For Peruvians over 45 years of age, 1989 was probably one of the worst years in the history of their country, devastated by stratospheric inflation that skyrocketed the prices of things every day and terrorism that turned the streets into mined territory.
1989 was also a turning point in the history of the Nikkei community. Although there were already Peruvians working in Japan, the exodus took off that year. It was a stampede. It seemed like everyone was leaving.
One of the thousands of Nikkei who migrated to Japan in 1989 was Kenzo Kobashigawa. He had a job in the computer area of a company that imported and sold car parts, but hyperinflation turned money into fiction.
Three years, Kenzo told himself. That was the period that was imposed as a goal in Japan to work and save. Once the goal was met, he would return to Peru to invest in his parents' restaurant, which needed a financial boost to get back on its feet.
But since life often doesn't understand plans, the three years were multiplied by six.
THE BLACK TRAIN THAT NEVER ARRIVED
His first work stop in Japan was an exhaust pipe and muffler factory in Kanagawa ken.
From that inaugural stage, he remembers with a laugh the first day of work, when he had an experience with which many former dekasegi and immigrants in Japan will feel identified.
He and a colleague—also new—were supposed to work until 8:30 at night (including zangyo ) and return with the rest of the Peruvians to the house they shared.
However, because it was their first day, they were only allowed to work eight hours. As it was, around 5:30 pm—much earlier than expected—they both left the factory to take the train that would take them back. Alone, with no one to guide them.
They arrived at the station and remembered the instructions of the contracting agency's translator, a Brazilian who told them that they had to board a black train. Not red, he clarified. It was emphatic.
The problem was that all the trains were red. The concern of both of them—two people who had recently arrived in Japan, without knowledge of the language—grew as time progressed and there was no sign of a black train, how strange. Approximately an hour passed until they decided to embark on the adventure.
They got on any train and remembering, trying to reconstruct the outward journey while the stations followed one another, they arrived at their turn.
Then they discovered that the black color to which the translator was referring was not that of the train cars, but that of the sign located at the top that indicated that the vehicle stopped at all stations, unlike the express (with a red sign ), which only stopped at some.
Kenzo also remembers that they were paid their salary in cash, a peculiarity that gave rise to an unusual custom that makes him laugh today. Eleven people who did not know each other shared a roof in his house. As a precaution, they carried their entire salary (200,000, 300,000 yen) in their pockets everywhere (home, factory, etc.). Until they spent it little by little or sent it to Peru.
A bank? For a recently arrived foreigner it was an entelechy. If due to not knowing the language you had difficulties taking a train or buying food, opening a bank account in Japan sounded like colonizing Mars.
Yes, there was a translator who could help them, but due to their busy schedule, the long work hours of the dekasegi and the banks' schedules that did not coincide with their free time, it was very difficult.
Until one day the stars aligned and accompanied by the translator they went to a bank, where they opened an account.
THE JAPANESE DID NOT KNOW THE OKINAWEAN SURNAMES
Kenzo quickly adapted to Japan despite the great barrier posed by his ignorance of the language.
Like most Nikkei, he experienced firsthand the discrimination or disdain of the Japanese, but it did not affect him much. He already knew more or less what awaited him from the previous experience of one of his brothers.
“As a Nikkei who has been told all the time that you are nihonjin , to go to Nihon and not be treated as an anihonjin, but as a foreigner, it is shocking, of course. But that was at the beginning. Later we realized 'these Japanese don't know anything' we said, 'that's why they work in a factory'. So we didn't pay attention to them. Until you learn Japanese.”
He experienced alienation, being treated as a foreigner, even despite his Japanese surnames.
“It was very strange for Japanese people to pronounce the surname Kobashigawa. They called me Kobayashikawa, Kobayakawa...Kobayashi they also called me. They couldn't pronounce Kobashigawa. So they chose to call me by my maternal surname, which is Miyahira.”
The problem, however, did not end there.
“I had 'Miyahira' written in romaji (on the uniform). However, the boss I had called me 'Miyahaira' (laughs). I told him 'I'm Miyahira, it's a name in Japanese.' 'Ah, now.' And he came (and said again) 'Miyahaira'. It's uncomfortable that they don't say your last name correctly, being a Japanese last name. Then you find out that they are not used to Okinawan surnames,” he explains.
LEARNING NIHONGO WITH DORAMAS
The plan to work and save in Japan for three years collapsed when the family restaurant in Lima closed due to brutal price increases. With no business to support them, his parents moved to Nihon.
