Despite more than one hundred years of Japanese presence, the fusion between their descendants and Peru has not occurred. Although there is a deep attempt at integration and unity, the historical experience of mutual distrust between both parties has weighed more. The ruling classes of the first half of the 20th century complained to the Japanese about their lack of willingness to be Peruvian. And the Japanese accused them of racial prejudice and explicit anti-Japanism. In truth, the wounds inflicted on the Japanese community have been very deep. The worst of all is that, following the extradition of former president Alberto Fujimori, there is currently a nationalist sector that uses the media to once again treat the Nikkei community with racial prejudice and a threatening tone.
Anti-Japanese laws and attitudes in Peru
Among the many shameful chapters in the history of Peru, there is one that stands out for its outrageous audacity: the mistreatment of the Japanese community during the first half of the 20th century and the consecutive racist attitudes towards their descendants to the present day. Of course, these initiatives have never come nor do they come from the majority population, but from their rulers and those who hold some media power. What inspired or inspires these speeches? Yesterday it was the utopia of the white and Western republic, today the demagoguery of the copper country 1 .
Since 1899, Japanese immigrants quickly achieved solid economic success. This aroused the distrust of the political and business sector, which viewed with suspicious eyes the tenacity, industriousness and unity of the Japanese colony. As a logical behavior of solidarity, the Japanese hired Japanese in their companies. It was then that President Luis Sánchez Cerro (1931-1933) decreed Law 7505 in 1932, which obliged foreign companies to have 80% Peruvian personnel. In the first third of the 20th century, the presence of Japanese was already uncontrollable and, therefore, President Oscar Benavides (1933-1939), through his Chancellor Alberto Ulloa Sotomayor, continued with legal attacks against the Japanese. He imposed a limit of 16,000 people for each group of foreigners when this colony already exceeded that figure. Likewise, knowing that the Japanese did not register their children in the Peruvian registries, the government ruled that the businesses could not be transferred to foreigners. To this end, he enacted Law 8526, which prevented Japanese people from registering as Peruvians their children born before June 26, 1936.
Journalist Alejandro Sakuda 2 says that the scare was so great that more than 2,500 Nisei were registered judicially on their birth certificates, since their parents had only registered them at the Japanese Consulate. It is said that these inscriptions filled two pages of the newspaper La Prensa and that this fact aroused the suspicion of the government. He also adds that the prejudice was so much that the writer Ciro Alegría represented the commercial conflict between a Japanese and a Peruvian in his unfinished novel Lázaro . A sector of the Peruvian Aprista Party stated that they opposed Japanese immigration because they liked to settle in groups, isolating themselves from the life of the country, speaking their own language and sending their children to Japanese schools. There was no shortage of anonymous and absurd leaflets that spoke of German-Japanese “fifth columns” with thirty thousand armed men who would invade Peru through the Amazon River, of the Asian threat that undermined the national economy, they even warned against consuming in Japanese restaurants because they ran the risk of dying from poisoning.
The Japanese community, logically, lived in the midst of terror between threats, insults and attacks, such as the one that occurred on May 13, 1940 with the looting that affected 620 Japanese families (of which 500 were Okinawans) and the material losses. They were calculated at six million soles 3 . But the greatest infamy occurred during the government of President Manuel Prado (1939-1945), when 1,582 people were taken to concentration camps in Latin America and the United States because they were considered 'dangerous'. For some scholars: "The situation of the 1930s and the Second World War were moments in which anti-Asian sentiments were revealed without further ado, once the ruling class of Peru, in the midst of that 'era of catastrophes in the world', chose that his place was next to the West and its political and social values 4 .
To show a button: Naeko's story in Cristal City
Naeko Yakabi was born in Peru and at the age of five she was sent with her grandmother Makato to the Cristal City concentration camp, in California, to join her grandfather Siyi. They emptied their purses, searched their belongings and bodies, bathed them and fumigated them with disinfectant before entering them into a dusty citadel surrounded by spikes. She wondered: why the fence, where would they escape if they could? Could they be criminals? Among the barracks they found their grandfather mending shoes and raising pigs, sharing with the other prisoner families the fear of a massacre. Siyi Yakabi was a Japanese immigrant who arrived in Peru in 1917 and had a bakery in Huacho (140 kilometers from Lima). Suddenly, the police detained him and deported him just because he was Japanese. At the end of the war they were prohibited from returning to Peru and chose to go to Okinawa rather than stay on American soil. There they survived in the jungle, devouring tree bark, surviving disease and escaping foreign occupation. It took twenty years to return to Peru. By then, his mother had already died. Naeko died in 2002 and until the day of his death, no Peruvian authority apologized for the mistreatment inflicted, as the US government did to more than one hundred thousand people from its Japanese community, including the Peruvian community.
