Interviews

1. We go to America (Spanish)

2. Memories of my infancy: Japanese 1, Japanese 2… (Spanish)

3. Mistreating the Japanese community (Spanish)

4. Prejudice in Japanese school (Spanish)

5. Hiding out to avoid the concentration camps (Spanish)

6. Help from fellow Japanese (Spanish)

7. Iron discipline at home (Spanish)

8. Education Japanese style (Spanish)

9. Closing the Japanese school and deportation (Spanish)

Shinki,Venancio

(b. 1932-2016) Peruvian painter

Prejudice in Japanese school (Spanish)

(Spanish) When I entered the school for Japanese, I remember during recess time on the first day everything started then. I did what all the other children did: I ran to the playing field but nobody wanted to play with me. I realized how strange, because nobody wanted to play with me. Afterwards I found out that those kids didn’t want to play with me because my mother was Peruvian, which in nihongo (Japanese) is ‘ainoko (half).’ Needless to say, they didn’t want to be near me. I was discriminated against by both sides: by the townsfolk, the children of the town (particularly the older ones, the zambazos, whom I admired because they played soccer so well, they hit us, others ran away), and at school they also treated me…they did not hit me, except that I did not enter, I did not fit in.

discrimination education identity interpersonal relations Peru racism

Date: September 6, 2007

Location: Lima, Peru

Interviewer: Harumi Nako

Contributed by: Asociación Peruano Japonesa (APJ)

Interviewee Bio

Venancio Shinki (born 1932 in Supe, Lima, Peru) is one of the most outstanding Peruvian painters. The son of a Japanese father (Kitsuke Shinki of Hiroshima Ken) and a Peruvian mother (Filomena Huamán), Venancio was raised on the San Nicolás hacienda in Supe, north of Lima, an area with a large concentration of Japanese immigrants in the early years. He studied at the National School of Fine Arts of Peru, and graduated with the best grade in his class in 1962.

His paintings recall Eastern, Western, and Andean traditions, with a distinctive surrealism that shows an unknown and intriguing universe, set off by a purified technique and a renovated figuration, which links Venancio with other great Latin American artists. Venancio has received many accolades and has participated in a variety of individual and group exhibits in Peru, Japan, Italy, United States, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, Panama, and Mexico, among others. In 1999, the year of the centenary marking Japanese migration to Peru, Venacio was invited to exhibit his work in the Museum of Man in Nagoya, Japan. His most recent works were displayed in November 2006 during the 34th Annual Japanese Cultural Week in Lima, Peru. He passed away in 2016. (October 2017)