The Story of the Japanese Peruvians

It was the late 19th century, and a rumor was spreading in the rural hinterlands of Japan. Poor farmers, only a few decades removed from their former position as peasants under the rule of now-abolished samurai fiefdoms, enduring another difficult winter, spoke to each other of a far-off land “full of gold,” where, some said, snow never fell. As Japan’s urban centers modernized, new rail tracks linking ports teeming with foreign traders in strange garb, the countryside was stagnating, and poverty reigned. But, it was said, a farmer could earn twice his monthly wages in this rumored land: a country known as “Peru.” [1]

In 1898, the Sakura-maru left its berth at the port of Yokohama, bound for the Andean coast in far off South America. On board were 790 Japanese men between the ages of 20 and 45. None would have ever before left the country. Only decades earlier, the act of leaving Japan had carried the death sentence. They intended to work on coastal plantations for a few years, save up some money, and return home. Like many immigrants before and after, the idea of quickly accruing money and departing would lead to something more permanent.

These 790 men represented the first large-scale immigrant group from Japan to Latin America. More than that, they were the first in a series of waves of Japanese immigration that would make Peru home to the 2nd largest Japanese population in South America. (And all a decade before immigration to Brazil began – now home to two million people of Japanese descent.) Their descendants would go on to play an outsized role in Peru’s economy, culture, and indeed, politics. And, eventually, a Japanese Peruvian would take the reigns as one of Peru’s most powerful, and infamous, 20th-century leaders.

This is the story of the Japanese Peruvians.

From the Land of the Rising Sun to the Kingdom of the Sun

The 790 immigrants disembarking from the Sakura-maru were not the very first from Japan to set foot in territory governed by Peru. Hundreds of years earlier, before the Tokugawa Shogunate shut Japan off from the world, Japanese merchants were involved in the Spanish Empire’s Pacific-spanning Manila Trade. Japanese lacquerware, porcelain, fans, and more were brought via galleons to Spanish holdings in the New World; vast quantities of silver were extracted and brought to Asia in the other direction. Spanish records show small communities of traders from “Xapón” present in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, the vast tracks of land south of Mexico the Spanish had wrested from the Incan Empire and other indigenous groups. [2]

In 1600, samurai warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the last of his rivals for control of Japan. Shortly thereafter, the Tokugawa Shogunate began a series of reforms aimed at limiting foreign economic, political, and cultural influence over the newly unified country. Japan isolated itself, limiting interactions with the world to a few portals for outside trade: Nagasaki, Tsushima, Ryukyu, and the lands of the indigenous Ainu. Diplomatic relations with the Spanish Empire ended in 1624, and with it, any connection with the Viceroyalty of Peru.

The centuries of isolation ended with US commodore Mathew Perry’s incursion into Edo Bay in 1853. The Tokugawa Shogunate, outmatched by modern American armaments, resigned itself to grudgingly opening Japan to global trade. The samurai government fell to the modernizing forces of the Meiji Restoration in 1867. Japan, long out of touch with the outside world, now felt the need to hurriedly learn all it could about a now very global international order.

Perusing the Global Order

Japan’s rush to modernization was, by most metrics, a startling success. In a matter of decades, it transformed from archipelagic recluse to regional powerhouse, with no signs of slowing down. But massive societal change left many behind. Industrialization led to the dwindling of the rural population, as farmers left their homesteads to find work in the bustling cities. Those who remained often found themselves unable to pay onerous land taxes implemented to support the new national government. Soon, as many as a million of Japan’s rural households were jobless. [1]

For the statesmen of early Meiji era Japan, emigration offered a dual appeal. On the one hand, immigration to foreign lands could help lessen the burden on the state of the “troublesome” rural poor. On the other, immigrants could serve to help establish ties between Japan and foreign lands, helping Japan catch up on its diplomatic backlog. Even better, Japanese immigrants abroad would bring back accumulated foreign capital to help strengthen the Japanese economy.

The Meiji government legalized emigration in 1885, over three decades after it first opened treaty ports to foreign trade. In that same year, 945 Japanese immigrants, bound for the sugar plantations of the Kingdon of Hawaii, left their homeland behind. By the end of WWII, nearly 750,000 Japanese nationals would make their way to foreign shores. [3] (Many millions more settled in Japan’s vast colonial empire.) Whether Hawaii, the United States’ West Coast, Brazil, or Peru, their welcome would be less than warm.

