Qualla: Pompeia, São Paulo

Pompeia, São Paulo: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alzinous, CC BY-SA 4.0. Shunji Nishimura stepped off the boat from Japan in 1932 carrying not much more than a set of skills and a hunch. Sixteen years later, in a small paulista town called Pompeia, he founded a company that built agricultural sprayers. Three generations on, Jacto equipment sells in eighty countries, and the curved eaves on the bus shelters in downtown Pompeia - a Japanese architectural tic that drifted west from Kyoto and landed here by way of a coffee-era migration - tell you who transformed this place. The town's name came from a senator's wife, Aretuza Pompeia. Almost everything else came from immigrants who arrived with nothing and stayed.

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Image: Alzinous | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pompeia, São Paulo: Kaingang, Coffee, Clearance

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Monica Kaneko from Sao Paulo, Brasil, CC BY-SA 2.0. Before any of the newer stories, there were the Kaingang, the indigenous nation the Portuguese colonizers called Coroados - the crowned ones - for the distinctive haircuts of their warriors. Their land stretched across what is now western Sao Paulo and parts of Parana, their live...

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Image: Monica Kaneko from Sao Paulo, Brasil | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pompeia, São Paulo: The Line from Bauru to Corumba

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Oliveira, CC BY-SA 4.0. The railroad changed the geography. The Noroeste do Brasil line was built to connect Bauru, deep in Sao Paulo state, with the Bolivian border at Corumba in Mato Grosso do Sul - a west-bound steel corridor cut through country that had been, until recently, mostly forest. The clear...

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Image: Daniel Oliveira | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pompeia, São Paulo: The Nishimura Decades

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Oliveira, CC BY-SA 4.0. Shunji Nishimura arrived from Japan at twenty-one years old in 1932 - one of the quarter-million Japanese immigrants who came to Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century, most of them to work coffee plantations in Sao Paulo state. He and his family began building agricul...

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Image: Daniel Oliveira | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pompeia, São Paulo: Curved Eaves

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Oliveira, CC BY-SA 4.0. Drive through the center of Pompeia and you notice the bus shelters. Their roofs are not the squared steel canopies you find across most of the interior - they are curved, the corners swept upward in a gesture borrowed from Japanese temple architecture. The design speaks to a com...

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Image: Daniel Oliveira | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pompeia, São Paulo: The Roman Catholic Diocese of Marilia

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Monica Kaneko from Sao Paulo, Brasil, CC BY-SA 2.0. The church, as in most paulista towns, is the other anchor. Pompeia belongs to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Marilia, and Catholicism remains the historical baseline. Evangelical Protestantism, led by the Assemblies of God - the largest evangelical denomination in Brazil - has gr...

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Image: Monica Kaneko from Sao Paulo, Brasil | CC BY-SA 2.0