs printed on sixteen preliminary pages and a two-page folding panoramic collage bound in the middle of the text. These photographs show a wide range of subjects relevant to the traveler's and emigrant's experience in Brazil (mostly the emigrant's), such as city views of Santos and Rio, numerous scenes of agricultural settings and products, views of Japanese colonial housing, and more. The photographs make it clear that the purpose of this work is to encourage agricultural emigration from Japan to Brazil. The color-printed maps support this assertion, as they depict the travel routes from Japan to Brazil, a map of Sao Paulo marked with the location of various Japanese colonies, and the location of Japanese colonies centered around the Destro settlement in southern Sao Paulo. We could locate no copies of this work in the United States, with only a single copy listed in OCLC, at the National Diet Library. An unusually well-illustrated Japanese promotional "travel guide" to Brazil with most of its content angled toward encouraging emigration to the country.