A Japanese monthly magazine 'Chou Koron' (Public Discussion) wrote in 1917, 'Brazil is an enormous country, 21 times bigger than Japan and can accommodate hundreds of millions more inhabitants than now. In South America, the Japanese are welcomed, the soil is rich, and many of the customs of the people resemble ours. There is plenty of room for millions of Japanese in this part of the world".
The Japanese took this report seriously. Today, there are over a million people of Japanese descent in Brazil, which has the largest number of Japanese outside Japan. Peru has the second largest, followed by Mexico and Argentina. There are an estimated 1.5 million Japanese descendants in Latin America.
'The Japanese in Latin America (Asian American experience)', a book published in March 2024, brings out interesting and comprehensive information on Japanese immigration into Latin America, their experience in the new continent, their trauma during the Second World War and their impact on Latin America. The author Daniel M. Masterson is a professor of history in the US. He has got collaboration with a US-Japanese scholar Sayaka Funada-Classen who has done research and interviews with people of Japanese descent in Latin America.
The Japanese had come to Latin America as contract labourers to work in agriculture, mines, infrastructure projects and industries. They suffered hardship and racial discrimination. During the Second World War, they were persecuted and some of them were deported to internment camps in the US. However, the Japanese have survived and integrated into Latin American society. They have blended the Japanese qualities of stoicism, teamwork and seriousness with the light-hearted Latino and Samba and Salsa-loving life.
The Japanese people did not emigrate on their own. They were encouraged to do so by the strategic policy of the Japanese government which sought to populate other parts of the world with their people. The government of Japan had signed a series of commercial treaties with some Latin American nations in the 1880s which facilitated immigration to the region. The Japanese government supported emigration with subsidies for travel costs and credit for colonizing projects. There were over fifty private emigration companies sending out Japanese abroad in the 1900s. They recruited and transported contract immigrants, extended loans to the immigrants and invested in colonisation projects abroad in collaboration with the government. They operated training Centers with courses in Portuguese and Spanish languages.
Japanese immigrants went first to Mexico and Peru in the late 1890s. In 1897, the Japanese established an immigrant colony in Chiapas, Mexico. This was organised by the former Japanese Minister of Foreign Relations and ardent proponent of immigration, Takeaki Enomoto. His enterprise purchased 160,550 acres of land for the project. But this experiment failed. In 1899, a group of 790 Japanese male labourers arrived to work in the coastal sugar plantations of Peru. A small group of 126 Japanese arrived in Chile in 1903, while Cuba and Argentina recorded their first few arrivals in 1907.
In 1907, the US restricted Japanese immigration with the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” signed with the Japanese government. Canada followed suit. The US also put pressure on Mexico and Central America to restrict Japanese immigration since some of the immigrants started moving illegally to the US. After this, the Japanese targeted South America more seriously and systematically for emigration.
In 1908, about 800 Japanese immigrants, mostly in family groups, arrived in Brazil to work in the coffee plantations in Sao Paulo State. In the next three decades, the Japanese moved in large numbers to Brazil and in smaller groups to twelve Latin American nations.
Two individuals namely Tanaka, an official of the Morioka Company and Augusto Leguía, a prominent sugar planter and future president of Peru were primarily responsible for initiating Japanese immigration to Peru under the contract labour system in 1899. Subsequent negotiations between the Japanese and Peruvian governments led to the issuance of a decree by President Nicolas Pierola that permitted Japanese contract labour under an initial four-year agreement. This decree stipulated that the recruits were to be primarily experienced male agricultural workers between twenty and forty-five years of age who would work ten hours a day in the cane fields or twelve hours in the sugar mill.
Japanese immigration to Brazil differed from that to Spanish America in that it was heavily subsidised and accompanied by significant capital investment by the Japanese. An agreement for Japanese immigration to Brazil was signed in 1907 by Ryo Mizuno, president of the company Toyo Imin Gaisha with the Brazilian President Jorge Tibirica to bring 3,000 Japanese immigrants to Sao Paulo. These immigrants were to be "agriculturalists fit for farming" and were to consist of families of three to ten members each. They were to be paid on a piecework basis at a rate of 450 to 500 reis (25 to 50 US cents) for every fifty kilos of coffee beans picked.
The Japanese established an administrative agency called as the Federation of Immigration Cooperative Societies under a law passed by the Diet in March 1927. They had created 44 societies in Japan’s 47 prefectures by the mid-1930s. The government extended about $800,000 in loans to the federation to acquire 541,112 acres of land in Sao Paulo and Parana states for colonization. They established another company Sociedade Colonizadora do Brasil Limitada (Brazilian Colonization Company) under Brazilian law to administer the Japanese colonies. This company was used to acquire real estate and construct the infrastructure of roads and common facilities.
In 1926, the Japanese Overseas Development Company (KKKK) purchased 500 acres of land in the province of Cauca, near Cali in Colombia to set up a colony. The company paid for the colonists’ passage as well as their initial local expenses in Colombia. Later, they allowed the colonists to buy their own land.