No Title

Why are there so many Brazilian-Japanese in Japan? The answer goes back to the Meiji era, and the government’s need to get rid of its own citizens. Part 1 of a 2-part series on the Nikkei Brazilians.

The First Japanese Peruvians

The birth of Japanese immigration to Peru came through an unlikely meeting.

Augusto B. Leguía, born in the northern Peruvian city of Lambayeque, was the manager of the British Sugar Company in Peru. Though his parents were middle class, he married into one of Peru’s wealthiest patrician families, and would rise all the way to president of Peru for the first time in 1908. By the 1920s, he would emerge as one of the country’s most impactful dictators. Part of his schooling was spent abroad in Boston, and it was there that Leguía met Tanaka Teikichi, studying in the United States in the hopes of improving his home country. [2]

Leguía served in the disastrous War of the Pacific (1879–1881), wherein Peru was dealt a terrible defeat by Chile. The Peruvian capital of Lima was invaded, and in suing for peace, the country lost large tracks of its southern territory. (Peru fared better than its erstwhile ally Bolivia, which lost its only access to the sea, rendering the country landlocked.) But the post-war years weren’t all bad; distant Europe was experiencing an economic boom, and needed raw materials Peru could help provide. A coastal agricultural revolution was soon underway, with exports of cotton, sugarcane, and guano (accumulated bat droppings with precious nitrate) exploding. [1]

But Leguía was aware of a problem amidst the boom; a lack of labor. Slavery had been abolished in 1854. Chinese “coolies” had arrived in their tens of thousands, but anti-Chinese sentiment and terrible working conditions led to Qing China banning the “coolie trade” by 1874. White laborers from Europe, the most desirable immigrants for the Caucasian elites of Peru, were put off by the low standards of living and frequent bouts of internal conflict. The country’s indigenous minority, speakers of Quechuan, Aymara, and other Amerindian tongues, could be forced into work, but would often flee poor plantation working conditions.

Immigration Begins

Leguía thought he might have a solution to all these labor woes. He remembered his Japanese friend from back in the United States; Tanaka was now an agent of the Morioka Emigration Company. It was a match made in labor-sourcing heaven. Leguía reached out to Tanaka, and the two began to promote Peru as an ideal destination for Japanese farmers seeking to better themselves. Both had the ears of their respective governments, and soon Peru legalized immigration from Japan.

And so it happened that Peru became the land “full of gold,” said to have weather suited perfectly to the comfort of the Japanese. Reportedly, the soil was perfect for farming; diseases were nonexistent. It was a paradise on earth, where a man could make his fortune.

With such claims, little wonder that hundreds boarded the Sakura-maru in 1898. The situation on the ground, however, was anything but ideal. Like their cultural cousins soon to be bound for Brazil, they’d find the sugar plantations more a nightmare than a paradise. And yet, with the floodgates open, hundreds of farmers – almost all men – immigrated to Peru annually for the next decade. By 1909, the Japanese-Peruvian immigrant population numbered 6,295. (Only 250 of these were women.) [3] The Japanese-Peruvian community had been born.

A Rough Start

In the beginning, it was horribly rough going. Conditions on the sugar plantations were so terrible that more than a fifth of those original 790 immigrants died of disease within four years. Takenaka Ayumi, in her writings on the place of people of Japanese descent in Peru, notes how “on one plantation, Casa Blanca, only 30 out of 226 Japanese immigrants were fit to work after three months.” Sickness and death abounded, and even a decade later, the death rate stood at 7.6%. Despite all this, emigration companies like Morioka continued to advertise Peru as an ideal place to make one’s fortune. [1] By 1919, 18,000 Japanese had emigrated to Peru. [3]

Experiences of disappointment, disease, and maltreatment in Peru were similar to those soon faced by Japanese immigrants to Brazil. In both cases, some immigrants returned to Japan empty-handed, rather than continuing a difficult life in a foreign land. But for those who did remain, and who avoided death by rampant illness, Peru soon became a home, rather than just a destination for work. In the first ten years, only 4% of immigrants returned across the Pacific. An additional 6% immigrated elsewhere in the Americas.

