This week’s travel dream: Deciphering busy São Paulo

São Paulo is “not an easy place to understand,” said Tom Downey in Afar. With its 11 million residents and its great forest of “seemingly interchangeable high-rises” spread over a flat, featureless terrain, Brazil’s cultural and financial capital is more an energy field than an Emerald City. Freeway-like avenues bisect its center, and the drone of low-flying helicopters can make a visitor feel like he’s “in the middle of a gang war in East L.A., circa 1984.” But the seeming impossibility of taking the city in whole makes São Paulo feel all the more like a code to be cracked. I decided to focus on its large Japanese community—on the theory that understanding one facet of this deeply cosmopolitan place might help me “cut to the heart of the culture.”

Just west of Parque Ibirapuera—São Paulo’s answer to New York’s Central Park—a striking green building stops me in my tracks. Shaped like a watermelon wedge with its round side down, the Hotel Unique is the creation of Japanese-Brazilian architect Ruy Ohtake, who proves happy to help demystify his native city. Raised in an Italian neighborhood, Ohtake has never thought of himself as anything but Brazilian, but his work feels so 21st-century Tokyo that it “jumps out at you like a spaceship that has just touched down.” The beauty of São Paulo, he tells me, “comes from the mix”: Every culture contributes something new, and the city embraces them all.

I meet Titi Freak, a graffiti artist, in Liberdade, the neighborhood where Japanese immigrants first settled after they began arriving in Brazil a century ago. He’s chosen a Brazilian-style bar—open to the street—as our starting point. As we begin walking this “time capsule” of a district, which feels more like old Japan than any place in Japan, Titi’s colorful murals tell a bigger story. “Almost every inch of surface” in some parts of São Paulo is covered by graffiti, and Titi is advancing that conversation in his own way. “His latest murals depict enormous, undulating Japanese-style fish.” They’re both worldly and “intensely local,” and they’re as ebullient as a samba. Doubles at Hotel Unique (hotelunique.com) start at $420.

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