Michiko & Hatchin: A Love Letter to Brazil

After a few visits to Brazil this year alone, I've realized it's time I sharpen my Portuguese. I've been reading a short stories book in Portuguese to practice, and recently, one phrase stopped me: 'preciso achar um orelhão.' This literally translates to 'I need to find a... big ear?' Clearly I wasn't familiar with the word orelhão, so I looked it up. Little did I know that funny little word was waiting on hold for years.

Ask Google Translate, and orelhão comes out to 'public payphone.' That's far too reductive. In reality, the orelhão is an iconic, egg-shaped public telephone hood found on streets across Brazil. It's widely celebrated as a symbol of Brazilian culture and design, much like the red telephone booths found across London.

I stared at this picture for a while, because something about it bugged me. I had seen one of these before. But not in Brazil. I recognized it from… a Japanese anime series from 2008?

Why would a Japanese studio bother to get a Brazilian phone booth right? Down to the yellow hood, the blue pole, the logo on the side? The show is Michiko & Hatchin, and nobody watches it for the phone booths. But maybe they should. 

From what I've read online, most people who talk about Michiko & Hatchin talk about it as "an anime set in South America." When asked why, they list the touristy stuff: sunshine, beaches, heat, a gangster or two, more heat. But postcards don't make a place feel real. Plenty of shows have put a generic "Latin America" on screen, a little bit of every country and none in particular. Michiko & Hatchin is deeper than that. It's a love letter to Brazil.

It started as a vacation crush

Michiko & Hatchin was Sayo Yamamoto's first series as a director, made at the studio Manglobe (the Samurai Champloo people) and first aired in Japan in October 2008.¹ It follows Michiko Malandro, who breaks out of prison to rescue Hana "Hatchin" Morenos from an abusive foster home, and the two of them tear across a sun-baked country on a road trip that is equal parts chase, heist and custody battle.

So why Brazil? She got "suddenly interested in Latin America" through its films and went to Mexico in 2004 and Brazil in 2005, both for the first time. In her words: "When I was there I decided that was where I wanted to set the series!"² Asked in 2008 why Brazil beat out the rest of South America, she said, "compared to Mexico and Argentina, it's a pretty modern and cheery place. You could also see the influence of the architect, Oscar Niemeyer, in public buildings, so it all seems rather stylish."³

The show's first draft didn't work, and she knew why. Before the scriptwriter Takashi Ujita came on, she says, the story "wasn't as hard-boiled and felt less like Brazil. It reminded of South America but it was Japan."² The fix? A hard-boiled scriptwriter.

The scouting trip went north, not to São Paulo

In 2007 the producers, Yamamoto included, flew to Brazil to go location hunting.⁴ The show's official website from 2008 still survives in the Internet Archive, and it has a section called "Location Hunting at 'Brasil'": a map of the country with five photo galleries pinned to it. São Luís. Olinda. Recife. Barreiras. Rio de Janeiro.⁵

Look at that list again. No São Paulo, the biggest city in the southern hemisphere. Four of the five stops are in the Northeast and the interior: Maranhão, Pernambuco, the far west of Bahia. If you have only seen Brazil through Rio postcards, this is the part of the country you probably haven't seen. It fits the look of the show, which the official site sums up as a piercing blue sky, a sun beating straight down and red-brown earth.⁶

The official site's introduction says the main staff did the scouting in person and went into favelas, "places foreigners rarely get to set foot in."⁶ Yamamoto described that visit in an interview. She went on a tour run by favela residents, and what surprised her was how ordinary it was: working people, post offices, banks, computers at home. She also noticed that "the patrol car that had parked itself by the entrance to the area had perfectly formed bullet holes in its windscreen."³ She credits that single visit for episodes 3 and 4: "I don't think stories in those episodes would have been possible if I hadn't actually gone to a favela."³

You can tell it's love

When the interviewer asked whether the sights and sounds of the trip made it into the show, Yamamoto didn't talk about landmarks. She talked about trash cans:

"Details such as the bits of graffiti on the walls, or the design of the rubbish bins, I've done my absolute best to have that all reflected on the screen. In the end, if you don't layer all of these minute details on top of each other, I don't think you'd be able to build your world up."³

The show's project coordinator, Hiromi Konishi, made the same point to Brazilian press in 2009: "Até a moeda corrente é desenhada igual ao real." Even the currency is drawn just like the real (Brazil's official currency).⁴

Which brings me back to the orelhão. If you want one object that says "Brazil" to anyone who has lived there, it's this. It was designed by the architect Chu Ming Silveira for the Companhia Telefônica Brasileira in 1971, and she started from the egg.⁷ The public ones went up in January 1972, in Rio on the 20th and in São Paulo on the 25th. Rio's first batch came with a yellow ribbon tied to each phone and a note: "Hoje é dia de São Sebastião. Por favor, corte a fitinha e inaugure este telefone em nome de todos os cariocas." Today is Saint Sebastian's day. Please cut the ribbon and open this phone in the name of every carioca.⁷

Chu Ming Silveira's original drawing for the orelhão, 1971. Image: Chu Ming Silveira, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Japanese studio could have drawn a generic phone box. They drew that one, accurately enough that a gringo looking up a vocabulary word recognized it instantly. If you want the whole show in one prop, that's it.

