Like every year, this 2018 the José Gálvez Egúsquiza school, the oldest in the Peruvian-Japanese community, celebrated its traditional undokai . This year, however, had a special meaning because in parallel a small ceremony was held in which the photographs of the Japanese immigrants who served as president of the school's parents' association during the Second World War were unveiled. World War.

José Gálvez was born in 1926 as Callao Nihonjin Shogakko and was founded by Japanese immigrants to educate their children. The Japanese Society of Callao was the promoter of the school. At that time there was a large Japanese colony in the province of Callao.

During the war, the government of Peru, an ally of the United States, confiscated property and ordered the closure of institutions and schools in the Japanese colony.

The Callao Nihonjin Shogakko, however, was saved from closure when it passed from Japanese to Peruvian hands. He also changed his name and adopted that of José Gálvez Egúsquiza, a Peruvian war hero.

Not only did the owners and the name change, but also the teaching system. The school's students could no longer take classes in Japanese. In 1942, the Peruvian Ministry of Education issued a resolution establishing that all foreign teaching was “strictly prohibited” and that teachers had to be “exclusively Peruvian.”

In those difficult times, of dispossession and persecution of the Japanese, with the Japanese Society of Callao deactivated, the José Gálvez parents' association played an important role as the leading entity of the colony.

Manuel Tsuneo Higa, director of the newspaper Prensa Nikkei, president of the Peruvian-Japanese Association of Callao and a former student of the school, highlights the work of its presidents as meritorious and risky considering the context of war in which they had to carry out their positions.

Two former students of José Gálvez, now in their eighties, share their experiences at school during the war. Their testimonies not only provide valuable information about the school in those times, but also about the Japanese colony as a whole.

TOO BOY TO UNDERSTAND, BUT...

César Tsuneshige, a doctor by profession, studied at José Gálvez between 1942 and 1948. Although he was too young to be aware of the seriousness of things, he realized that there were strange situations. For example, Peruvian government officials or police officers came to the school to inspect and make sure that there were no books in the Japanese language so that the students would not receive “foreign education.”

Or that despite the ban, teaching in Japanese continued clandestinely. The students had been instructed to hide their Japanese books when an inspection was carried out and put their Spanish texts on top of their folders. That's how it was at the beginning. Later, teaching was only in Spanish.

The doctor remembers that to go to José Gálvez, a route he took on foot from his home, he had to pass through another school, one run by American religious. At that time it was common for Nisei children to be attacked or insulted by other children.

His father advised him to try to avoid the students from the other school and not respond to their attacks. “I was short, skinny, the others were bigger. I would pass by and try to avoid them, but sometimes they would hit you. What they currently call bullying. “They pulled your hair, they kicked you.”

There was an incident that marked him for life. The person responsible was not another child, but an adult. To be exact, an American priest, the director of the school he had to pass through on his way to José Gálvez.

There was a car parked in front of the school. The tires were flat and the Nisei boy just happened to pass by. “The director comes out and sees me. He kicked me. I didn't know... I looked scared and left. I didn't tell anything. I couldn't reason why. One didn't understand why."

The priest believed that he had punctured the car's tires. Perhaps he saw the “Japanese enemy” in the child and cowardly attacked him.

Caesar Tsuneshige evokes the attack without resentment (more than 70 years have passed since then). However, it left an indelible mark on him.

He also remembers that in his house, the only one with a radio, a group of Issei met with his father to listen to news from Japan. He heard them commenting on the war, but he did not understand the meaning of the situation.

His father avoided talking to him about the war. That didn't stop him from doing it, however. He once watched an American war movie called Guadalcanal about the battles in the Pacific between the United States and Japan. The film excited him and with the candor typical of a child he spoke about it to his father:

"I told dad: 'The Americans come and they tatatatata kill a lot of Japanese.' Me, unconscious, knowing that my dad was Japanese. My dad said 'that's a movie'. 'No, dad, but nice...'. One saw it as fiction, but it was American propaganda. An older one already reasons.”

Japan lost the war, but some immigrants did not believe in defeat. César Tsuneshige remembers a group of his father's Japanese friends shouting “Nihon banzai!” Intrigued, he asked his father about the meaning of the harangue and he explained that they thought Japan had won the war. “But in the newspaper it says that Japan has lost,” said the son. “But they don't believe in that,” replied the father.

César Tsuneshige left José Gálvez and enrolled in a Peruvian school. He was shocked to go from an entirely Japanese environment to one in which, apart from him, there was only one other Nisei student.

However, he won over people because he stood out in his studies (José Gálvez's foundation was good, especially in mathematics) and because of his affable character. “They never treated me badly. I earned respect. I played all sports, I wasn't good, but I was involved in everything,” he says.

Of course, he had to leave the Japanese classes he was taking with a private teacher to concentrate exclusively on his studies in Spanish.

Just like him, there were other former Gálvez students who, thanks to the foundations acquired at the school, later excelled in other schools.

Much later, as an adult, César Tsuneshige realized that life takes unexpected turns. Once, by chance and in another province, far from Callao, where he grew up and still resides, he visited the tomb where the remains of the American priest who attacked him when he was a child rest. “What's life like, right? 'You. He was the person who, without having committed any crime, kicked me. And now I am here praying for you.' "Life gives you, I don't say revenge, but opportunities."

THE ACTS OF GENEROSITY THAT ARE NEVER FORGOTTEN

Keyko Higa, a retired teacher, also studied at the José Gálvez school during the war. She is the daughter of Renzo Higa, one of the Issei who held the presidency of the school's parents' association at that time.

Like Caesar Tsuneshige, he was also unaware of war. At home it was a banned topic. They were more concerned about the financial situation of the family, which supported themselves with a business that sold sandwiches and drinks.

When she studied at José Gálvez there were only classes in Spanish (she learned nihongo at home with her mother). He remembers that the foundation of mathematics served him a lot when he later studied at another school. “We knew a lot, we even learned square root (in primary school).”

Although she was very young, she clearly remembers the earthquake that shook Lima in May 1940. Just eleven days earlier, in a markedly anti-Japanese climate, a crowd of vandals had looted Issei businesses. There were people, the teacher reveals, who said that God had sent the earthquake as punishment for the attacks on the Japanese.

Unlike other Nisei children, she does not remember being abused. Maybe, he surmises, because she is a woman. But he does remember that, to annoy them, they would yell at the children in the street “Mamurito!”, in reference to Mamoru Shimizu, the Japanese immigrant who was convicted of the murder of seven people (including his brother, his wife of him and his three children) in 1944, a multiple crime that shocked Peruvian society.

Before being enrolled at José Gálvez, Keyko Higa studied two years at Lima Nikko, the first officially recognized Japanese school in Latin America (closed during the war).

The only thing she remembers from that stage—apart from the fact that “she was very crybaby”—has as its protagonist Elena Yoshida de Kohatsu, the only woman who has held the presidency of the Peruvian-Japanese Association, a person very close to her family.

“She was in fourth or fifth (grade). I had to go to shokudo for lunch and someone grabbed my seat, so I was left crying. That's why Elena stopped by the shokudo every day to see me. “If I was crying, he would take me to his house to eat.”

Almost 80 years later, he still remembers that gesture of generosity with gratitude, as well as others in times when the ties in the Japanese colony were very strong. He remembers, for example, that after the earthquake in 1940 his parents had to abandon the store they had in Lima and return to Callao, where a cousin of his mother gave them a hand by transferring his dairy farm to them, or to Kintaro Ichiki, also president of the association. of José Gálvez's parents during the war, who helped his father a lot. Those things are never forgotten.

© 2018 Enrique Higa