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Several Wikipedia editions use this poster promoting Japanese immigration to Brazil in the early 20th century. However, different Wikipedias describe it as "a Japanese government propaganda poster" or the poster from a private Japanese company, and the license in Wikipedia Commons is that of a work of Brazilian origin, not a Japanese one.

Then, my question is: who produced this poster? The Japanese government? A Japanese organisation? A Brazilian organisation?

The file was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in 2006, and in that time it wasn't as strict as nowadays when registering the source, so I can't check it. Reverse search on the Internet just reveals a lot of not very authoritative pages that use the image, but that aren't about the image.

poster in Japanese promoting emigration to Brazil

Edit: With the rough Google translation (as suggested by Spavel) the text seems to hint to a Japanese organisation based in Kyoto. However I'm still interested in the context. At least I would like to understand that context enough to correct the captions in Wikipedia.

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    Note that Peru is also shown on that image. Further backround information since immigration to Peru started nine years before emigration to Brazil began. Japanese Peruvians - Wikipedia
    – Mark Johnson
    Commented Feb 29 at 17:49
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    Whacking the footer into Google Translate gives us "social forestry industry" for the big text and what I think is the address of a human resources agency.
    – SPavel ♦
    Commented Feb 29 at 17:51
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    @SPavel Thanks. i didn't realise that I could Google translate an image. I updated the question according to that.
    – Pere
    Commented Feb 29 at 18:03
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    Editing the question with the full translation may help. Try putting the organization name into Google Scholar... Maybe this is relevant for example? jstage.jst.go.jp/article/arfe/46/2/46_2_177/_article/-char/ja (The actual PDF file is in English if you download it.)
    – Brian Z
    Commented Feb 29 at 18:13
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    @BrianZ - The full Google translation is quite bad. It allows you to grasp something but I wouldn't include it in the question. As per SPavel's comment, you can see that I didn't get even the city right. I think a reasonably good translation might improve an answer but that Google translation wouldn't improve the question.
    – Pere
    Commented Feb 29 at 19:04

1 Answer 1

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The poster was issued by Kaigai Kogyo Co. (海外興業 - you can see these characters in the footer of the poster written right to left), or Kaiko (海興) for short.

enter image description here

Kaiko was a conglomerate formed by a merger of Japan's various colonial management companies, after the government decided that competition between six different companies was pointless and established their own out of four of them, later acquiring the other two. In addition to posters like these, they also issued whole magazines to inform the Japanese public about life abroad and encourage them to emigrate to Pacific nations where they could find work.

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    Then it seems that both the Wikipedias that say it is a government poster and the ones that say it is from a company are more or less right because the company was established or supported by the government.
    – Pere
    Commented Feb 29 at 20:02
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    That's right - it was a government-owned company.
    – SPavel ♦
    Commented Feb 29 at 20:03

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