Most Japanese came to work on the estates, and then moved to the cities, mostly on the coast, mostly as merchants. However, this process was not homogeneous.

Gasumi Tokeshi junto con su esposa y dos de sus hijos (Foto: Archivo familiar)

In the book The Future Was Peru , Alejandro Sakuda details that many immigrants quickly learned various trades. We are talking about hairdressers, jewelers, glaziers and a long etcetera. Then, with the end of indentured immigration in 1923, other Japanese came to stay with relatives or acquaintances, and were taught by them.

An example of this variety is Gasumi Tokeshi, an artist-quality watchmaker born in Kunigami in 1909, with millimetric precision in his work and patience, above all patience for such meticulous work. I met him when I was a child, I was 8 years old and he was 80, always jovial and mischievous, as he would surely be in his adolescence.

“They say he was very restless. He worked as a fisherman and kept track of the day's catch, which is why he was highly regarded even though he was a boy. But his mother worried about him, because you never know if a fisherman is going to come back. That's why when an uncle in Peru asks for a boy to help him, his mother sends him here, in 1932,” says his daughter Eva. Because of that trip, Gasumi did not participate in World War II. He was the only one of the brothers to survive.

Teacher Learning

Tokeshi llegó al Perú en 1932.

Already in Lima, Gasumi worked in a store with his uncle. Then he became a watchmaker “with a teacher, as was done then, helping in the business, first cleaning, organizing, seeing how the trade was done,” says Amelia, another of his daughters. That was the only way to learn, with traditional Japanese teaching practices. Perhaps that is why the number of Japanese watchmakers grew, until this became a characteristic profession of the colony.

Gasumi opened his own watch shop in the Cañete neighborhood of downtown Lima, a high-ceilinged store with display cases attached to the wall, wooden shelves and a traditional back room. The work was very hard, requiring concentration and manual skill, as well as a steady and meticulous eye. “I always saw him with a magnifying glass glued to his eye, under a very powerful light, crouched down, very concentrated,” Eva remembers.

Many times he had to stay until dawn, because “clients from the province would come, who would stay in Lima for a few days, and they would ask my dad to please finish in that time, and he would hurry up. His clients were his friends,” adds Eva.

Thus he began to acquire clients, who always returned due to the confidence he projected, his honesty in his work and his friendliness, which I can attest to. This trust was very necessary, since they gave him valuable objects. “I remember the display cases full of very expensive Longines watches, which clients left without any fear,” says Amelia. And little by little the watch shop was filled with treasures. Every night Gasumi put the watches in the safe and in the morning he put them back in the display cases. In this way he gave an education to his six children.

Artist of an era

The most difficult thing was repairing wind-up watches, “sometimes a piece got stuck, you had to remove the part of the winding and repair it,” explains Amelia. Furthermore, those were times when waterproof watches were not even conceivable, so, “other times customers would go into the sea with their watches on, to repair them my dad would take them apart piece by piece to dry them,” says Eva.

But there was room for jokes. Gasumi had fun with his partner Eusebio Sipán, who worked for pleasure because he had properties and could live off his income. "Mr. Sipán was a little rougher, he was in charge of the alarm clocks, which was a less delicate job. They were very friends, they spent a lot of time talking,” says Amelia.

From his children Tito learned to repair alarm clocks and Amelia to change lenses and repair straps. All this watching him work, helping him on his vacations. Only the job was destined to change.

The passing of the years put an end to watchmaking. In 1973, after suffering an illness, Gasumi had to close the business. He turned it into a candy store. “There were fewer customers, because battery-operated watches appeared, and the area became more dangerous. It was no longer profitable,” says Amelia. It was the end of an era, but Gasumi had two more decades to share his wisdom.

“Dad had delicate hands, like an artist. He always believed he could do something different, creative. If he couldn't do something else, it was to give us all an education,” says Eva. I believe that an artist is not only an artist because of his manual skill, but because of his sensitivity, his creativity. And Gasumi had a lot of both.

His memory for recounting episodes was fascinating, so much so that researchers Wilma Derpich and Cecilia Israel interviewed him for their book Workers in the Face of the Crisis: Testimonies of the Thirties , as Gasumi remembered things as minute as the price of bread each year, and what things one could buy with a real. The master watchmaker remained active until his last days with the same joviality and precision, this time in his words, few but always accurate.

“Dedicate yourself to music”

Over the decades in front of the watchmaker, Gasumi welcomed many young people as apprentices. One of them was the remembered Luis Abelardo Takahasi Núñez, who remembers in his memoirs that it was Gasumi who encouraged him to pursue his musical career. “As a watchmaker, you are a good Creole musician, dedicate yourself to that,” Gasumi told him with a sense of humor. And it wasn't a bad suggestion.

Don Gasumi con el autor del artículo. (Foto: Archivo familiar)

* This article is published thanks to the agreement between the Peruvian Japanese Association (APJ) and the Discover Nikkei Project. Article originally published in Kaikan magazine No. 73, and adapted for Discover Nikkei.

© 2012 Asociación Peruano Japonesa