From DiscoverNikkei.org
Philip Mauceri, Japan and Peru in the Fujimori Era: The Ties That Bind
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IMMIGRATION, WAR AND RECOVERY: 1873-1980
Although the first trade and friendship agreement between Japan and Peru was signed in 1873, the first such agreement between Japan and a Latin American nation, it was not until the start of the 20th century that sustained contact between the two countries began. This contact took the form of large scale Japanese immigration to Peru. Between 1899 and 1923, 82 ships carrying nearly 18,000 immigrants arrived in the port of Callao.1 The majority of these immigrants arrived with four year contracts to work on the sugar and cotton plantations of the coastal regions of Peru. The largest labor contractor was the Marioka Company, which recruited and transported workers from the impoverished rural regions of Japan. Recruitment of foreign laborers to work on coastal plantations had begun in 1849 with the importation of Chinese "coolies" to meet labor shortages. Despite several attempts to curb Chinese immigration, railroad construction at the end of the 19th century increased the demand for Chinese laborers, many of whom had married mestizos and established chinatowns in several Peruvian cities.2
Following the pattern of Chinese immigrants, many Japanese laborers migrated to cities once their labor obligations had been fulfilled. In the cities they established their own neighborhoods and small businesses, becoming well-known for their open-air markets and bazaars.3 However, unlike their Chinese counterparts, few Japanese-Peruvians intermarried with mestizos or other local populations. Moreover, they maintained their cultural homogeneity and distinctiveness by nurturing Japanese language schools and cultural associations in their neighborhoods.
The arrival of Japan's first ambassador in Peru in 1921, which was accompanied by the expansion of the 1873 trade agreement and a thriving Japanese-Peruvian population, made the 1920s an era of closer ties between the two countries. By 1925, one percent of Peru's imports were coming from Japan. Although this was far below the imports from Europe and the United States, it represented the beginning of a true trade relationship and was actually comparable to Peru's trade with some of its Latin American neighbors.4
During the next two decades, the deepening ties between the two countries and the growing prosperity of the Japanese-Peruvian community were strained by war and internal repression against the Japanese. Throughout the 1930s, the Peruvian government issued decrees restricting immigration from Japan, prohibiting citizenship to the children of Japanese immigrants and revoking the residency of Japanese-Peruvians who left the country. Concern with Japan's international expansion were combined with racist xenophobia that viewed the Japanese-Peruvians' tight-knit urban communities as foreign and possibly subversive. Fears turned violent when in May 1940 rumors of an imminent Japanese invasion led by "zeros" resulted in a riot throughout downtown Lima that ended in the looting of 600 Japanese-Peruvian businesses and ten deaths.5
1. Luis Jochamovitz, Ciudadano Fujimori: La Construcción de un Político. (Lima: PEISA, 1993), p. 23.
2. Henry Dobyns & Henry Doughty, Peru: A Cultural History. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 173 and p. 193
3. Jochamovitz, p. 25.
4. Dobyns & Doughty, p. 304.
5. Jochamovitz, p. 63.