Maria Rodrigues, a Tokyo-based costume maker, was one of several Brazilian performers who joined Tokyo's Asakusa Samba Carnival this year, with the event returning in all its glory after a scaled-back version was held last year in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On a street lined with 480,000 spectators, the Sept. 15 carnival marked 43 years since the event's launch, with Rodrigues, who wore a skirt adorned with "solar panels" as part of her team's "electricity" theme, dancing to high-octane Brazilian samba music as she passed the landmark Kaminarimon gate of Sensoji Temple in Asakusa.
The veteran dancer of the Asakusa-based samba team named G.R.E.S. Nakamise Barbaros contributed to its winning the fifth consecutive top honors in the contest by also making costumes featuring "lightning" for eight of its dancers.
"I believe the Asakusa Samba Carnival is the biggest contest-style Brazilian carnival outside of Brazil," the native of the South American country's northeastern Bahia region said in an interview before the carnival in the Japanese capital.
The annual late-summer Tokyo highlight, modeled after the world-famous Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, featured nearly 5,000 performers and 15 teams who vied for prizes in an area of Tokyo that has embraced the event wholeheartedly.
"I love the sound of Barbaros' 'bateria'," Rodrigues said, referring to a Brazilian Portuguese word for a samba music band.
The band consists of various instruments including big bass drums that drive the low and powerful beats and snare drums that produce higher, sharper staccato notes.
"Although the scale of a samba team band in Brazil is much bigger, the sound of the Barbaros' band is beautiful and its music level is high. The musicians are learning and practicing very hard," said Rodrigues, adding that many members of Barbaros have been to Rio de Janeiro to study samba where it originated.
Rodrigues, now 70, has participated in the Asakusa carnival since the early 1980s, although she does not remember the exact year when she first danced in the annual event.
The carnival was launched in 1981 by an association of stores in Asakusa to revitalize the downtown area, once the center of entertainment in Japan before waning in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s due in part to the spread of television use, the Asakusa Samba Carnival organizing committee has said.
At the time, comedian and actor Junzaburo Ban told Eiichi Uchiyama, then mayor of Taito Ward, that the excitement of Asakusa's traditional Sanja Matsuri festival and the Rio de Janeiro Carnival had much in common, suggesting that Asakusa should launch a Brazilian carnival to reinvigorate the town.
Rodrigues, who lived in Sao Paulo as a dancer and went on samba tours to European countries in the late 1970s, recalled the first Asakusa carnival she joined in the early '80s -- then an evening stage show, which she participated from a team founded by those who had previously joined the Sanja Matsuri.
"I asked my Brazilian friends to join the team's performance with me, though it was not a proper samba team yet," she said about the group, later named G.R.E.S. Nakamise Barbaros.
The acronym means samba school in Portuguese, while the latter part describes a group of fun-loving "barbarians" and the famous Nakamise shopping street near Sensoji Temple.
"Brazilian performers came to Japan then taught Japanese people how to play samba music and dance to it" in the 1980s, Rodrigues said.
It was around this time professional musicians from Brazil began touring Japan, which had seen an increase in the popularity of samba and other Brazilian music genres after the boom of Bossa nova reached Japan's shores by way of the United States in the 1960s.
Rodrigues, who came to Japan in 1980 as a professional samba dancer, said the quality of samba has greatly improved in the past four decades as Japanese performers have eagerly sought out instruction from Brazil, including by inviting Brazilian artists to Japan.
She has danced at events including ones for Japanese beverage maker UCC Ueshima Coffee Co. to promote its Brazilian coffee and helped dancers sew costumes, adjusting sizes and employing the skills she learned from her mother who was a tailor.
Rodrigues, who began dancing in childhood in the city of Feira de Santana in Bahia, spoke about the first time she made costumes as a young samba dancer in Japan.
"Our dance team of six Brazilians came up with an idea for a new show, and I made the six costumes," she said, adding that she later got orders to make samba outfits for other dancers, gradually turning it into her primary job.
In the big carnivals in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, as well as the one in Asakusa, samba teams choose their own themes and musical accompaniment, creating choreographies and costumes to match.
Solo dancers called "passistas" stand out due to their hip-swinging, quick-succession steps and their extravagant outfits -- entertaining audiences with vividly colored bikinis and leotards, decorated with rhinestones and colorful plumage on their backs.
During her career as the samba costume maker in Japan, Rodrigues has had many highs and lows, including experiencing the passing of her Japanese husband and the closing of a shop she had run near Asakusa since 2010 due to the pandemic.
The health crisis took a toll on her business as nearly all samba and other entertainment events, including the Asakusa carnival, were called off.
After closing the shop, she continued making clothes out of her apartment in Tokyo but suffered a stroke in 2022 and was hospitalized for three months.
Although she still suffers from the aftereffects of the stroke, getting back to a normal life of sewing and dancing has helped her cope with hardship.
"Dancing is a good rehabilitation. I will keep on dancing," she said, adding that she hopes to reopen a shop in Tokyo. "Samba is my life."
© KYODO
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