This project is inspired by anthropologist Merry I. White’s book Coffee Life in Japan. In it, she reveals how coffee, as a global beverage, holds a unique cultural status in Japanese society, while serving as a subtle thread of transnational trade and migration.

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In the early 20th century, Japan initiated a large wave of migration. Between 1908 and 1941, approximately 189,000 Japanese emigrated to Brazil, becoming labourers on coffee plantations, primarily in the state of São Paulo and its surrounding areas. This migration was not only part of the Japanese government’s strategy to export its “surplus population” (kajô jinkô), but for Brazilian plantation owners, Japanese immigrants were seen as a vital workforce to revitalize the coffee economy.

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Within this historical context, Japanese migrants brought their labour to Brazil, while coffee beans traced a path back to Japan along the trade routes. Coffee can thus be viewed as a material medium of cross-cultutihhoral migration and memory, tracing the routes shaped by migration policies and trade, returning across the ocean in place of the migrants themselves, and becoming a vessel of their migratory histories. At the intersection of Imperial expansion and economic globalization, the journey of coffee mirrors those bodies shaped by migration—it gestures toward a distant Other while always glancing back at an irretrievable origin.

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The screening is divided into two sections:

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Section One | Feature documentary screening

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Welcome Back, Farewell

Dir. Marcos Yoshi | Brazil | 2023 | 105 min

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A documentary by Marcos Yoshi that explores the emotional process of rebuilding a family separated by the Dekassegui migration phenomenon. Set against the backdrop of successive migration flows between Japan and Brazil—home to the largest Japanese-descendant community in the world—Yoshi traces his own family’s journey, revealing that migration is not just a physical relocation, but an emotional rupture and reconstruction, turning personal experience into a shared immigrant narrative.

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​​Section Two | Short film (15min) + Coffee Brewing Workshop (45min)

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AMARELA

Dir. Andre Hayato Saito | Brazil | 2024 | 15 min

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AMARELA tells the story of Erika, a 14-year-old Japanese-Brazilian girl who finds herself caught between two cultural identities. Erika struggles with the pressures of family tradition, the alienation from peers, and the unspoken sexism within both cultures. The film explores the identity tensions faced by second-generation immigrants—those who live in the in-between, never fully belonging to either side. 

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Together, these two films  respond to “immigrant memory” in different forms: one reconstructs historical memory by retracing the migratory path of a family, reflecting on the origins and ruptures of identity; the other focuses on the present, showing how the legacy of migration continues to brew within the younger generation—not as an echo of the past, but as an actively forming self-awareness.

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The Coffee Brewing Workshop attempts to bring memory into the realm of the body and the senses, inviting participants to experience first-hand the coffee brewing equipment from different regions and to experience the cultural complexity of coffee as a global beverage. Coffee is not only a consumer product, but also a ritual – one shaped by colonial history, trade routes and cultural fusion.​​​