Kasato Maru arrived at Santos / Canterbury monks observed lunar event - June 18

This day in 1908 marked the beginning of Japanese mass immigration to Brazil when the ship Kasato Maru arrived at the port of Santos in Brazil. / On this day in 1178 (on the Julian calendar), several monks from Canterbury reportedly saw the moon split into two and explode into flames.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, history enthusiasts, you get not one, but two events
in history today. With that said, on with the show. Hi,
I'm Eves and welcome to this Day in History class,
a show that uncovers a little bit more about history
every day. The day was June nineteen o eight. The

(00:27):
ship Casato arrived in the port of Santos, south of
Sal Paulo, Brazil. The ship was carrying the first Japanese
immigrants to come to Brazil. Seven eighty one Japanese passengers
took the trip from the port of Kobe to the
port of Santos to work at coffee plantations. As the
Japanese government had been promoting immigration as a way to

(00:50):
solve social and economic issues. There were Japanese individuals who
migrated to Brazil before the Casato madus arrival, but this
day is considered the official beginning of Japanese mass immigration
to Brazil. From the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century,
Japan operated under a seclusion policy enacted by the Tokugawa

(01:13):
Shogunate that kept it isolated from the rest of the world.
This period was called sakoku, which can be translated as
closed country. During this period, Japan restricted trade and relations
with other countries. Most foreign nationals were not allowed to
enter Japan, and Japanese people were not allowed to leave
the country without a license, with harsh punishments if they

(01:37):
did do so. Some of the goals of Sakoku were
to cut off Western colonial and religious influences, to control commerce,
and to strengthen Tokugawa authority in Japan and East Asia.
Japan was not completely shut off from the world during
these two hundred plus years. The Dutch, Chinese, and Koreans

(01:58):
had access to Japan in and Nagasaki was prominent as
one of Japan's international cities at the time. But the
isolation policy ended in the eighteen fifties when the country
was pressured to sign treaties restoring diplomatic relations with the
United States and other countries. Once Japan opened its doors,
Japanese people began migrating abroad. In eighteen sixty eight, more

(02:23):
than one hundred Japanese people went to Hawaii to work
on sugarcane plantations. Others went to work on farms in Guam.
But conditions and treatment of the Japanese were poor in
foreign countries, and the recruitment and transport of the Japanese
contract labors was not authorized by the Meiji government. The

(02:44):
government banned people from immigrating out of the country for
the next two decades, but in eighteen eighty five, after
Japan and Hawaii entered an agreement, Japanese people began leaving
in droves to Hawaii, Thursday Island, New Caledonia, as Australia, Fiji,
and other South Pacific locations under labor contracts. The plan

(03:05):
was for them to return to Japan with money after
a few years. Japanese people also began immigrating to Latin
America and North America. The later policies restricted Japanese immigration
to the US and Canada. As anti Japanese sentiment rose
in North America and Australia, the Japanese began looking to
South America. Impoverished farmers were facing rapid industrialization in Japan,

(03:32):
while Brazil needed more cheap labor on plantations. Japan encouraged
immigration to South America as a way to deal with poverty,
food shortages, and over population. On April nineteen o eight,
the Casato Madu left the port of Kobe carrying hundreds
of Japanese immigrants who hoped to earn a lot of

(03:54):
money and take it back to their families, and on
June eighteenth, the ship reached the Santo Support. Most of
the people on the ship were farmers from fourteen prefectures,
including Okinawa, Kagoshima, and Kumamoto. Besides the seven hundred and
eighty one migrants who were set to work at coffee plantations,
ten of the passengers on board were traveling without contracts.

(04:18):
The laborers were sent to work on several different farms.
Many owners provided the Japanese laborers with housing, clothing, and food,
but wages were low and living and working conditions were poor.
Some migrants left the farms to work other jobs, while
others started their own plantations. Japanese communities formed in the country.

(04:42):
From nineteen o eight until the beginning of the Pacific
War in nineteen fifty one, nearly one hundred and eighty
nine thousand Japanese people migrated to Brazil. The overwhelming majority
of those people are estimated not to have returned to Japan.
From nineteen fifty three nineteen seventy three, tens of thousands

(05:02):
more Japanese people moved to Brazil. Today, Brazil is home
to the largest population of Japanese people outside of Japan.
I'm Eve Jeff Ko and hopefully you know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. If you
have any burning questions or comments to tell us, you
can find us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at t

(05:25):
d I h C Podcast. I have a news show
called Unpopular. It's about people in the past who challenge
the status quo and we're sometimes persecuted for it. You
can listen anywhere. You listen to This Day in History Class.
Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you tomorrow. Hello everyone,

(05:51):
I'm Eves and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a podcast that really believes in the saying you learn
something new every day. The day was June eleven, just
after sunset several months from Canterbury reportedly saw the moon

(06:13):
split into two and explode into flames. This happened on
June on the Julian calendar, but took place on June
when going by the Gregorian calendar. English chronicler Gervais wrote
about the event. According to translations, Gervais set the following Now,
there was a bright new moon, and as usual in

(06:34):
that phase, its horns were tilted towards the east, and
suddenly the upper horns split into From the midpoint of
this division, a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out over
a considerable distance fire, hot coals, and sparks. Gervais went
on to say that the quote moon throps like a
wounded snake, and that the phenomenon happened a dozen or

(06:55):
more times. In six planetary geology, Jack D. Hert Tongus
paper about the eleven seventy observation was published in the
paper Heart Tongue said that the event was likely not
just the product of someone's imagination. He suggested that the
phenomenon could have occurred because of cloud layers or turbulence

(07:16):
in the Earth's atmosphere. He also suggested that a meteoroid
could have been along the line of sight to the Moon,
but his best guess was that the description was consistent
with an impact on the lunar surface. He acknowledged that
the probability of such a lunar impact happening during recorded
history was small. Based on the location and sides of

(07:38):
the event, he concluded that the supposed impact observed that
day formed the crater Giordano Bruno, which was named after
an Italian philosopher and Friar. The crater is about fourteen
miles or two kilometers in diameter. It's on the far
side of the Moon and is one of the youngest
large craters on the lunar surface. But the idea that

(07:59):
the eater was formed in medieval times is not universally accepted.
A study released in two thousand one suggested that the
event people witnessed in eleven seventy eight was not the
impact that created Giordana Bruno. It said that this kind
of impact would cause a week long meteor storm on Earth,
but there is no evidence that such a storm occurred.

(08:22):
Other researchers have suggested that the creater formed more than
a million years ago, and as far as what the
monks actually saw, modern theories posit that a meteor exploded
as it passed in front of the Moon. Only the
monks would have been able to see the event from
their specific location on Earth. There's still debate over the
true formation age of Giordana Brunow. I'm Eves Jeff Code

(08:45):
and hopefully you know a little more about history today
than you did yesterday, and if you have any comments
or suggestions, you can send them to us at this
day and I heard media dot com. If you prefer
to hit us s up on social media, leave us
a note at t D i h C Podcast on Facebook, Twitter,
or Instagram. Thanks so much for listening to the show

(09:06):
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