Interviews

1. Father’s Reason For Moving to Argentina (Japanese)

2. Nikkei Businesses in Buenos Aires (Japanese)

3. Escobar’s Immigrant Population (Japanese)

4. Popular Sports in the Nikkei Community (Japanese)

5. Great Japanese Language School in Escobar (Japanese)

6. Serving in Malvinas War and its Impact (Japanese)

7. Nikkei Signalman (Japanese)

8. Supporting Nikkei in Japan (Japanese)

9. Changes in the Nikkei Community in Japan (Japanese)

10. The Next Generation of the Nikkei Community (Japanese)

11. Nikkei Identity (Japanese)

12. Roles You Can Fulfill Being in Japan (Japanese)

13. About Escobar (Spanish)

Juan Alberto Matsumoto

(b. 1962) Nisei Japanese Argentinian, currently residing in Japan

Nikkei Signalman (Japanese)

(Japanese) If you look at Argentine history until now, Nikkei have been fairly well trusted. In Argentina we are called Japonés. We get put into a particular place socially by being Japonés, but basically we are entrusted with a high degree of confidence. So my immediate supervisor was still quite young — an army warrant officer just out of college — and I became a close associate of his, being in charge of communications.

Communications was a very different thing back then. You had to carry around the radio was in a huge box, which weight about 7 kg. And you couldn’t just charge the radio; it needed about twelve batteries to work. So I was assigned to manage it and be in charge of communication with a headquaters. In terms of communications, some messages were encrypted. So I was told that I had to remember all encryptions. They said to me, “Japonés are smart and has a good memory so you should be fine for this.” In the end, I had to memorize a lot.

Argentina Buenos Aires Falklands War stereotypes

Date: September 22, 2019

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Yoko Nishimura

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Juan Alberto Matsumoto was born in 1962 in the city of Escobar, Buenos Aires, Argentina. He received an informal bilingual education attending the Japanese school in Escobar. While he was in college, he enlisted in the Malvinas War (Falklands War) and served as a signalman. Afterwards, he graduated from the University of Salvador in Buenos Aires with a degree in international relations. In 1990, he went to Japan as a government-sponsored student. He majored in Labor law at Yokohama National University where he received a master’s degree.

Currently he serves as a public relations legal translator, a court interpreter, and broadcast interpreter, as well as a lecturer at JICA trainee orientations. He also teaches Spanish language and Latin American politics and law at the University of Shizuoka and occasionally he gives talks on multicultural coexistence. He also provides various supports for Latin American Nikkei living in Japan. (February 2020)

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