ABSTRACT

The Japanese community of Peru is the oldest and most well established of all Asian communities in Latin America. People of Japanese ancestry have been residing in Peru for more than a century where they initially made productive lives as merchants, tradesmen, shopkeepers, mechanics, and cotton farmers. In more recent decades their descendants have become doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, and successful businessmen. Of course, in the most prominent example of political success, Alberto Fujimori served as Peru’s president for a decade after his election in June 1990. As the Nikkei of Peru move beyond their first century of experience, the younger generations face many of the same challenges in this century as their forbears in Peru confronted in the first years of the twentieth century. Younger Japanese Peruvians are migrating to their ancestral homeland in search of the secure and comfortable lives that have eluded them in Peru. Before I discuss these issues, let me briefly examine some of the distinctive characteristics of the Japanese Peruvians in order to place their experience in the context of the broader Japanese diaspora in Latin America (Masterson and Funada-Classen 2004: 11-86).