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https://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2008/12/23/laredo/

Laredo: Where the Japanese were

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For years I have had a joke with some friends about my supposed unconditionalism towards everything Japanese. They pretend to hold me responsible for the failures of their Japanese-made devices and I pretend to take that responsibility. However, they also compensate me: I receive the most gratuitous congratulations for Kurosawa's films! But aside from this anecdote, there are those who assume that we Niseis actually live in a cultural duality.


There is no doubt that our nationality has some peculiar elements to the extent that its formation has been influenced by our paternal culture (I am referring to that spontaneous set of ways of seeing and acting that Gramsci spoke of). But, it is often forgotten that the culture of our parents did not remain intact but rather received the influences of the environment and the class to which they joined. Over the years our parents became, so to speak, cultural mestizos. I saw this process at the Laredo hacienda. I try to remember it in the notes that follow.

Laredo was an open door to the Sierra. The sellers who came down with livestock and goods and the intermediary merchants who came from Trujillo met there. After the transactions, they had lunch at the inns of Doña Santos Sato, Nakamura, Nakamine or at Pancho Tamakawa's chichería. They personally prepared the regional dishes as if they had always known this seasoning.

All the Japanese who had settled in Laredo were small business owners or hacienda tenants, like Otake or the Maskos. However, this country had started for them in the tasks of the sugar fields, where they shared the same exploitation conditions as the local laborers. There began his process of cultural assimilation. Perhaps the first approach was to learn the use of coca to resist the daily task (12 cane furrows, 100 meters each, cut down with the machete!). There was not a single Japanese in Laredo who had not learned to coke at that time 2 . They even managed to penetrate the magical aspects of coca. I remember Don Otake coking, lost in thought, next to my sick father. One night he announced to us that this was the final night. Not long after, indeed, my father died. Later we asked him how he knew. “Coca,” he told us.

When they came to work in the sugar valleys, there was not a level of organization among the workers capable of articulating them in the collective struggle. The uprisings were carried out in small isolated groups. The Japanese, then, were alone. When around 1905 two abusive foremen, his compatriots, were executed in Chiclín, the event was presented simply as a dispute between them.

In this context, immigrants saw savings as their resource to separate themselves from the estate that exploited them excessively. The famous thrifty spirit of the Japanese is not, then, a racial tendency. To increase their saving capacity, both the man and the woman received separate tasks, which was unusual in local marriages. Completing the task gave them the right to a ration of meat and rice; other provisions had to be purchased with their salary. They limited those purchases, replacing them with foods that they discovered in the surroundings. The tenderest shoots of the wild cane that grew on the banks of the rivers, the new leaves of the sweet potato and the yucca became part of their diet. Also included was the cañán , a small lizard from the sandbanks whose nutritional use had been forgotten. This perhaps created the legend that attributed the Japanese to serving the most unlikely animals. That's how they saved. Thus they came to the town to invest in inns, hairdressers, and grocery stores. Others, who already brought an agricultural background from Japan, dedicated themselves to growing fruit and vegetables on rented farms .

And then they experienced the everyday dealings. The relationship with the women who trusted in the store, with the pensioner worker at the inn, with the child who cried at the hairdresser's. The first sheds they occupied upon arrival had been left behind, where the women made alfeñiques, which were miniatures of colored sugar in the shape of baskets, birds, or fruits. People remembered that children, afraid of those unfamiliar faces, would name the boldest one to go buy them. Now the people said: “Here the Japanese are.” And this “finding” had an almost ontological weight. In this context, it is significant that in Laredo Japanese businesses were not looted during the years of World War II, which did happen in places like Lima and Trujillo.

How much Japanese was left in them? (Although this concept is quite generic, since the vast majority of immigrants came from the island of Okinawa, which had its own regional culture). How much was left of Tamakawa who in his chichería played the guitar and sang the malicious “eat the potatoes and leave me the guinea pig”? In those who joined with mestizas? In the vast majority who converted and practiced the rituals of Catholicism? In any case, it is not about insinuating that a good part of their culture had been recast to the point of being lost, but rather about confirming the fact that in daily life what was Japanese did not have the necessary validity to lead children to an identity problem. really deep. Our basic nationality has not been determined by them. Beyond race, we Niseis are included in the contradictions of a Peruvian nationality that is still in formation. This is evident, but sometimes there is confusion: last year in Callao, where a good number of Niseis are concentrated, some of them tried to organize to run for the general elections. Its leaders declared that they did not have racist motivations, but this defense suggests a charge that, contradictorily, demonstrates their great Creoleism: they wanted to take advantage, very opportunely, of the “affinity of the eye” 4 , ignoring that ideological and political affinity is above anything.

Editor's Notes
1. Agricultural products for human food consumption.

2. Chew ( chacchar in Quechua) coca leaves.

3. Small holdings of agricultural land.

4. In Peru “of the eye” – in popular language – refers to people of Asian origin, because of their slanted, different eyes.

Final note: The photographs of José Watanabe have been taken from the Album “José Watanabe, Peruvian Nikkei poet” by Maya Watanabe: http://www.discovernikkei.org/nikkeialbum/es/node/5647

* The poet José Watanabe (Laredo, Trujillo 1946 – Lima 2007) wrote and published this article in Puente Magazine – of which he was a collaborator – in December 1980 (Year 1, No. 1; pp.52-53). This time it is published with the authorization of his widow, Micaela Chirif, and his daughters Maya, Issa and Tilsa.

** This article is published under the San Marcos Foundation Agreement for the Development of Science and Culture of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos - Japanese American National Museum, Discover Nikkei Project.

© 2008 José Watanabe

About the Author

The late José Watanabe (1946-2007) is one of Peru’s most beloved contemporary poets. Along with his numerous articles, children’s books and screenplays, the author's publications feature seven original volumes of poetry. Watanabe is also a main contributor to La memoria del ojo: cien años de presencia japonesa en el Perú (Memory of the Eye: A Hundred Years of Japanese Presence in Peru, 1999), a riveting “photographic history” that narrates scenes of everyday life, loss, and northward “relocation” of approximately 1800 Japanese Peruvians to U.S. detention camps during World War II. The poem “Mama Turns 75” is excerpted from the maestro's third book of poems, Historia natural (Natural History, 1994). 

Updated November 2018

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