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Closing the Japanese school and deportation (Spanish)

(Spanish) Before they expelled us from school, something else happened. As time passed, we believed, my father also believed, that nothing was going to happen to our school, to our director who came from Japan, to the teachers who [also] came from Japan. Here they began first in Lima, where there was a famous looting of Japanese stores. Before that happened, there was the confiscation of farms. How many Japanese lost their farms, how many Japanese lost their stores, their goods, not their stores. They emptied these stores completely…in San Nicolás there began another reaction against the Japanese. Because of this my father had sold his store, his business; therefore, the other man [previously mentioned] was well informed of what was happening in Lima and elsewhere.

They intervened in the school, closed it up, arrested the director; the bad thing was that the director had a room that no one knew about at the time, where he listened to shortwave radio broadcasts from Nihon. In the morning, while we were doing 'radio taiso,' the director would tell us about what he had just heard on the radio. The police entered and wrecked everything. They arrested the director and the teachers and shipped them off to the concentration camp.

I*: They deported them?

Ah, of course. They sent them to Texas, I believe, and the others I don’t remember. They were not together. [Some] were sent to different locations. The Americans are very skillful at such things. And we [Japanese were tossed] out on the street.

* “I” indicates an interviewer.


education imprisonment incarceration Japanese language schools language schools Peru World War II

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)

George Ariyoshi
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Teacher who helped with lisp

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James Hirabayashi
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Little interaction with parents

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James Hirabayashi
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Life in camp as teenager

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James Hirabayashi
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Politics in ethnic studies

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Center for Japanese American Studies in community

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James Hirabayashi
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Involvement with ethnic studies

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Testing assumptions of Japanese scholars

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Kids working hard

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First day of school

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Yuri Kochiyama
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Didn't have rights that whites had

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Californians didn't know about evacuation

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Conditions of assembly centers

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Visit to assembly centers by E. Stanley Jones

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Hiding what happened in camp

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Issei are hard-working

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