敷田家

（英語だけ）

Origins of this Shikida family

According to the oral tradition of our family and some old mortuary documents, this family is approximately 180 years-old. The first family’s name was Shikijitani (敷地谷), followed by the name Atarashiiya (新屋) which I suppose is due to the Meiji’s restoration era and, finally, the name Shikida (敷田). I suspect my family is originally from the Japanese location of Shikijitani (same as the name), but I am not sure about this as my grandmother spent much of her life in Hiroshima before coming to Brazil.

Our family name came from my grandmother’s family because of an old Japanese tradition. As she is the only daughter (no brothers or sisters) of her family, her the family name was adopted by my grandfather. However, it’s known that as a landlord, her father had several feud servants and one of them received the last name Shikida by his own merits. I know this man or his son (or grandson?) is a Budhist monk and he takes care of the Shikida’s tombs.

My grandmother came to Brazil from Hiroshima before the 2nd World War and she had a lot of children. Nowadays, almost all members of the family live in Brazil. I believe that we only have one Shikida that has emigrated to Japan.

As most of this is due the oral tradition, I always search for new information in order to correct the data about the origins of our family. If you have any information and like to share it with me, I would appreciate it (my email is in the main page of this site).

Documents

Below you will find two copies of the mortuary documents above mentioned.

As you can see, the photo above explains the changing of the names using those beautiful old Kanjis that Japanese used (still used in Taiwan) before the end of the 2nd World War. The next picture complements the information given above.

In 2005, my cousin, Mona Shikida (敷田モナ) interviewed my grandmother for her final research on Art in the Sao Paulo University (USP, サオパウロ　大学). The interview is a compilation of information about the Shikida family from Japan to Brazil. Mona did a limited number of copies of this in DVD for members of the family. In my humble opinion, it is a high quality work with subtitles done by an official translator. The cute girl in the photo is, of course, my grandmother in her younger years. If you want to know more about this work, contact me and I will transmit the information to Mona.

UPDATE [2015/07/28]: My cousin Anderson Maeda just started to scan some old photo albums and we found some interesting pictures of our grandparents in Japan and also in São Paulo.

We can see below some scanned photos from graduation album. It seems to me the school was destroyed when the A-bomb was dropped in Hiroshima.

Below, some more photos of my grandmother and friends (unknown names). Also, photos of her and her classmates.

In São Paulo, my grandparents worked with agriculture and also teached Japanese for the children. Below, the photo of the school of Álvares Machado, a small town located in the state of São Paulo. Also, some students.

Finally, my grandparents first house in Brazil. As you can see, Japanese immigrants in Brazil had not an easy life.

Finally, some years ago I created an entry in Nikkeypedia for my grandmother. It’s here.

UPDATE (2017/Jan/08): That’s the old “Immigration Card” from Brazilian government. Here you can see the exact date my grandmother came to Brazil: 1940/Aug/21, one and a half year before Pearl Harbor’s attack.