Naeko's story was the culmination of a series of mistreatment directed at the Japanese population in Peru. The most serious thing is that this issue is still considered an anecdote and not a political issue. In my opinion, neither the consecutive governments nor the current Nikkei community have the intention to resolve the issue. Here pride and fear mix. It would be very difficult for Peruvian governments to recognize their imperfection as a democratic republic, due to the deeply racist and discriminatory nature that has characterized them. The Nikkei community, for its part, has learned the lesson: having Peruvian citizenship is not a matter of legal security but of the political situation. The threat of a national expulsion always hangs in the air.
The Fujimori excuse for racism
“Better not get involved in politics,” our parents advised us because for them politics meant conflict and danger for the Japanese. However, there was a Nikkei, Alberto Fujimori, who entered politics and became president of the republic (1990-2000); and the repercussion is that with him he brought the entire Nikkei community into politics. Everything he does or fails to do has an absurd impact on each Nikkei in Peru as if we were counted in bulk and not as individuals. When Fujimori used his Japanese nationality and took refuge in the land of his parents, the governor of the province of Nagano at that time 5 asked him to leave the country because it could increase anti-Japanese sentiment in Peru. Similarly, a Peruvian congressman 6 of those years, in one of the plenary sessions of Congress, stated that Fujimori was irresponsible (for taking refuge in his Japanese nationality) because now the entire Japanese colony in Peru had to bear this shame. Incredible logic.
But one of the most curious arguments is the one that appeals to the historical experience of Alberto Fujimori, as a member of the Peruvian-Japanese community, to explain his current political behavior. That is to say, it is argued that Fujimori attacked human rights during his government and plunged the country into corruption due to the mistreatment suffered by him in the Second World War. A kind of avenging angel of the Japanese colony? This thesis is as light as it is ridiculous, and it is surprising that it is put forward by people linked to historical sciences. With this logic we would never understand history and we would always end up saying that members of the Japanese, Chinese, Indian, black, Amazonian and other communities have revenge and historical revanchism as the motivation for their actions. In my opinion, racism is what is hidden in this type of speech that nationalist leaders and media figures who have been using the various media have been using.
New outbreak of anti-Japanism in the 21st century? I don't risk answering this question. Reviewing the history of the hundred years of Japanese presence and the impunity with which rulers and media leaders moved to mistreat Asian communities, in Peru everything can be expected.
As part of this contest, I reflect and tell myself that in principle no racist argument should disrupt our identification with Peru. As the saying goes: a lot of water has passed under the bridge and, in the case of the Peruvian-Japanese community, the ground is cemented. Today the community has up to 6 generations that speak Spanish perfectly, there are no longer exclusively Japanese schools, its young people feel Peruvian history their own, and the enormous number of politicians, professionals and artists reveal this national identification. Even the Nikkei families who currently work in Japan want to return to Peru, which they feel is their only country. To all this we must add the powerful wave of globalization that the planet is experiencing. In Peru, although the merger has not been achieved, the integration that is being experienced is solid and is going well.
Grades:
1. This reference to the “copper”, referring to the indigenous population, comes from Mr. Ollanta Humala in his candidacy for the presidency in 2006.
2. Sakuda, Alexander. The future was Peru. One hundred years or more of Japanese immigration. Lima:ESICOS. 1999.
3. Sakuda, Alexander. Op. Cit., p. 240-241.
4. Yamawaki, Chikako. Life strategies of Asian immigrants in Peru. Lima: Institute of Social Studies, JCAS The Japan Center for Area Studies, 2002, p. 10
5. Yasuo Tanaka
6. Luis Solari
© 2007 Doris Moromisato