According to the Japanese foreign ministry, a total of 243279 Japanese had migrated to Latin America from 1899 to 1941 with the following break-up: Brazil 187681, Peru 33067, Mexico 14566 and Argentina 5398.
The Japanese entry into the Second World War and their devastating defeat caused trauma for the Japanese Latin Americans. The Latin American governments interned or removed the Japanese from their homes to more secure areas. They froze the bank accounts of the Japanese, confiscated their radios and phones, banned publications in Japanese, restricted their travel and prohibited gatherings of more than five. They deported about 2000 Japanese to the United States for internment, as requested by the US government. The vast majority of these deportees were Japanese Peruvians.
After the end of the War, the Japanese resumed emigration in 1952. About 50,000 went to Brazil and a few hundred to Bolivia and Paraguay. Many of these post-World War immigrants were from war-torn Okinawa, which was administratively separate from Japan and under direct U.S. military rule. The U.S. government strongly encouraged this immigration because of the economic difficulties of the Okinawan people and the need to acquire land for the military bases on the island. The US administration provided loans and subsidies to these emigrants.
Under an agreement between the Japanese and Bolivian governments, the immigrants were to “dedicate themselves to professions in agriculture and animal husbandry and to demonstrate industry, honour, and aptitude for work.” The Bolivian government granted 87,198 acres of land with a share of 110 acres for each Japanese household.
The Paraguayan dictator Strossner actively encouraged Japanese immigration in his home region of Encarnacion on the border with Argentina. In 1956, he gave land for two colonies to be settled by the Japanese. The Japanese government extended to the colonists credit for tractors, vehicles and construction equipment.
Strossner’s example was followed by the Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo who had invited Japanese immigrants to settle near the border with Haiti in a clear effort to discourage further Haitian immigration in this sensitive area. After Trujillo’s assassination in May 1961, most of the Dominican Republic’s Japanese left.
The first-generation Japanese immigrants worked as labourers in agriculture, rubber plantations, sugar mills, mines, and road and railway projects, apart from taking up low-level jobs as carpenters, and barbers (there were more than sixty Japanese-owned barbershops in Cuba by the mid-1920s), waiters, taxi drivers, dry cleaners (The Japanese operated more than 500 dry cleaners out of the total 800 dry cleaners in Buenos Aires city in the early 1950s) and even as domestic helpers. They suffered enormous hardship, racial discrimination and abuse in Latin America. The Peruvians called the Japanese Chino macacos (Chinese monkeys) equating them with the Chinese who had come earlier as coolies.
The first immigrants to Latin America were overwhelmingly male contract labourers who sought to better themselves financially and then returned to Japan. Only a few returned to Japan. Later, during the periodic economic crises in Latin America and after the emergence of Japan as a prosperous country, Japanese immigration reversed. Some third-generation Japanese have gone back to Japan temporarily and a few permanently for better jobs and economic stability.
But most of the descendants of Japanese immigrants have stayed and become full citizens of Latin America. They have steadily climbed up the social ladder into the middle class with education and entrepreneurship. The Japanese Brazilians have even entered politics at the local, regional, and national levels becoming ministers, mayors and members of legislative bodies. Alberto Fujimori became the President of Peru in 1990 and continued for ten years till 2000. His daughter Keiko Fujimori is head of a political party which has a number of seats in the Congress. She contested the presidential elections three times but lost narrowly. She has a chances of becoming President in the future.
President Alberto Fujimori started off in 1990 as a Meiji reformer by ending the guerilla insurgency, taming hyperinflation and transforming the economy. But in the end, he turned out like a typical Latino Caudillo (strong man) trampling democracy, abolishing the Congress and ruling as an autocrat. He got elected for a third time in 2001 by manipulating the constitution and rigging the elections. But he faced strong public protests. When the criminal and corruption scandals erupted in November 2001, he fled to Japan from where he sent in his resignation by fax, in a bizarre way.
The Japanese government gave asylum to him, issued a Japanese passport and refused the Peruvian request for extradition. But Fujimori did not want to fade into quiet retirement. He came to Chile with the intention of entering Peru but was arrested and extradited to Peru in 2005. He was sentenced to 25 years in jail for human rights abuse crimes. He was released in December 2023. On 14 July this year, he announced his candidacy in the Presidential election to be held in 2026, when he would be 88 years old. On 9 August 2024, the Peruvian government issued a law against the prosecution of crimes against humanity committed before 2002. Fujimori is the most important beneficiary of this.
The Fujimori story is like one of the Magical Realism novels of Maria Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner for literature. Fujimori beat Llosa in the 1990 Presidential election. Since then, Llosa has become a permanent enemy and fierce critic of Fujimori. The juicy story of Fujimori is an ideal material for a Llosa novel. It is surprising that Llosa has not ventured to write a novel based on the story of Fujimori. Maybe because Fujimori the Japanese macho, has outdone the typical Latino Caudillos, beyond the Latino imagination of Llosa.