Life in the coastal plantations was hard. Japanese immigrants worked alongside a wide range of laborers; they were never the majority in any plantation. Their fellow sugar harvesters were Indigenous Andeans forced down from the mountains, Cholos (Indigenous Peruvians who had left their communities behind for the coast), Afro-Peruvians, mixed-race Indigenous workers, and even some remaining Chinese immigrants. Caucasian taskmasters would try to play each group offer each other to prevent any sort of class consciousness from emerging.

Strikes and Repercussions

On the other hand, emigration offices often sent emigres from certain locations in Japan to work on the same plantation. This helped foster a sense of Japanese community. For example, in 1899, 176 Japanese immigrants from Niigata Prefecture all went to the Santa Barabara plantation, run by the British Sugar Company. Despite the harsh conditions and unfair treatment – “shorting of wages, physical punishment and cruelty, and unsanitary working conditions including the lack of toilets and medical doctors” (Moore, 2009), workers could find comradery amongst peers from their same regions, who spoke their same dialects. This was additionally true for immigrants from Okinawa, at the time only recently fully integrated into the Japanese Empire. (Many descendants of Okinawan immigrants identify as strongly with their Okinawan roots as they do with any concept of Japanese heritage.)

If the plantation taskmasters expected cowed peasants willing to endure mistreatment, they were in for a surprise. Japanese immigrants often held strikes, trying to slow down the gears of the plantation system to get better treatment. In April of 1899, Japanese immigrants from Yamagata to San Nicholas went on strike only two months after arrival. The plantation had reneged on promises of payment in cash; Japanese workers were instead given company store coupons. The plantation officials’ response was to arm themselves and call in local soldiers to get the Japanese immigrants back to work.

Peru’s Fear of “Yellow Peril”

The militant reaction towards the strike (and others like it) came in part from “yellow peril” rumors that held that Japanese farmers were, in fact, Japanese Imperial soldiers sent to Peru as a sort of secret colonial expansionist force. Despite their poverty, the Japanese immigrants had better contracts than Peruvian workers and always seemed ready to stand up for the rights these contracts offered. This led to plantation officers separating the lodging of Japanese workers from Peruvians, so as to avoid their “militancy” from catching. (This was against a background of growing labor unrest in Peru in the early 20th century.) [3]

Even if a Japanese laborer escaped the plantations, their agrarian options were limited. Unlike in Brazil, where industrious Japanese immigrants could eventually create successful farming enterprises, options for a better life via agriculture were restricted. The pre-independence Spanish land system essentially barred Japanese immigrants from owning their own farms. (And White colonists owned all the best tracts, anyway.) The Peruvian government made things more difficult in 1910, when a decree made clear that only “Peruvians or Europeans” could be colonists in the fertile valleys of the Sierra Mountains. [1] Japanese immigrants intent on thriving in their new home would have to look beyond the familiar agricultural lifestyle.

Into the Towns

By the 1920s, many Japanese immigrants had been living in Peru for two decades. They’d become accustomed to the local culture and way of work; some had even established small stores and barber shops on the plantations, breaking away from total fiscal reliance on plantation officers.

In the capital of Lima, where President Leguia now ruled as a populist dictator, Japanese who’d escaped the plantation life embraced hairdressing as their means of moving up in the world. “Just as Japanese immigrants in San Francisco and Buenos Aires were concentrated in the laundry business, so in Lima they started out as barbers.” (Takenaka, 2004.) Most other occupations were off-limits, so they had to do what they could to accumulate capital. It’s an experience that many first generation immigrants the world over can relate to. By 1924, 73.4% of barber shops in Lima were owned by Japanese immigrants.

This industriousness bore fruit. By 1930, 45% of Japanese immigrants owned some sort of business. Groceries, cafes, mechanical repair shops, bakeries; Japanese immigrants were soon an outsized presence in the public markets of Lima. Their community became known as the Japanese Colonia (Colony). Since Peruvian banks often refused to service Japanese immigrants, small credit unions called tanomoshi (頼母子) sprung up to fill in the gap. ” These trust-based groups helped foster solidarity and a sense of ethnic identity and continued to be important a half-century later, when Japanese-Peruvians, for the most part, still engaged in small businesses.” (Takenaka, 2004.)