The soundtrack was written from inside Rio

The music is even more Brazilian than the art. Shinichiro Watanabe, the Cowboy Bebop director, oversaw the music, and he found his composer at a concert. The Rio musician Kassin tells the story: after some shows in Japan, a group came up to talk about a project. "They turned out to be Watanabe and the show's writers." Their brief: "The music should be Brazilian and jazzy. We'd like you to do the soundtrack."⁸

Soundtrack artwork from the show's official website, 2008. © manglobe / Caliente latino.

Then nothing happened for eight months, until "a huge box came in the mail. And it was all the scripts and all the ideas... how long each piece of music should be, what should happen, the BPMs, everything." Kassin wrote sixty-four themes.⁸ The vocal tracks are sung in Portuguese by Brazilian artists, among them Thalma de Freitas, Nina Becker, BNegão, Wilson das Neves, Ritchie and Kassin himself.⁴ Also: the project coordinator quoted above, Hiromi Konishi, is Kassin's wife.⁴ The show had a Brazilian musician's family inside the production.

(The opening theme, "Paraíso," is the exception. That one is by the Japanese jazz band SOIL & "PIMP" SESSIONS.⁴ Still a banger.)

In defense of the skeptics: love letters get things wrong

To be fair, the show never actually says it's Brazil. Officially it's the "Latino World," a fictional country with Brazil as its motif.⁶ And one Brazilian fan blog caught the seams immediately. Writing while the show was still airing in 2008, it pointed out that the end cards say "A continuar" (Portugal's Portuguese) instead of the Brazilian "Continua...", and that a few names are Spanish rather than Portuguese.⁹ Then there's the bigger worry: a foreign show built around a prison break, gangs and a favela risks reducing a country of two hundred million people to its crime stats.

I think both points are fair, and I don't think they sink the show. Love letters get details wrong all the time. Nobody minds, as long as you can tell they meant it. The slips are the kind you only notice if you speak the language, which is exactly why the same blogger shrugged them off: "afinal eles não são brasileiros." After all, they're not Brazilian.⁹ And the rest of the post is a rave. And on the favela point, the director's own account cuts the other way. What she took from the favela tour was that it was a neighbourhood, with banks and post offices and people going to work, and she wrote that into the show. Michiko's surname points the same way. In Brazil, a malandro is a type: the street hustler who bends the rules and gets a samba written about him.¹⁰ Whether or not the staff meant it that literally (I can't prove intent), it's a far more affectionate read on a Brazilian outlaw than "gangster."

Praça Cantão in Santa Marta, a favela in Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, 2012. Photo: André Sampaio, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The love letter is becoming an archive

Then, halfway through writing this, I found out the orelhão is disappearing. With Brazil's fixed-line phone concessions over, the telecom regulator Anatel began the mass removal of payphones in January 2026, around 30,000 of them, with the phase-out running progressively through 2028.¹¹

One of São Paulo's last orelhões, February 2026. Photo: Danylamirinda, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I was in Brazil recently, and I never saw one in person. I can't tell you whether that's the removals, the places I went, or just that I wasn't looking yet. But it's a strange order of events: I met the orelhão in an anime, learned its name from a book, and missed the real thing on the actual trip.

Which means Michiko & Hatchin has become something its staff never planned: a keepsake. A team from Tokyo flew across the world in 2007 to photograph rubbish bins and phone booths so their cartoon would feel like the real place. Nearly twenty years later, some of what they drew is being hauled off the streets.

So go watch it. Watch it for Michiko and Hatchin, sure. But also watch the corners of the frame. The bins. The graffiti. The big ear on the street corner. It's accurate. It's affectionate. It's a love letter, and some of what it was written to is already gone.

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Notes

1. Air date and studio: "Michiko & Hatchin (TV)," Anime News Network encyclopedia, link; the Brazilian fan blog in note 9 records the Japanese premiere as 15 October 2008. ↩
2. Sayo Yamamoto, interview in Febri (May 2017), English translation by Wave Motion Cannon, link. ↩
3. Sayo Yamamoto, interview in Animation Note no. 11 (September 2008), English translation by Wave Motion Cannon, "Rawness of Women," link. ↩
4. "Animação japonesa usa o Brasil como cenário," G1/Globo.com, republished by Gazeta do Povo, 23 January 2009, link. Source for the 2007 trip, the currency quote, the singers, Konishi's marriage to Kassin and the opening theme. ↩
5. Official Michiko to Hatchin website, "Feat #01 Background: Location Hunting at 'Brasil'," archived 2008, Internet Archive. ↩
6. Official Michiko to Hatchin website, "Feat" introduction (Japanese), archived 15 September 2008, Internet Archive. My translation. ↩
7. "Site oficial do Orelhão e de sua inventora Chu Ming Silveira," orelhao.arq.br, including its timeline and its reproduction of O Estado de São Paulo, 21 January 1972. ↩
8. Kassin, interview, Dust & Grooves, link. A 2009 profile in URBe gives a slightly different count (61 themes); I use Kassin's own number. ↩
9. "Michiko to Hatchin: um anime ambientado no Brasil," Nerd Maldito, December 2008, link. A fan blog, so treat it as one viewer's reaction, not a survey. ↩
10. "Malandragem," Wikipedia, link. The staff have not, as far as I can find, explained the name. ↩
11. Wendel Martins, "Fim do Orelhão: Anatel inicia desinstalação dos últimos telefones públicos," Canaltech, 21 January 2026, link. ↩