Allow me to present to you this headcanon: Shiro as a Japanese Brazilian!
Brazil has the most number of Japanese immigrants in the world. This is a result from a large number of Japanese people fleeing from Japan to Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century. Bairro da Liberdade (Freedom) is a district in São Paulo (Brazilian State) that is home to the largest Japanese community outside of Japan. I’ve been there and it’s both huge and amazing! Most people living in there speak both Portuguese and Japanese and there are also some Japanese newsspapers that run in this area. It’s a very welcoming place for anime and manga fans and it’s not hard to find cosplayers meeting in the area. Karaoke contests are famous in the area. There are also a smaller number of Chinese and Korean folks living in Liberdade.
Introducing the Voltron team to chimarrão. Coran absolutely falls in love with it, Hunk loves the smell and taste, Pidge and Keith are very reluctant to even try it out and Lance dives right in in one go. Allura is suspicious and finds out it’s not really to her taste but still appreciates the thought.
Whenever the panic attacks get bad and he needs to calm down, Shiro likes to isolate himself from the others and listen to bossa nova and Maria Gadú. It really helps him out.
Shiro’s father is Japanese, his mother is Brazilian.
He’s fluent in Japanese, Portuguese and English, which helps him get that scholarship at the garrison. He learns some Russian as well, though he’s not as good at it, but it’s important for the space program.
Shiro and Lance thinking they can understand each other because Portuguese and Spanish are similar and then realizing how bad an idea that was.
Shiro came to fall in love with space while visiting the SONEAR (Southern Observatory for Near Earth Asteroids Research) observatory with his parents as a kid, located in the state of Minas Gerais. It was an experience unlike any other and that’s when he decided he wanted to be an astronaut for real.
I see a couple of people saying in the tags that they’d like to attempt writing Japanese Brazilian Shiro but are scared to mess up since they’re not familiar with the culture. If you’d like to know more, please ask me anything you’d like to know! I’d love to help anyone who might wanna try this! I’m gonna give an arm (hah) and a leg to have fics with Japanese Brazilian Shiro!
I’m Japanese Brazilian and I absolutely love this headcanon! If anyone needs help to write fic about Japanese Brazilian Shiro, feel free to ask me anything!
I’d just like to add something to this post: I think Shiro and Lance would totally be able to talk to each other in their native languages. Sure, they wouldn’t understand each other 100%, and some funny situations would come out of this every now and then, but I think they’d have conversations in Portuñol just fine most of the time. At least I manage to understand my Spanish speaking friends and I believe they understand me as well, so it’s possible.
I shared this headcanon with some friends and one of them (@nonsensicalgrl) had some more ideas. We were all confused as to how Shiro would have gotten the habit to drink chimarrão, which is typical of the south of Brazil (mainly Rio Grande do Sul), if he lived in São Paulo. So what she came up with was:
Shiro’s mother is from the south and has family there, but she moved to São Paulo where she met his father. Shiro always visits his grandparents in the south during summer and gets the habit of drinking chimarrão from his grandmother.
Shiro and his parents live in São Paulo for a couple of years, but at some point they move to Minas Gerais because his mother is a university professor and got a job there.
In Minas Gerais, Shiro visits SONEAR, starts practicing capoeira (he develops a crush on his teacher) and eats a lot of pão de queijo. This last part is totally irrelevant but c’mon, pão de queijo.
theclumsiestninja 
