Japanese-Peruvians-Reviled and Respected: The Paradoxial Place of Peru's Nikkei

...usually there's no intent to worked from ubiquitous, shoddy-looking bazaars...

...In exchange ujimori's 1990 election, and his appointment of for the prisoners, Peru received $25 million from the four Japanese-Peruvians to cabinet posts during U.S...

...At the same time, Because Peruvian banks wouldn't lend to Japanese, he often campaigned wearing traditional indigenous the immigrants pooled money in cooperative arrangeclothing and hats, symbolically making the point that ments called tanomoshi, providing small loans to one Peru's indigenous and mestizo voters-groups which family at a time...

...If true, that would have made Fujimori constitutionally ineligible to serve as president...

...Chile, Argentina, and he and his colleagues "found no reliable evidence of Venezuela also refused to deport Japanese, as did planned or contemplated acts of sabotage, subversion, Brazil, though Brazil's Japanese community was by far or espionage...

...No Japanese will govern Peru," said widely displayed campaign signs...

...There are few nikkei who fight...

...On their arrival in the United States, the to assimilate...

...Seventy percent of Japanese- not a street in which there is no Japanese barber shop," Peruvians live in Lima...

...The day successful businesses, large Japanese business successes after arriving in Peru, Heitaro and small, and Japanese- Hayashi bought cosmetics, Peruvians are more often than aroused a nativist response...

...Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in but most Japanese-Peruvians remained in detention till December 1941 prompted the Peruvian government to late 1946 because Immigration and Naturalization freeze and confiscate Japanese assets, forbid Japanese- Service officials had seized their passports and then Peruvians to assemble in groups larger than three, and accused them of being illegal aliens...

...With insult...

...3 necting to their ethnic roots...

...2. Clinton Harvey Gardiner, The Japanese and Peru, 1873-1973 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), p. 65...

...2 with the mass of Peruvians who use it...

...In Peru, the government allowed the FBI to spread The non-Peruvian Latin American deportees were anti-Japanese propaganda and to investigate individual freed from the Texas camps soon after the war ended, Japanese...

...detention camps, the largest contracts, hoping to come home rich in a few years...

...The looters stripped Japanese property of windows, floor planks, wallpaper, and tiles, even carting off toilets, all in full view of the police, who made no attempts to intervene...

...Higashide says this figure corresponds to "U.S...

...were murdered...

...240-241...

...Concentration Camps (Honolulu: E&E Kudo, 1993), p. 89...

...They wanted their kids with DDT...

...Enraged by the predominance of aimed at nikkei readers...

...See Gardiner, The Japanese and Peru, pp...

...Japanese-Peruvians represented 45% of Peru's foreign population, distantly followed by the 7,000 Chinese and he first Japanese to come in significant numbers then by scant numbers of Italians, English, and arrived at the turn of the last century, lured by Germans...

...The Latin American group held in the camps...

...5 In the wake of the riots, there was an exodus back to Japan...

...Takayama, a Peruvian journalist, is accused of no crime...

...By embracing the term, Fujimori under- exploited, even as they gravitated toward this type of cut its negative charge and symbolically allied himself bargain shopping...

...pantyhose, and handkerchiefs not economically well-off...

...The history of Peru's nikkei, or people of Japanese descent, has been marked by even more serious examples of discrimination, including anti-Japanese riots in Lima in 1940 that left 10 Japanese-Peruvians dead...

...fighting totalitarian regimes, asking Latin American Eleven other Latin American countries, including governments to root out supposed civilian subversives...

...Author's correspondence with Percy Takayama...

...Fujimori's then-wife, Susana Higuchi, later assailed the ir h If nikkei for their silence during the elections, saying, "The nikkei are passive...

...The climate in United States and Peru agreed that Japanese-Peruvians Peru remained anti-Japanese for some time, so the comshould be deported to the United States...

...1 2 At that time, 25% of her interview subjects thought it premature to have a nikkei candidate...

...Percy Takayama says that several times recently when he's approached a Lima newspaper kiosk, people gathered to scan the tabloid headlines have yelled at him that "Japanese should go back to their country...

...J. F. Normano and Antonello Gerbi, The Japanese in South America: An Introductory Survey with Special Reference to Peru (New York: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1943), pp...

...For its part, the opposition campaign used a broadly circulated flyer to ridicule Fujimori's Japanese ancestry...

...Indeed, three nikkei ran for congress under FREDEMO auspices...

