are Brazilian citizens who are nationals or naturals of Japanese ancestry or Japanese immigrants living in Brazil or Japanese people of Brazilian ancestry. The first group of Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil in 1908. Brazil is home to the largest Japanese population outside Japan. Since the 1980s, a return migration has emerged of Japanese Brazilians to Japan. More recently, a trend of interracial marriage has taken hold among Brazilians of Japanese descent, with the racial intermarriage rate approximated at 50% and increasing. History Background Between the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, coffee was the main export product of Brazil. At first, Brazilian farmers used African slave labour in the coffee plantations, but in 1850, the slave trade was abolished in Brazil. To solve the labour shortage, the Brazilian elite decided to attract European immigrants to work on the coffee plantations. This was also consistent with the government's push towards "whitening" the country. The hope was that through procreation the large African and Native American groups would be eliminated or reduced. The government and farmers offered to pay European immigrants' passage. The plan encouraged millions of Europeans, most of them Italians, to migrate to Brazil. However, once in Brazil, the immigrants received very low salaries and worked in poor conditions, including long working hours and frequent ill-treatment by their bosses. Because of this, in 1902, Italy enacted , prohibiting subsidized emigration to Brazil. The end of feudalism in Japan generated great poverty in the rural population, so many Japanese began to emigrate in search of better living conditions. By the 1930s, Japanese industrialisation had significantly boosted the population. However, prospects for Japanese people to migrate to other countries were limited. The US had banned non-white immigration from some parts of the world on the basis that they would not integrate into society; this Exclusion Clause, of the 1924 Immigration Act, specifically targeted the Japanese. At the same time in Australia, the White Australia Policy prevented the immigration of non-whites to Australia. First immigrants In 1907, the Brazilian and the Japanese governments signed a treaty permitting Japanese migration to Brazil. This was due in part to the decrease in the Italian immigration to Brazil and a new labour shortage on the coffee plantations. Also, Japanese immigration to the United States had been barred by the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907. The first Japanese immigrants (781 people – mostly farmers) came