Javier García Wong-Kit
@JaviernestoJavier García Wong-Kit is a journalist, professor, and director of Otros Tiempos magazine. Author of Tentaciones narrativas (Redactum, 2014) and De mis cuarenta (ebook, 2021), he writes for Kaikan, the magazine of the Japanese Peruvian Association.
Updated April 2022
Stories from This Author
Warike Nikkei: a popular secret
Dec. 23, 2019 • Javier García Wong-Kit , Asociación Peruano Japonesa
Cooking has something of a mystery when it surprises with peculiar recipes that seek to be inimitable. Although their objective is to reach a large audience, in Peru huariques have become famous, those simple restaurants that have achieved mastery in a dish for which people visit them even if they are in remote areas or small establishments. On a street in Breña, Lima, in a single-room establishment but with a lively staff of waitresses and cooks, Warike Nikkei has become …
Andrés Hamamoto: Nikkei cooking over hot coals
Dec. 4, 2019 • Javier García Wong-Kit
Many descendants of Japanese grew up in Peru with a mixture of cuisines at home: the Creole native to the country and the Japanese that their ancestors shared without making any further distinction between the origins of both. Nikkei in gastronomy is just that: the mixture of both cultures in a diet that has a new personality, with ingredients from both sides of the Pacific. Andrés Hamamoto is 29 years old and is a baseball fan who grew up in …
Masaki Uyema: an adventurer of Nikkei cuisine
Nov. 1, 2019 • Javier García Wong-Kit
The career of a chef usually has several routes that make their training experience an adventure. In 2002, Gastón Acurio, the most famous Peruvian chef, started a television program that charted a path for many young people who wanted to study cooking. The show was called Culinary Adventure and it was a tour of the gastronomic proposals from all over Peru. At that time, Masaki Uyema was 11 years old and did not yet know that he would be a …
Planet Watanabe: Influences of a Nikkei poet
Sept. 2, 2019 • Javier García Wong-Kit
Peruvian poetry has produced great names (César Vallejo, César Moro, José Santos Chocano, Blanca Varela and more signatures) among whom is, without a doubt, the Nikkei writer José Watanabe Varas (Laredo, 1945), whose work has achieved influence different creators through their poems, theater, film scripts and children's literature, among other writings. To know the 'planet Watanabe' is to enter a universe that continues to expand. Books that analyze his life and work, poets who figure in a literary tradition where …
Juan Carlos Fangacio Arakaki: Nikkei through cultural transfusion
Aug. 14, 2019 • Javier García Wong-Kit
Many times we think that identity is something we see in the mirror. The Peruvian journalist Juan Carlos Fangacio Arakaki (Lima, 1988) says that he looks Palestinian because of his long beard and long hair. When he traveled to Japan to visit his mother, who went to work in Nagahama when he was a child, he felt what many Nikkei feel when they are in Japan: that they are not much like the Japanese, despite having the same surnames. In …
Arturo Goga: from the technological hobby to the digital profession
July 3, 2019 • Javier García Wong-Kit
On Google, the name Arturo Goga returns 279 thousand results and they all have to do with a 36-year-old Peruvian Nikkei communicator, who began a hobby for technology when he was a child, and which he has turned into a successful blog and a full-time job. , achievements that not everyone can have in the digital age. His interest began in the years of Atari and the new computers with CD rom readers, and has continued until the era of …
Alfredo Oshiro: illustrated journalism
June 6, 2019 • Javier García Wong-Kit
Not long ago, journalism was the simplified task of writing and photographing what reporters knew when visiting the scene. Radio and television were the first technological media to transfer the news to their platforms and the press made a great innovation with infographics, which in Peru are less than 30 years old, giving the information the color of the schematic illustration. The newspapers El Sol and El Comercio were the pioneers in this work, which has an artistic side that …
Doris Moromisato: parole
May 3, 2019 • Javier García Wong-Kit
There is no word that serves to define Doris Moromisato Miasato (Chambala, 1962), one of the most unique writers and Nikkeis in Peru. Equipped with a voice capable of saying what she thinks, even when what she thinks is not the most popular or socially accepted, she has managed to earn a name in the world of Peruvian literature through poetry, but she has struggled not to be pigeonholed into that facet that began in 1988 with the collection of …
Alfredo Kato: In the eyes of a Nikkei journalist
April 10, 2019 • Javier García Wong-Kit
Journalists are spectators of reality, capable of deciphering it in a simple code that sheds light on what we understand as current events. Alfredo Kato Todio is 81 years old and has a look that, from a very young age, distinguished himself from others to make a name for himself in entertainment journalism, which now in Peru seems inconsequential, as does the topic it addresses. Talking to him about journalism, his career, and the Nikkei community seems like a way …
Nomi Sasaki is inspired by Chabuca Granda to draw migration
Feb. 20, 2019 • Javier García Wong-Kit , Asociación Peruano Japonesa
Express yourself with words, with a song or a drawing. These three forms come together in the creative adventure of the visual artist Nomi Sasaki who, after several trips, hours listening to Chabuca Granda and meditating on the origin of people, migration and the connection with the land, created “En la grama” , a series of 30 drawings inspired by the song of the same name written by the Peruvian composer and performer. “I don't know what stung me,” says …