...In the 2000 election campaign, supporters of then-presidential candidate Alejandro Toledo chanted, "cholo yes, chino no...

...5. Fukumoto, Hacia un nuevo sol, p. 522...

...Nikkei organizations did little to protest the antiJapanese aspects of the campaign, limiting themselves to statements about how nikkei should conduct themselves to minimize the risk of attacks: During election week they should stay out of public places, avoid traveling alone, and have neighbors watch out for them...

...Author's interview, Albany, California, September, 2000...

...first boatload of contract workers arrived in 1899...

...4 Densely clustered in Lima, the Japanese promises of steady work on Peru's coastal cotton seemed even more numerous than they were...

...went to Japan or stayed in the United States, for Peru Following the U.S...

...The result, says Takayama, has been verbal attacks on those with Asian features (including Chinese-Peruvians), offensive graffiti scrawled on Japanese-Peruvian-owned businesses, and even physical assaults, such as the mauling that one young man received while standing in line at a Lima bank...

...108-110...

...Toledo suppo Amelia Morimoto interviewed "Cholo yes, c nikkei at random in April and May 1990, between the first Toledo himse round of the election and the runoff between Fujimori and to the "OriE Vargas Llosa...

...Fujimori goods...

...MADR 1 Earlier this year the Peruvian press reported tel: 212.62 that careful examination of his parents' immigration and other records indicated a Peruvian birthplace...

...Three visitors from Japan ital Mafia...

...the city boasts a nikkei cultural said a 1926 article calling for all Japanese businesses to center and museum, and magazines and newspapers close immediately...

...camps, The FBI drew up a list of the most "dangerous Axis but 84% of the 2,118 imprisoned Latin American nationals" and set out to investigate them, though 35 Japanese came from Peru...

...These were the origins also dubbed himself El Chino, of the soon-to-flourish "the Chinaman...

...Fujimori himself has been officially accused of dereliction of duty and there have been allegations that he, like his erstwhile adviser Vladimiro Montesinos, illegally profited from his job and has the proceeds stashed away in foreign accounts...

...Fukumoto, Hacia un nuevo sol, p. 336...

...The Peruvian officials began rounding up scores of Japanese were afraid that all the past discrimination Japanese-Peruvians, stuffing them into the bowels of would be repeated," explains Olga Okuma, a Peruvian rancid boats, shaving their heads, and spraying them nikkei now living in California...

...1 6 In this year's national elections, there were several nikkei candidates, but all lost, except for Susana Higuchi, Fujimori's ex-wife, who won a congressional seat...

...92-101...

...At one point, a group of nikkei marched in front of Vargas Llosa's house, accusing Fujimori of pushy, un-Japanese behavior for daring to run...

...A pure Peruvian, native to here, has to assume the presidency...

...Peruvians groused about and headed for the red-light Alberto Fujimori, in 1990 district...

...Toledo, now Peru's president, has sometimes referred to the "Oriental Mafia," as well as the "criminal Japanese and his accomplices," thus turning denunciations of Fujimori government misdeeds into racial attacks...

...4 Following Fujimori's election, one nikkei observed: "There's sympathy and pride that a Japanese is president, even if no one wants to say so...

...For two days in May 1940, Peruvians sacked, looted, and burned more than 600 Japanese homes and businesses in Lima, killing 10 Japanese and injuring dozens...

...Prostitutes paid his advantage, adopting the Japanese and Chinese shops...

...During Vargas Llosa's campaign, the colony squelched itself...

...they But the place of the nikkei in Peruvian society is more soon discovered that the life of a laborer on Peruvian complex and paradoxical than all this might suggest...

...Expatriate Peruvian writer Herbert Morote has lambasted then-Peruvian president Manuel Prado for allowing riled-up citizens to sack the businesses of honorable immigrants so he could look good to "Uncle Sam...

...Almost all Japanese-owned shops were destroyed, and there was an estimated $6 million in property damage...

...Fukumoto, Hacia un nuevo sol, p. 337...

...But the term suggests the Japanese are indistin- frequent "liquidation" and "inventory" sales, they guishable from other Asians, and many nikkei consider catered to the poorest Peruvian consumers, who felt it derogatory...

...cash for his merchandise, campaign slogan "Honesty, enabling him to buy more Technology, Work...

...4. Mary Fukumoto, Hacia un nuevo sol: Japoneses y sus descendientes en el Pern (Lima: Asociaci6n Peruano Japonesa del Peri, 1997), pp...

