Transamerica Japan

» see transanet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Japan changed its immigration law in 1990 to favor people of Japanese descent, and the Brazilian population of Japan went from about fourteen thousand in 1989 to a hundred and nineteen thousand two years later. These were the dekasegi, mostly working in car and electronics factories around Nagoya and the factory towns of Gunma. By 2007 there were nearly three hundred and seventeen thousand of them, with their own newspapers and their own television channel. For a few years they had a radio network as well.

Transamerica Japan started streaming on 18 July 2005, relaying the carriers of Rede Transamérica in Brazil under a license deal rather than as a subsidiary. The FM side followed on 1 September, on twenty watts out of Nagoya. It billed itself as the first Brazilian radio network to put itself on FM outside South America, a claim I can find nothing to contradict, and one that also tells you how small the thing was: twenty watts covers a few wards of one city.

It got bigger by borrowing. Programs went out on community stations across the middle of Japan, in Ōta and Okazaki, and nationally through the MobaHO! satellite service on channel 359. The flagship was a Brazilian chart countdown made in Japan and syndicated outward. From April 2006 it carried news in Portuguese, supplied by the Chunichi Shimbun under a contract signed that March, in a block running from nine at night to one in the morning.

~ the record ~

~ the hummer and the christmas party ~

Its first networked broadcast was on Christmas Day 2005, live from a party at a Nagoya club, fed out of a Hummer H2 the station used as a mobile unit and redistributed to Toyohashi and Hamamatsu. The promotional fleet also included a Ferrari, and the station sponsored a car in the Alfa Romeo Cup. For an operation whose entire licensed output was twenty watts, the vehicles were doing a lot of the work.

The legal shape was odd too. Transamerica never held a broadcasting license in Japan. The license belonged to a separate Nagoya company that had been running since 1998 as FM DANVO, and which from July 2006 took Transamerica on as a nickname under a business tie-up. The registered station name was still FM DANVO on the day it died. Everything the audience knew the station by was a brand resting on another company's paperwork.

~ what left before the listeners did ~

The reason given for the collapse is specific and it is not about listeners. The 2008 financial crisis hit Japanese manufacturing, and through it Brazilian-Japanese employment. The companies that had been buying the advertising stopped. The audience was still there when the money stopped: at the end of 2008 there were still 312,582 Brazilians in Japan, barely down from the peak.

The exodus came afterward. On 31 March 2009 the welfare ministry opened a program paying unemployed workers of Japanese descent 300,000 yen each, plus 200,000 per dependent, to fly home, on condition that they not come back on the same residence status for what turned out to be about three years. Some 21,675 people took it, and 20,053 of them were Brazilian. Eligibility was limited to people who had arrived before 31 March 2009, which is the day before this station stopped putting audio on its carrier. By the end of 2012 the Brazilian population of Japan was around 190,000, down roughly forty percent from the peak, though the government changed how it counted in 2012 and the two figures are not strictly comparable.

~ the shell that kept answering ~

It lost its national distribution first. MobaHO!, the satellite service carrying it to the rest of the country, shut down at 15:00 on 31 March 2009, beaten by digital television on handsets. The next day Transamerica suspended broadcasting and left its carrier running with nothing modulated onto it, which is a radio station still transmitting silence. The transmitter was switched off on the afternoon of 7 April. Shareholders voted to dissolve the company on 17 July. The abolition paperwork went in on the 22nd, and the license formally ended on 31 July. Bankruptcy proceedings opened in Nagoya in November.

The website outlived all of that by years, and it is where the story actually finishes. Within a month of the transmitter going off, the page title changed from a radio station for the Brazilian community in Japan to a radio station for the Brazilian community abroad, and the address moved from Nagoya to an office in Shibuya. By 2015 the listen-live button pointed at a Shoutcast server in Brazil carrying the São Paulo pop channel. Whatever was still answering had stopped making anything. The last real page was captured on 11 July 2015, and by February 2016 the site was four hundred and forty-five bytes of empty white.

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