Racial Journeys: Justice, Internment and Japanese-Peruvians in Peru, the United States, and Japan

Extract

On June 13, 2007, the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs created a commission to investigate the facts and circumstances surrounding the relocation, internment, and deportation of Latin Americans of Japanese descent to the United States during World War II. Among these were almost two thousand Peruvian citizens and permanent residents. Though not as widely known as the famous saga of internment and redress of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, in many ways the story of the Japanese in Peru is more intriguing, as much information still lies in the shadows, and is only now coming to light. Likewise, the issues of civil liberties that underscore this story—how a powerful nation can coerce a weaker ally into handing over some of its own people for imprisonment in another country without due process, on the ground that they are potential subversives—are all too obvious in a post 9/11 world fighting a “war on terrorism”. Also, while many people know that Peru's Alberto Fujimori was the first person of Japanese ancestry to be elected leader of a nation outside of Japan—thereby indicating a potential immigrant success story—few are aware of the cultural and social conflicts that still plague today's Peruvian Japanese population. Even fewer are likely to know about struggles of Japanese Peruvians who “return” to their ancestors' homeland for work for higher wages than the unstable Peruvian economy can provide. The short story of the Japanese in Peru, then, is many ways a microcosm of the larger saga of migration, discrimination and assimilation in the globalized, racialized, transnational twenty-first century world.