...A 1991 ino no...

...Currently, 15,000 Peruvian nikkei live in Japan, leaving a generation in Peru decimated...

...But the community as a Meanwhile, Peru's Japanese community continued to whole has tried to keep a low profile and until the 1990 grow, swollen by new arrivals...

...some managed to buy and work thieves, but of honorable, ambitious hard workers, their own farms in the coastal and jungle regions, and Considered as trustworthy as Toyotas, the nikkei have others went to cities where many established small often served as treasurers in clubs and schools...

...lead, Peruvian authorities black- readmitted only 79 of those who had been deported...

...Fujimori's government collapsed in scandal last year...

...I'm deeply worried, because he isn't prepared to govern the country...

...today many nikkei run pensated ingeniously...

...29REPORT ON RACE AND MIGRATION were incarcerated in U.S...

...1 5 In fact, while the Fujimori victory touched off a brief wave of enthusiasm for all things Japanese in Peru, it also provoked a new wave of racism, including remarks about the "flat-faced first "ters chanted, lady," Susana Higuchi...

...By 1936, the 23,000 election, political participation was not encouraged...

...Japanese-Peruvians: Reviled and Respected 1. Seiichi Higashide, Adios to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S...

...While fewer than 1,000 Peruvian nikkei lived in Japan in 1988, more than 31,000 did by 1992, mostly young adults...

...and sugar plantations...

...Fujimori is currently living in exile in Japan...

...8. Historian Amelia Morimoto, interviewed in the documentary "Humillados y Ofendidos," aired on the U.S television newsmagazine Aqui y Ahora, June 5, 2001...

...7 the largest in Latin America...

...Others have shouted that the Japanese have robbed the country blind...

...Some Peruvian politicians and the tabloid press have attacked Fujimori in ways that subtly-and sometimes not-so-subtly-implicate the entire Japanese-Peruvian community in his government's misdeeds...

...Some nikkei worried that a Fujimori victory could bring new attacks on the community...

...farms was one of overwork, abuse, and disease...

...As the Fujimori government was progressively discredited by the accusations of corruption, abuse of power, and serious human rights violations lodged against his closest associates and finally against him personally, Peruvian political discourse became increasingly anti-Japanese...

...ing a congressman...

...Today, Peru's 54,000 nikkei form one of the nation's Japanese business successes aroused a nativist largest immigrant-descended ethnic groups, though response...

...One asserted, "A Japanese can't govern Peru...

...The first stores...

...He is the target of abuse simply because he, like Peru's now-discredited former president Alberto Fujimori, is of Japanese descent...

...if, however, it were proved that Fujimori had been born in Japan he would have had automatic Japanese citizenship, making it impossible to deport him to stand trial on corruption charges in Peru...

...With a tiny advance from a tanomoshi, together make up some 80% of the population-should Samuel Matsuda's father established an inn and then a consider Fujimori to be someone like themselves, in caf6...

...Vast numbers of participants felt that Fujimori was simply not ready to be president...

...It remains to be seen, then, whether the Fujimori era will be remembered as one in which the Peruvian nikkei fully and permanently entered the nation's political life or one in which they were cruelly and definitively set back...

...Peruvians groused about Japanese monopothey make up only a tiny one-fifth of 1% of the popula- lies and unfair competition: "It can be said that there is tion of 27 million...

...Other attacks, including a car bomb set off next to the Japanese embassy, were likely guerrilla actions aimed at drawing attention to the Fujimori government's improved economic and diplomatic ties with Japan...

...listed prominent Japanese and later the entire commu- About 10,000 Japanese-Peruvians remained in Peru nity, prohibiting the patronage of Japanese businesses, during the war, and that group chose to keep living there As part of a U.S.-designed plan to repatriate Axis afterward, rather than moving to a devastated postwar officials, Peru forced some Japanese to return to Japan...

...9. The other nine countries were Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua...

...3. Gardiner, The Japanese and Peru, p. 66...

...Many The Peruvian stereotype of the nikkei is not that of fled the plantations...

...Some upscale restaurants refused to serve nikkei, and there were some attacks on nikkei businesses and homes...

...87-88...

...And newspaper editorial accused the "nikkei of promoting prostitution has referred in the past and of exploiting poor people...

...Peruvians routinely use the term Hayashi Company...

...A mob of retirees beat him up, yelling that Fujimori had made their pensions less secure...

...During World War II, thousands of Japanese-Peruvians Vol XXXV, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2001 0 0 0g Eve Kushner is a freelance writer in Berkeley California, who often writes about topics related to Japan...