An Appealing Destination

This success beyond the plantations proved attractive to impoverished Japanese back in the Empire, then weathering the Depression. Higashide Seiichi, then a student in Tokyo, was so inspired by tales of Japanese business success in Lima that he decided to emigrate.

“In that sense,” he would later write, “at that time the Peruvian Japanese community was even more advanced than Japanese immigrants in North America, who were still based mainly in agricultural activities… I had no intention of going overseas to become involved in farm work. Peru seemed to be the ideal destination.” [6]

Higashide tells the story of his time in Peru in his book, Adios to Tears. He led a dynamic and exciting life, adapting quickly to the more amiable, less hierarchical Japanese community in his new home. An architect by trade, he found himself laboring for food and board as a “working guest” of an established Japanese family. Higashide dodged the Imperial Japanese embassy’s attempts to deport him back to Japan for military service, and established a family. Things were going well – until everything came crashing down.

Here Comes the Backlash

Success begat distrust and animosity. In Lima, a specific (if factually incorrect) prejorative for Japanese merchants emerged. “Chinos de la esquina” – “Street corner Chinese.” Peruvian workers’ associations urged direct action against the Japanese community. Lima’s central labor union formed an Anti-Asian Association and lobbied the Peruvian president to ban Japanese immigration. In 1923, contract immigration was illegalized, reducing the Japanese arrivals to a trickle; only those invited by family members already in Peru were allowed in.

Japanese-Peruvians pushed back against this othering, trying to prove themselves to be proper citizens. In 1921, when President Leguia hosted a massive centennial celebration for Peru, the Central Japanese Society (Sociedad Central Japonesa) decided to show their patriotism by funding the creation of a massive statue of Manco Cápac, the semi-legendary founder of the Inca Empire. With Manco Cápac often considered the child of the sun god Inti, and the Japanese emperor similarly considered a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, Manco Cápac seemed the perfect figure to represent the bonds between Japan and Peru. President Leguia attended the unveiling of the massive statue alongside the Japanese ambassador and various notables from the Japanese-Peruvian community; it may have been a happy moment for Leguia, who had helped spur the original Japanese migration to Peru.

But in 1930, President Leguia’s 11-year reign came to an end. He’d spearheaded Peru’s modernization – something done via major public works projects funded by loans from foreign nations like the USA. In his rush to bring Peru into the 20th century, he’d given vast financial influence to a series of foreign debtors. Animosity grew, and, toppled by a coup de etat, Leguia spent his last months in the harsh environs of the dreaded Panopticon prison. Meanwhile, Peru was drawn into the global depression of the ’30s, and the public’s anger was directed towards the meddling outsiders they saw as ruining the country – including their fellow citizens who happened to be Japanese.

A Depressing State of Affairs

Further laws stymied Japanese economic success in the cities. Legislation mandated that 80% of company employees be Peruvian. Imports were heavily regulated, and business titles could not be transferred. The government would sometimes step in and unilaterally expropriate Japanese-owned businesses to non-Japanese Peruvians. Meanwhile, local perceptions of Japanese in Peru shifted as they became more successful. As manual laborers in the plantations, Japanese – having only recently emerged from feudal serfdom – were considered slavish and unthinking. Now that they were more successful, that stereotype shifted to “cunning” and “stingy.” Either way, the perception was that they were outcompeting native-born Peruvians without giving anything back to society.

A local 1943 article on the topic put it bluntly:

“Unlike Anglo-Saxon immigrants, not a single Japanese name has endeared itself to Peruvian national feeling and no Japanese is known but for his mercantile activities.” [3]

As far as the Peruvian public was concerned, their Japanese neighbors were now a menace.

The Trope of Dual Loyalty

Further legislative attacks followed.

