Hatanaka was not a homesteader. He was a scout working within a formal colonization apparatus: the Sociedade Colonizadora do Brasil, which laid out the subdivision on the Fazenda Bastos lands and sold lots to arriving families. He is named among the founders alongside Carlos Kato, Kunito Miyasaka, Elpídio Alves, Henrique Ronget Pelegrini, and Aníbal Viana — a list that says something about how these colonies actually worked, with Japanese organizers and Brazilian partners on the same founding document. The immigrants who took the lots were farmers, and they farmed what the market wanted: coffee first, then cotton. Neither cycle held. What finally suited the place was not a crop in the ordinary sense but an insect. São Paulo made Bastos a municipality by state law in 1944.

The soil around Bastos is sandy, and sandy soil grows mulberry well. Mulberry leaves feed Bombyx mori, the domesticated silkworm, and sericulture is labor the whole household can do — picking leaves, tending trays of larvae through their molts, watching for the moment the worms begin spinning. Bastos became the largest sericulture center in Brazil. In 1940 a modest local silk-thread mill was bought by Bratac, short for Burajiru Takushoku Kumiai, the Brazil Colonization Society, and the operation grew steadily after the war. The Bratac plant in Bastos is now the only industrial-scale silk-thread producer left in the Western world — Asian mills dwarf it in volume, but nothing else on this side of the globe still spins silk at factory scale. It is a genuinely odd thing to encounter in the middle of São Paulo's dry interior: an industrial-scale filature, four generations deep, in a town most Brazilians have never heard of.

The municipality was created in 1944, which is to say in the middle of the worst years for Japanese-Brazilian communities. Brazil declared war on the Axis powers in August 1942, and the response at home fell hard on immigrant populations: Japanese-language schools were closed, Japanese-language newspapers were shut down, and speaking the language in public became grounds for suspicion in towns built almost entirely by Japanese families. The people of Bastos were farmers and silk producers who had been in Brazil for over a decade, and for several years they lived as potential enemies in the country they had cleared land in. The colony held together. That it did is not a small fact about the place — it is most of the explanation for why the town still keeps its own museum of the experience.

In 1957 Bastos found the vocation it has never let go of: laying poultry. The shift from silkworms to hens is less abrupt than it sounds — both are intensive, technical, daily animal husbandry, and the same families who had learned to read the health of a tray of larvae learned to read a shed of birds. Today Bastos has the largest laying flock in Brazil, more than eleven million hens by recent counts, which works out to something like five hundred birds for every human resident. The municipality produces more eggs than any other in the country and accounts for roughly eleven percent of national output. The self-applied title is capital do ovo, the egg capital, and unlike most municipal boasts it is simply accurate.

Bastos hosts Brazil's Festa do Ovo, which is both an industry trade show and a town party — an exhibition of poultry equipment and technique running alongside concerts and entertainment for the whole region. The Museu Histórico Regional Saburo Yamanaka, founded in 1975, holds one of the most important archives of Japanese immigration in Brazil, including the photographic record of Bratac's mill from the first buildings onward. Between the two you get the entire shape of the place: a colony that arrived with instructions from a government on the other side of the world, survived being treated as suspect by the one it had joined, and ended up feeding a large fraction of the country's breakfasts.