This could be a sensitive topic I will made but this is my thoughts on the conditions of Japanese-Peruvians in WWII. It's not just how they were a target of racism in Peru for associating itself with USA and being anti-Japan for fear that Japan would invade South America for it's bases to attack the United States.
First, I thought about this when I am talking to a Peruvian woman at work about the Peruvian-Japanese that were interned in the United State and she doesn't have a concrete idea why it happened. I got home and thought if it was the best topic to make out from sad stories from history.
I would discuss more on their lives on the camps in the United States. It was the darkest days in their plight that the trauma caused them not to accept the compensation from the American government decades later.
After the Pearl Harbor bombing, Peru broke ties with Japan and the suspicion on the Japanese-Peruvians increased as Peru imitated what happened in USA but Franklin Roosevelt wanted to remove all the Japanese in Peru and you know what happened..
According to Gardiner (in Hirabayashi and Yano 2006: 160), 2,264
Latin Americans of Japanese descent were deported to the United States
in 1942. Among those, at least 1,800 people were from Peru. Those
Japanese who were on a “blacklist” at the American embassy in Peru were
kidnapped and deported at gunpoint by the Peruvian police to internment
camps in Texas and New Mexico. These deported “Japanese” included many
people born in Peru (Gardiner 1981: 14-15; Hirabayashi and Kikumura-Yano
2007: 157). At these camps, the Japanese-Peruvians were joined by some
500 Japanese immigrants and their children from eleven other Latin
American nations, (i.e., Bolivia,[2] Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican
Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua,
and Panama).[3] It is hard today to discern the precise reasons for
these deportations. Patriotic wartime hysteria and political pressure
from the United States were major contributing factors, but these simply
added to the already extensive patterns of discrimination found in
Peru. According to California Democratic congressman Xavier Becerra, one
motive behind this action was to use these people as bargaining chips.
Becerra and members of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and
Internment of Latin Americans of Japanese Descent Act (S 381 and H.R.
662) claim that some 800 Japanese Latin Americans in these camps were
sent to Japan in exchange for captured American soldiers. However,
substantive evidence that these exchanges actually took place remains to
be documented.
Life in the camps was not only a physical and economic struggle for
Japanese-Peruvians, it also involved conflict with both non-Japanese
Americans and Japanese Americans. Physically, the internment camps in
the United States were like prisons, with residents surrounded by
barbed-wire fences with armed guards. Physical conditions, especially at
first, were stark. Each camp housed about 10,000 people, and conditions
were often crowded. However, the residents gradually organized
themselves, and by the end of the war something of a community had grown
in each camp. There were newspapers, amateur theaters, schools, and
sports teams. Many people had jobs, such as cooks, janitors, or
health-care workers. As time passed, some Japanese were given a chance
to be released temporarily from the camps to engage in agricultural work
in local areas. But these opportunities were mostly limited to Japanese
Americans, most of whom were either first-generation Japanese or their
Nisei second-generation children born in the United States. They knew
almost nothing about Peru or the Japanese Peruvians, and showed little
interest in learning more. The feelings seemed mutual. This was
especially true for the Nisei, most of whom thought of themselves simply
as Americans or Peruvians and identified with the cultural and social
values of their respective host nations. The Japanese minority from
Latin America, then, was a minority even in the internment camps.
Not surprisingly, Japanese Peruvians, whose only American experience was
their internment, were equally, if not more, hostile. By 1943, after
many Japanese Americans had proved loyal to the US by enlisting, the US
began drafting Japanese-American men including those who had been denied
most of the rights enjoyed by US citizens and been imprisoned. As a
result by the end of the war more than 33,000 Japanese-American men and
women had served in the American armed forces. The West Coast exclusion
orders that had barred Japanese Americans from living on the coast were
terminated in December, 1944, and the last camp was closed in March
1946. Although no provisions were made to compensate them for the losses
they incurred during the war or as a result of internment (except for
the $25 that each was given when leaving the camps), Japanese-Americans
were free to go anywhere in the country. Many returned to the West
Coast. But Japanese-Peruvians who were detained in the United States
were neither allowed to return to Peru until 1948. Nor were their
belongings returned to them by the Peruvian government following return.
Although a few managed to return to Latin America, many were either
deported to Japan or reentered the United States from Mexico and applied
for a visa to stay in the United States. In 1988, over 110,000 Japanese
Americans who were interned during the war received an official apology
from the American government and $20,000 compensation for being
incarcerated. However, Japanese Latin Americans who were interned
received no apology or compensation. This was because when they were
deported from Peru, their passports were taken away by the Peruvian
government, and they were classified as "illegal aliens" upon their
arrival in the States. Being neither U.S. citizens nor permanent
residents at that time, they failed to qualify for reparations even
though the majority eventually became American citizens after the war.
Finally, after a class-action lawsuit, in June 1998 American-interned
Latin Americans received an official apology from the U.S. government
and nominal compensation of $5000. However, only about 800 Latin
Americans accepted this offer, the others simply rejecting it outright.
As mentioned, in summer 2007 a US Senate committee formed a commission
to investigate the relocation, internment, and deportation of Latin
Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. It estimated that the
cost of the investigation would be about $500,000. The sponsors
included Senators Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka from Hawaii, Ted
Stevens and Lisa Murkowski from Arkansas, Carl Levin from Michigan,
Patrick Leahy from Vermont, and Congressmen, Xavier Becerra, Dan
Lungren, and Mike Honda of California and Chris Cannon of Utah. The
investigation was originally initiated in 2006 by the Commission on
Wartime Relocation and Internment of Latin Americans of Japanese Descent
Act. It remains to be seen if the commission will come up with a
solution that is acceptable to both the US government and the Latin
American Japanese victims.
I have to copy it from an external site but reading the whole thing which I did is to see, how the internment camps made them hostile to the American government and were the most out-of-place people in those camps. They can't assimilate with the Japanese-Americans in the camps because they only know Spanish unlike their American counterparts that speaks both Japanese and English fluently. Being stateless, some made their way to the United States while a few went back to Peru to start again.
What I am writing here is an act of tragedy, made possible by people like Roosevelt that wanted to destroy the Japanese even in Peru, for his political ambitions....The Japanese-Peruvians would suffer more in the internment camps than the Japanese-Americans...Losing their Peruvian citizenship, few returned, having the internment trauma and most of all, being the victim of racism altogether.
