Qualla: Bastos

Bastos: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In 1928 a man named Senjiro Hatanaka went looking for dirt. He had been sent from Japan to find land in the Brazilian interior that could absorb the waves of emigrants leaving a crowded, depressed countryside, and what he settled on was a cattle property in western São Paulo belonging to a rancher called Henrique Bastos. The farm's name stayed on the map. Almost everything else about the place was built by people who had crossed an ocean to get there. Bastos was founded on June 18, 1928, and in the century since it has been Brazil's silk capital and then its egg capital — a town of roughly 21,000 residents that keeps millions of chickens.

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Image: Public domain

Bastos: An Agent with Instructions

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit José Rosael/HélioNobre/Museu Paulista da USP, Public domain. Hatanaka was not a homesteader. He was a scout working within a formal colonization apparatus: the Sociedade Colonizadora do Brasil, which laid out the subdivision on the Fazenda Bastos lands and sold lots to arriving families. He is named among the founders alongside Carlos Kato...

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Image: José Rosael/HélioNobre/Museu Paulista da USP | Public domain

Bastos: Mulberry and Bombyx mori

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Governo do Estado de São Paulo, CC BY 2.0. The soil around Bastos is sandy, and sandy soil grows mulberry well. Mulberry leaves feed Bombyx mori, the domesticated silkworm, and sericulture is labor the whole household can do — picking leaves, tending trays of larvae through their molts, watching for the moment the worms b...

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Image: Governo do Estado de São Paulo | CC BY 2.0

Bastos: A Community Under Suspicion

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Governo do Estado de São Paulo, CC BY 2.0. The municipality was created in 1944, which is to say in the middle of the worst years for Japanese-Brazilian communities. Brazil declared war on the Axis powers in August 1942, and the response at home fell hard on immigrant populations: Japanese-language schools were closed, Ja...

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Image: Governo do Estado de São Paulo | CC BY 2.0

Bastos: The Turn to Eggs

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Governo do Estado de São Paulo, CC BY 2.0. In 1957 Bastos found the vocation it has never let go of: laying poultry. The shift from silkworms to hens is less abrupt than it sounds — both are intensive, technical, daily animal husbandry, and the same families who had learned to read the health of a tray of larvae learned t...

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Image: Governo do Estado de São Paulo | CC BY 2.0

Bastos: What Gets Celebrated

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Governo do Estado de São Paulo, CC BY 2.0. Bastos hosts Brazil's Festa do Ovo, which is both an industry trade show and a town party — an exhibition of poultry equipment and technique running alongside concerts and entertainment for the whole region. The Museu Histórico Regional Saburo Yamanaka, founded in 1975, holds one...

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Image: Governo do Estado de São Paulo | CC BY 2.0