In the 1930s, Japanese immigrants would sometimes send their children – who were Peruvian citizens by birth – to Japan for education or even military training. Back in the Japanese Empire, militarization and expansion was in full swing. Many Peruvians saw Japanese immigrants as inherently loyal only to their ethnic homeland. (A common theme in the Americas of the 1930s and 40s, whether in the USA, Brazil, or Peru.) In 1936, the government banned re-entry to Peru for immigrants and proceeded to add strict quotas on “racial groups.” Japanese and Chinese immigration decreased even further. In 1940, on the eve of World War II, Peru enacted a law that negated the citizenship of any Japanese child who left Peru for any extended period in their parent’s homelands.

La Prensa, a major Peruvian newspaper, wrote the following in a 1942 article:

“In the Japanese schools in Lima, the child is taught that his primary allegiance is to Japan. These boys speak Japanese better than Spanish and feel themselves bound in no way to the country of their birth. The Japanese flag waves in school below the Emperor’s portrait. The Japanese schools are always rounded by high walls that prevent the passer-by from seeing within.”

In reality, much of this seeming inward-looking nature came from the cycle of prejudice shown by the larger population. Peru enacted law after law making it harder for Japanese to make a living, whether in the plantations or the cities. National schools lacked enough space for many Japanese students, resulting in immigrant communities running their own. (Or sending their children to Japan for their education.) A vicious circle commenced. [3]

Pillaged, Deported, and Interned

Then came World War II, and the starkest case of anti-Japanese action in the Americas.

First, in 1940, the Japanese-Peruvian community of Lima weathered the worst ethnically targeted riot in the country’s history, as hundreds of Japanese-owned shops were ransacked, dozens injured, and some Japanese-Peruvians were even killed. This community calls this event the Saqueo – “The Pillage.” A rumor that the Japanese community was arming itself and preparing to attack the government was the basis for the riot; the Peruvian authorities did little to refute the rumor. The riot was so traumatic that some ethnic Japanese Limeños (denizens of Lima) packed up their shattered possessions and fled to Japan. Others would place Chinese flags on their storefronts, hoping to pass for anything other than Japanese.

As America entered the war on the side of the Allies following the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it began to pressure South American nations to do the same. FBI attaches in local US embassies kept a close watch on Axis immigrant communities. The US then went a step further – they urged Peru to begin deporting Japanese nationals to the United States for internment. 

Forced from Their Homes

With anti-Japanese sentiment rampant in Peru, its government needed little convincing. And so Peru began its engagement in the USA’s now infamous internment of Japanese citizens. Over 1000 Japanese men were ripped from their homes and communities, shipped 2000 miles northward to Crystal City Internment Camp, south of San Antonio, Texas. With wives and families following behind, the number ballooned past 2000 people – nearly 10% of the Japanese population of Peru. Most would never see their homes again.

Higashide Seiichi was among these unlucky victims of geopolitics and distant war. After over a decade making a new life in Peru, even emerging as a community leader, he was forced from his home and stripped of his possessions. In 1944, Peruvian police forced Higashide onto a ship and deported him first to Panama, and finally to internment in Texas. His wife, Angelica Higashide, herself a second-generation Nikkei, shuttered their business and took their five children to Texas to join her husband.

Meanwhile, other Japanese-Peruvians escaped deportation by paying out ruinous bribes or fleeing into the deep countryside. All felt the pang and anxiety of having lost family and friends to the deportations. [5]

Strangers in a Strange Land

For some years, the prisoners in Texas lived a life surrounded by barbed wire, two thousand miles from their former homes in Peru. The American government hoped to use the interned Japanese immigrants as a bargaining chip with Japan; the idea was to exchange them for US military POWs imprisoned in often unspeakable conditions in East Asia. The American guards at Crystal City made sure the interned children received Japanese-language educations. They assumed the pupils would need the language when the US inevitably sent them to Japan.

In the end, the United States exchanged 800 Japanese of Latin American origin for US prisoners during the war. When the Japanese surrender came in August of 1945, most of the interred were still behind those barbed wire fences. Peru and the other Latin American countries refused to re-admit deported Japanese – citizens or not. Unable to return home to Latin America, 1000 further individuals were deported to Japan. For many younger Nikkei, this was a country they’d previously had no experience of.

