Enrique Higa Sakuda
@kikerenzoEnrique Higa is a Peruvian Sansei (third generation, or grandchild of Japanese immigrants), journalist and Lima-based correspondent for the International Press, a Spanish-language weekly published in Japan.
Updated August 2009
Stories from This Author
Live to enjoy
March 8, 2017 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
Often, talking to older people about their lives involves going into the past, taking refuge in a space that seems to be their habitat. As if everything worth biographing, all the exciting things, had happened in his childhood and youth (and perhaps in middle age), the present is minimized in his stories. As if they had already lived everything they had to live and old age only consisted of existing. You talk to them about how Messi is reinventing himself, …
Kisey Higa, living history of the Nikkei community
Jan. 20, 2017 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
After greeting Kisey Higa, I tell him that my last name is like him, that my family was from Callao and that I am the nephew of Mitsuya, the bullfighter. “You are Renzo San's grandson, right?” he says. I expected him to say something like “oh yeah, I know your uncle,” and nothing more, so I'm surprised he even remembers my grandfather's name. Later, during the interview, while we talk about World War II, I tell him that I had …
Peruvian, Japanese, Nikkei: it all adds up
Dec. 12, 2016 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
There are people for whom the parts do not add up, but rather get in the way, collide, and life is like a rigid framework in which for something to enter, something else must leave. The new does not add, but rather takes away, colliding with what exists. Other people, however, manage to harmonize their parts and integrate the new. Rosa Sakuda, a Peruvian granddaughter of Japanese who resides in Japan, belongs to this group. She feels Peruvian, Japanese, Nikkei, …
From Torakichi Yamazaki to Jorge Ávila, a family saga
Dec. 1, 2016 • Enrique Higa Sakuda , Asociación Peruano Japonesa
Clotilde Yamasaki never knew her father's real name. He only remembered that his countrymen, Japanese immigrants like him, called him “Torak.” In Peru he was baptized as José. One of the few things she knew about her father, a silent and reserved man, was that he had arrived in Peru accompanied by an uncle on the Sakura Maru , the ship that brought the first Japanese immigrants to the country on April 3, 1899. . The mystery would be solved …
Boys with a future: Children of dekasegi share their experiences
Nov. 15, 2016 • Enrique Higa Sakuda , Asociación Peruano Japonesa
They were raised and educated in Japan. Their parents took them to Peru after finishing their primary or secondary studies. They are bilingual. They study and work. They like Peru. They are friends, they joke, they laugh, but above all they share the experience of being children of dekasegi. Only they can truly understand what it means to feel lost in Peru and long for Japan, the frustration of wanting to express themselves in Spanish and not finding the right …
Toyomi Tsuruta, teacher who opens new worlds
Nov. 2, 2016 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
In 2013, the Tsuru Japanese Language Center opened its doors, the entrepreneurial dream of a Japanese woman who seeks to offer a quality alternative to the teaching of nihongo in Lima. Toyomi Tsuruta has lived in Peru since 2010 with her husband, a Peruvian engineer whom she met in Japan, where he was studying. She didn't come to Lima on an adventure, to see what would come out, but with a certification as a Japanese language teacher, and soon after …
The Story Dealer
Sept. 20, 2016 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
Rubén Sugano loves talking to older people. Issei or nisei. Listen to their stories. Nurture yourself with them. It's a “vice,” he says. An addiction to stories that usually go back to war, to hard childhoods, to blows that shape strong personalities that overcome adversity. The vice was born during his childhood. In Huaral, province of Lima where the 38-year-old musician and researcher grew up, his friends were his father's friends. His interest in the history of Japanese immigration to …
Miyuki Arakaki, uchinanchu feeling
Aug. 3, 2016 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
The silence shocked him. I had never experienced anything like this before. Accustomed to the hustle and bustle of Lima, Okinawa seemed like a parallel reality from which the volume had been removed. Miyuki Arakaki felt like something was missing. I missed the hustle and bustle. If in one sense Okinawa was another world, silent and imperturbable, in another it was like her home, the land of her grandparents, of the obaachan who sang songs to her in uchinaguchi when …
Memories of a Matador
June 16, 2016 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
The ocean has always had great significance in the life of Mitsuya Higa. Ever since he was a child, he has been going to Callao’s La Punta district to swim or simply gaze at the sea. Now 83 years old, he no longer swims, but he still visits La Punta regularly because, he says, the ocean fills him with peace. While living in Madrid in the 1960s, chasing his dream of becoming a matador, he missed the ocean. “I needed …
Juan Carlos Tanaka, the ambassador of ramen in Peru
May 11, 2016 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
Juan Carlos Tanaka was 22 years old when he emigrated to Japan in the 1990s. Like thousands of young Peruvian Sansei, he was looking for a better future in the country of his grandparents. Japan gave it a second life. There he met a Japanese woman, married her and they started a family. He learned to be practical, efficient and punctual. And he discovered the dish that in Peru would become his source of income, the reason for his appearance …