With his parents and siblings in Japan, Kenzo no longer had a home to live in Peru. Furthermore, the country was still suffering from the onslaught of terrorism. Put in that scenario, he decided to settle in the land of his ancestors.
The Nikkei arrived at a job in which he was the only foreigner, a fact that pushed him to redouble his commitment to learning the language. Whether or not he had to master it, he couldn't always depend on translators, even more so considering that Japan would be his definitive homeland.
He realized it more clearly when his father became ill. Kenzo took him to the hospital and the doctor talked to him, but he didn't understand. Then, combining his “broken Japanese” and his “half-English,” he asked him to please write the instructions on a piece of paper.
The Nikkei returned home, took the dictionary and looked up kanji by kanji to decipher the meaning of the doctor's notes. That's how he learned little by little.
He also improved thanks to the dramas he watched on TV. I chose those focused on the daily life of the Japanese and where their protagonists spoke like ordinary people.
With these series he also learned about the social conventions in Japan, how people behaved in certain circumstances (for example, at wakes, how they entered the premises, how they greeted, etc.).
BACK TO PERU... AND NOW?
Kenzo met his wife in Japan. The plan to stay there remained, only not alone, but with his partner. And it would have lasted if they had not told him that his older brother, then in Peru, was seriously ill.
He had to return unexpectedly to Lima to accompany him. Shortly after, his wife returned and they both settled permanently in the Peruvian capital.
It was 2007. 18 years had passed since his trip to Japan.
Now, what to do in Lima? He began looking for work and got a place at the La Victoria Nikkei school as a nihongo teacher.
I had never taught. “It was harder than working at Nihon,” he says. It entailed a great responsibility to instruct children and adolescents. How to reach them? How to make yourself understood? How to keep them calm?
It was a debut not without embarrassing situations that he evokes with spark today, such as when high school seniors who had grown up in Japan and spoke Nihongo would correct him in class if he made a mistake.
“Imagine, they knew more Japanese than me (laughs). Every time I spoke something strange, ' sensei , that's not how you say it,' they corrected me," he remembers.
Three years in La Victoria trained him and in 2010 he began teaching at the Peruvian-Japanese Association, where he remains to this day.
“I never thought I would be a teacher. Teaching never crossed my mind, but now I can't stop teaching,” he says of the vocation he unexpectedly found.
“Teaching Japanese completely changed my life,” he adds. He likes to feel useful, helping his students, to whom he offers his WhatsApp so they can write to him if they want to ask him something. He even responds to former students.
A negative experience in Japan influenced his spirit of service. He says he was once at a train station and didn't know how to get to his destination. There were some Peruvians who knew the place and asked them for help. His compatriots, instead of lending him a hand, told him to fend for himself. That hurt him and he told himself that he would never act like them. If I could help others, I would.
JAPAN? BELIEVE HALF OF WHAT THEY TELL YOU
With the perspective and distance that the years give, Kenzo takes stock of his dekasegi stage: “For me it was very good to go to Japan. It helped me a lot. “I grew emotionally, I grew as a person.” Additionally, he learned to value family and friends more.
Now, having been a dekasegi for almost two decades has immunized him against the idealization of Japan and the Japanese.
“Many students ask me 'what is Japan like?' I always tell them: 'Of everything they tell you, only believe 50%', because you don't know which people you are going to bump into. Yes, you may meet very good Japanese people, or you may meet Japanese people who make your life impossible. The same goes for Peruvians who are very good people and Peruvians—or foreigners—who get on with you.”
Then he adds: “You say 'the Japanese are good people', but maybe you get a boss who is the worst. There is everything, then. Before they told us that in Japan there is no crime, they don't rob you. My bicycle was stolen twice, at the door of my house. There are pickpockets too, not that everything is rosy in Nihon. That's what I teach my students: 'If you want to go to Japan, go, but don't think everything is pretty.' “It has its good things, it has its bad things.”
Kenzo was shocked by the coldness of the Japanese. However, he understands them.
“The majority of Japanese are very traditionalist (young people are a little more open). They close themselves off quite a bit in their society. They are afraid of what they don't know. If it is a foreigner, it is not that they do not want to talk to him, but that they do not know how to respond, how to act with a foreigner.”
In any case, he feels grateful to Japan. First, because in Nihon he met his wife. Secondly, because of the Japanese language. “That's what I live for,” says the sensei who never imagined he would become one and for whom teaching today is almost like breathing.
© 2023 Enrique Higa Sakuda
