Navigating in a small motorboat without stopping from the town of Pucallpa (located south of Loreto Departamento) up the Ucayali river to the Huanuco Departamento - under normal conditions - takes up to 4 hours to reach the mouth of the Pachitea river and an additional 2 hours furrowing to reach Honoria town.
This town is located on the left bank of the Pachitea river. When I visited for the first time, there were approximately 200 houses with a population of just over 800 inhabitants, back then this vast region of the Peruvian Amazon area was not frequently traveled. The local inhabitants of this area were saying that this town had been created from the efforts and contributions of 3 people: a Chilean citizen who provided the name of the place; a native of this region named Sergio Chavez and a Japanese immigrant strangely named Jose Diaz. This town was elevated to the category of District on January 2, 1956, joining the province of Pachitea in the Huanuco Departamento, with Tenho Taba of Yonagusuku, an immigrant from Okinawa, Japan, as its first Mayor.
Tenho Taba had come to Peru in 1928, called by his brother Yamato to work on his agricultural property with small livestock near Puerto Inca town, at the left bank of the Pachitea river. With the death of his sister in law after painful illness and a business failure that he had shared with his brother Yamato, He returned to Okinawa, taking Yamato’s children with him. Tenho came back to Peru for a second time and was staying in the Amazon area when World War II started. He and his brother decided to stay in Peru indefinitely when they heard of the death of their parents and Yamato’s children during the Battle of Okinawa.
Tenho was a real gentleman, kind, respectable, distinguished, a man of good nature and had a sincere attitude towards his post as mayor of Honoria town and from the beginning he was welcome as ministry of service to the residents. He was a very popular leader far from his homeland, where he brought his customs to the community. He worked relentlessly, without time to rest from early in the morning to late in the evening. His driving task was maintenance and cleaning of the street and roads. Certainly no mayor would do this job in a big city, but simply working prompted mutual help among the residents when the harvest season arrived for agriculture products. He organized to help all workers. He patronized the construction of public works - in particular 3 schools, a church and the Post Office building.
*This article is an excerpt from Luis Takanobu Shimabukuro’s Descubriendo Amazonia (Discovering the Amazon) which he is currently working on based on his father’s stories Amazon Sanka (1974).
© 2013 Luis Takanobu Shimabukuro
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