Since the arrival of Jesuit Christians in 1549 through to the migration of ethnic Japanese migrants from Brazil since the 1990s, the Portuguese language has maintained a complex presence in Japan. During Japan’s “Christian Century” from 1549 to the mid 1600s, the Portuguese traded and spread Catholicism from their bases around Nagasaki. Thereafter, following the expulsion of the Portuguese, the language went into hiding, incorporated into the secret prayers, or oraçao, of the hidden Christians. Jumping forward to the 1990s, following changes to Japanese immigration policies, many Nikkei Japanese (descendants of migrants from Japan) from Brazil came to work in Japan, bringing a new stage in the history of the Portuguese language.

Today, tourist areas in the Nagasaki region exoticize Portuguese language and history to market products and locations; multilingual street signs include Portuguese alongside Japanese and English in cities such as Hamamatsu, which has been described as Japan’s most Brazilian city (a cidade mais brazileira do japão); community centres provide multilingual information in Portuguese and other languages where large numbers of Brazilian Japanese live; and even Netflix Japan offers subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese for some programs.

In our presentation, we map out the linguistic landscapes of Portuguese in Japan, illustrating the above stages, showing how Portuguese today is portrayed and commodified through signs in terms of an exotic Other from Japan’s past, and contrastingly in terms of supporting/recognising the new heritage language of ethnic Japanese Brazilians and their families. We bring together various lenses of linguistic landscapes (e.g., Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, & Barni, 2010; Blommaert, 2013; Cenoz & Gorter, 2008), outside of traditional educational contexts (Neidt & Seals, 2020), and as discursively constructed social semiotics (Kress, 2011; Scollon & Wong-Scollon, 2003; van Leeuwen, 2005). Accordingly, we highlight representations of (the)Portuguese in linguistic landscapes that are multilayered and diachronically-synchronically, discursively constructed.