Birth of the US Japanese Peruvian Diaspora

Some families fought against this second deportation, securing permission to remain in the United States. (Higashide Seiichi was among them. His family would live in Chicago, and eventually settle in Hawaii.) Many of these families still live in the US – a third country, which their ancestors never intended to live in. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan officially apologized for the Japanese internment – which overall affected more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent. The US government paid out reparations of $20,000 to interned citizens. But Japanese Peruvians, who had been non-citizens during the war, were not eligible. The fight for appropriate reparations is ongoing.

Blanca Katsura, a Japanese Peruvian, was 12 in 1943 when her father was deported from northern Peru to the US. She followed her father and spent her teenage years at Crystal City Internment Camp. Released in 1947, her family took refuge in the basement of a Methodist church in California. They found success in the USA, but it had never been what her family intended. Blanca, now in her late 80s, spoke to the BBC on the subject:

“My parents wanted to go back to Peru but couldn’t. They missed the life they had there… The Peruvian government sold us out to the US government and that is not a very nice feeling. How would you feel about it?”

War is Over

At war’s end, more than 20,000 Japanese Peruvians remained in Peru, with return to Japan no longer an option. Their homeland was in a state of devastation, reeling from the mass Allied firebombing campaign. Millions of refugees from Japan’s shattered empire were swarming into a country that already had millions more made homeless by the war. Okinawa, from whence so many Japanese Peruvians originated, was even more devastated, the victim of the only ground battle on the Japanese home islands. (Or at least those remaining to Japan after the war.)

The lesson of the war years was the need to keep a low profile. Amongst the degradations of deportations and expropriations, the Saqueo of 1940 seems to have left the biggest impact. In 1990, fifty years onwards, Japanese Peruvian schoolchildren tasked with writing essays based on conversations with their grandparents almost unanimously wrote stories about that riot. Their grandparents had been forced into hiding as their families’ hard-won livelihoods were violently destroyed. The Saqueo became an intergenerational source of trauma. 

Worries about national belonging would continue to haunt members of the Japanese-Peruvian community for decades, even as one Japanese Peruvian emerged as one of the most important on the national stage – and into international infamy.

Emerging from the Shadow of Injustice

1945 came and went, and the Japanese Empire ceased to exist. The Japanese Peruvians still remaining in the country emerged from the war years shaken, determined to chart a new course for their community. Starting from scratch after the appropriation of their property during the war, the Lima colony pooled what limited resources remained to them. Directing these to the education of Japanese-Peruvian youth, they built schools and sports complexes.

While the Japanese Peruvian community would continue to grow, it would not experience a huge post-war boom like that in nearby Brazil. In that country, the stark poverty in early post-war Japan resulted in a huge wave of incoming immigration. Peru, however, still had its anti-Japanese immigration laws on the books. [2] So, even today, the vast majority of the Peruvian Nikkei population descend from early pre-war immigrants. Brazil has a massive population of Japanese descent estimated at nearly 2 million people; Peru, at higher estimates, has only 200,000. (This estimate is still much higher than the declarative Japanese Peruvian population, which is closer to 23,000 people.)

Still, the post-war would prove to be very different than what came before. WWII made racism and the targeting of domestic minorities unpalatable to the international community. The UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Peru was amongst the 48 countries that voted in favor of the document, enshrining that all humans are “born free and equal in dignity and rights” irregardless of “nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, language, or any other status.”

For Peruvian Nisei (the first Japanese generation born in Peru), this atmosphere was conducive to their entry into wider domestic society. The country was also striving for modernization and experimenting with more direct democracy – although Peru still had many more coups d’état in its future.

The New Model

Scholar Benjamin J. DuMontier has described Peru’s perception of Japanese Peruvians as evolving from one of “menace” to “model citizen.” (A trajectory that would be familiar to many people of Asian descent in the United States.) In the 1950s and ’60s, this meant downplaying Japanese culture and focusing on the community’s newfound “Peruvianess.” By producing impressive businesspeople, scholars, and athletes, the Japanese Peruvians could make the country proud during this new era of internationally sanctioned diversity.