...But we're also afraid that if his government doesn't work out, they're going to attack us...

...In recent years, owing to Japanese and Chinese shops, a nationalist wrote in Japan's economic boom and Fujimori's now-vanished 1927, "Asiatic immigration is for the race what cancer prestige, more nikkei have shown an interest in con- or syphilis is for the human body...

...Some were he wrote phrases like buenos Peru's agricultural university, dias and muchas gracias on used the nikkei stereotype to enraged by the predominance of flash cards...

...Oddly, Gardiner, The Japanese and Peru, p. 53, puts the number much lower at $1.6 million...

...1 3 True or not, the reports served to paint Fujimori as a foreign interloper, in contrast to Vargas Llosa, whose white Spanish-descended forebears could be traced back for generations...

...Higashide, Adios to Tears, pp...

...Eager to escape crippling unem- Nativist resentment was further fueled by a U.S.-led ployment and poverty in Japan, they avidly signed labor international campaign that tied anyone of Japanese NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 30REPORT ON RACE AND MIGRATION descent to Japan's role as a World War II enemy...

...dollar value at that time...

...9 Mexico moved its Japanese years later a chief intelligence officer would admit that to inland areas but deported none...

...That's how we've advanced, little by little," says stark contrast to the rich, white opposition candidate, Matsuda, who continued his family's ascent by becomnovelist Mario Vargas Llosa...

...1 1 JapanesePeruvians were far from unanimous in supporting Fujimori's candidacy: He had not actively associated himself with the community, and his populist pronouncements had little appeal for middle- and upperclass nikkei, many of whom backed Vargas Llosa's conservative FREDEMO party, as did well-off Peruvians in general...

...This fear led thousands of nikkei to flee to Japan in a reverse migration called dekasegi...

...Fear dominated the responses, as with this comment: "The whole colony is afraid that he'll do a bad job and that 91 years after our grandparents arrived, he'll fail, erasing the positive image that the colony has worked to achieve...

...Eventually most shut down Japanese-language newspapers and schools...

...6. Herbert Morote, Rdquiem por Perd, mi patria (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1992), p. 122...

...1 0 1771 detainees were confined to dusty, barbed-wireenclosed concentration camps in Texas...

...Ecuador and Panama, shipped Japanese to U.S...

...Others, however, voted for Fujimori out of fear that a poor electoral showing would discredit the nikkei...

...218-222...

...Peru's economic crisis had already prompted movement to the thriving islands in the 1980s, but Fujimori's presidency accelerated the exodus...

...Japanese arrived at the end of the nineteenth century as If the early Japanese migrants had too little capital to indentured plantation work- open shops, they often comers...

...And as his government was discredited, Peruvian political discourse became increasingly anti-Japanese...

...But they left many in the nikkei community feeling vulnerable...

...The cabinet ministers were Jaime Yoshiyama and Daniel Hokama (both ministers of energy and mines), Victor Yamamoto (minister of health), and Jaime Sobero Taira (minister of fishing...

...6 In the war years, the United States was demanding hemispheric unity in Jaime Yoshiyama was a cabinet minister during much of the Fujimori era...

...Toledo describes himself as a cholo, or an urbanized person of indigenous background...

...The younger nikkei felt entirely Peruvian anyWhen this proved impractical and expensive, the way, some unable to speak Japanese...

...Rumors, fueled by the opposition, had it that Fujimori had been born in Japan, not Peru...

...Other Japanese-Peruvians won congressional seats during Fujimori's era...

...Knowing no Spanish, the virtually unknown dean of Japanese monopolies...

...In 1942, munity tried to keep as low a profile as possible...

...1 Others with insufficient capital "chino" to refer to nikkei...

...All the following quotes about Fujimori's candidacy come from Amelia Morimoto, Los japoneses y sus descendientes en el Peru (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Pero, 1999), pp...

...One said, "He doesn't have a plan for governing...

...7. Clinton Harvey Gardiner, Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), p. 22...

...8 his ten years as president, brought renewed public C 0 Vol XXXV, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2001 31REPORT ON RACE AND MIGRATION attention to the nikkei community, attention that the community did not completely welcome...

...Reports that Fujimori had doctored his birth documents to prove that he had been born in Peru rather than Japan continued to circulate -4_ during his presidency...

...he recently tried to buy some- thing at a store, only to have the clerk say, "I don't wait on criminals...