As the decades went by, the Japanese Peruvians experienced a generational pathway similar to that of many immigrant communities worldwide. The Issei – first-generation arrivals – maintained a strong sense of being Japanese in Peru, rather than fully Peruvian. The majority married within their community. (In the early pre-war years, often via the process of male workers selecting “picture brides” who immigrated to Peru to meet husbands they’d never before encountered.) Many never learned fluent Spanish. The second generation, the first to be born in Peru, was a different story. Most learned the local lingua franca and called themselves Japanese Peruvians (peruano-japonés) or Nisei. They were of Peru, but, as famed Nisei poet José Watanabe put it, were “the creation of a culture that [we] never managed to understand fully.” [5]

Nisei also tended to embrace the relaxed “Hasta mañana” culture they encountered in Peruvians around them. To the straight-laced issei, this could be a source of frustration. [6]

Teófilo Toda at the Crossroads

In 1954, a national scandal involving the treatment of Nisei cyclist Teófilo Toda demonstrated what Japanese Peruvians were up against – and how far they’d come. Toda, one of the country’s fastest cyclists, was a member of the Peruvian national team heading to the South American cycling tournament in Montevideo, Uruguay. At the last minute, the Peruvian government refused to issue Toda’s exit visa. The old discriminatory laws of the 1930s had reared their ugly heads.

But unlike in the 1930s, when the Peruvian media had been at the forefront of anti-Japanese scaremongering, the 1950s media came to Toda’s defense. The general perception was now that discriminating against a Peruvian son of immigrants was backwards, and actively damaging the country. A February 10th, 1954 op-ed in the newspaper La Crónica – which had previously portrayed Japanese as dangerous interlopers – shows how much thinking had changed:

“Why should a Peruvian see himself impeded from dressing (in national colors) and defending the uniform of his country abroad? Peruvian by birth, because that is how the Constitution of the country specifies it, Peruvian by feelings, Peruvian by his speech, by lessons and culture?; … [T]hey can limit his Peruvian rights. Could it be for the only sin of being a son of Japanese parents and having been born in our land? Frankly, we cannot believe it.”

No se dan Ninguna Explicación Sobre el ‘Caso’ de Teófilo Toda.” Translation from DuMontier.

That Toda’s team otherwise consisted of naturalized Italian-Peruvians, who had been issued visas, was seen as especially unfair. The team opted not to compete in Montevideo out of solidarity with their Japanese Peruvian teammate.

In spite of the government’s treatment of Toda, that same year, 1954, saw that same government issue reparations to Japanese Peruvians who’d had properties seized during the war. In 1960, at long last, Peru lifted the ban on immigration from Japan. [2]

The Generation of ’64

Across the Pacific, Japan was cementing its return to the brotherhood of nations with the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Simultaneously, the Nisei generation in Peru was establishing itself as a committed and integral part of the Peruvian civic landscape. In 1960, a group of like-minded Japanese Peruvian university students proclaimed themselves the “Generation of ’64.” Their goal was to help catapult their cohort into the national sphere. The trauma of the Saqueo, only two decades past, lingered; but for these young Nisei, the answer was to proudly proclaim themselves as Peruvian, rather than hiding in the shadows.

The Peruvian 1960s was an era of domestic upheaval, with stuttering economic growth and increased urbanization. Indigenous community members were moving in droves from the Andes to cities like Lima; as the urban population demanded greater freedoms and opportunities, the government failed to make good on various social promises. In 1962, a military junta enacted yet another coup de etat; in 1963, liberal reformist Fernando Belaúnde came into power. His government promoted public works, civic health, and education, but inflation and poverty came hand in hand with any progress made.

Nisei as a Civic Force

It was in this environment that Japanese-Peruvians like the Generation of ’64 first entered national politics. These included political candidates like Francisco Segami, who ran for senate in 1962, and Augusto Masuda in 1963. Nisei civic groups in Lima hosted speeches by presidential candidates. While only a few scant decades earlier, fear of Japanese involvement in national affairs spurred violence, this time Nikkei could run for office and even be praised in the national press.

By the 1980s, the will of the Generation of ’64 had borne fruit. The Japanese community had integrated to the extent that former President Bustamante y Rivero would speak at an event commemorating the 80th anniversary of Japanese immigration. As DuMontier points out, Bustamante y Rivero had enforced laws denying Japanese immigrant families citizenship in the 1940s. Yet, now he commended that self-same community. He praised “…not only native Japanese that live and die here, but that well accomplished and vigorous mixture of Nisei, in which the blood of Japanese and Peruvian have mixed and where (Japanese) national origin has given up its place of primacy to the nationality of home, to give place to a new variety of Nippo-Peruvians that…are entirely our compatriots.” [5]

An Integral Part of Peru

The generations turned, and the descendants of the original Issei only became more integrated. By 1989, a poll showed that many younger Japanese Peruvians were now monolingual, unable to speak their ancestral language. Community newspapers once published in Japanese were now written in Spanish. 90% of the community now practiced the religion of the Peruvian majority, Catholicism. Nonetheless, many reported still engaging in Japanese (Shinto) rituals and festivals, and eating at least one Japanese meal a week. [2] Peru may not have been a “land of gold,” but for tens of thousands, it had become a permanent home.

Conversely, 1989 also saw the beginning of a major outpouring of the Nikkei community from Peru back to their ancestral homeland. Japan had loosened immigration rules for those of Japanese descent, hoping to receive more manual labor for the factories dotting the archipelago. (The assumption was that ethnically Japanese cousins would be less disruptive to the national culture than other immigrants.) Japanese Peruvians, weary of poor economic conditions in Peru, made a reverse of the same journey their grandparents had made long ago.

Conflicted Homecoming: How the Japanese Brazilians Returned to Japan

The epic tale of the 300,000 cousins the Japanese welcomed home from Brazil and insisted they needed – until they suddenly didn’t. Part 2 of a 2-part series on the Nikkei Brazilians.

Now, Peruvians make up a small but important part of the Japanese cultural fabric. Peruvian restaurants and bars in Tokyo serve ceviche and Pisco sours in spaces where both Japanese and Spanish are spoken. A second generation of Japanese Peruvian returnees is being born, with the total population of Peruvians in Japan standing at nearly 50,000.

Back in Peru, the heritage of the Japanese Peruvians is now embraced by many in the country at large:

“Japanese cultural centers organize festivals and classes in Japanese language, martial arts, and crafts, among other activities. Thousands of limeños receive medical attention at the Japanese Peruvian hospital and eat in Peruvian Japanese restaurants. Nikkei cuisine is one of the most visible cultural expressions of the Japanese Peruvian community in Peru.”

Palma, P., & Iacobelli, P. 2022.

Alberto Fujimori: An Ethnic Japanese Dictator in South America?

By 1990, the image of the Japanese population within Peru was rehabilitated to the extent that a Japanese child of immigrants from the 1930s could rise to the highest political office in the nation. His name was Alberto Fujimori – and he would become not only one of Peru’s most famous (and infamous) leaders, but perhaps the most politically powerful person in the worldwide Japanese diaspora. His dramatic and controversial legacy continues to have a real-world impact via a major strain of Peruvian politics named after him: Fujimorism.

The story of Alberto Fujimori – and the story of how he affected Peru, and the Japanese Peruvians – is its own complex tale. His arrival on the scene cemented the place of the Japanese community in Peru, but his authoritarianism pushed Japan itself to have more distant ties with the country. The greatest sign of Japanese Peruvian ascendancy would also threaten the very safety of that community – and spell a dynamic, tumultuous era for one of the world’s most important Japanese diasporas.

This miniseries will continue in part 2, with the history of Alberto Fujimori.

Sources:

[1] Takenaka, Ayumi. (2004). The Japanese in Peru: History of Immigration, Settlement, and Racialization. Latin American Perspectives, 31(3), 77–98.

[2] Palma, P., & Iacobelli, P. (2022, October 19). Japanese in Peru. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History.

[3] Moore, Stephanie Carol. (2009). The Japanese in Multiracial Peru, 1899-1942. [Doctoral dissertation, University of San Diego, California].

[4] Barnhart, E. N. (1962). Japanese Internees from Peru. Pacific Historical Review, 31(2), 169–178. https://doi.org/10.2307/3636574

[5] DuMontier, Benjamin J. (2018). Between Menace and Model Citizen: Lima’s Japanese Peruvians, 1936–1963. (Doctor of Philosophy thesis). University of Arizona.

[6] Higashide, Seiichi. (2000.) Adios to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps. University of Washington Press.