ABSTRACT
It takes national governments to implement large-scale immigration projects. The ways in which the governments are involved not only determine where and how the immigrants are settled but also affect how the immigrant communities grow. The case in point is Japanese immigration in Bolivia. In its 100-year history, their community has shaped a unique pattern of compartmentalization. It is separated vertically in terms of time and horizontally in terms of physical location into components that are distinct from one another. Vertically, it is separated into the pre-World War II group of spontaneous immigration and the government-sponsored post-war group. Horizontally, the pre-war group is divided between the Amazon region and the old Andean cities, with little contact between them. The post-war immigrants settled in the Santa Cruz region. They established Colonia Okinawa, comprising immigrants from Okinawa and their offspring, and Colonia Japonesa San Juan, made up of those from mainland Japan.1 Such compartmentalization is a distinctive feature of the Japanese Bolivians as compared to other groups of Japanese ancestry in the Americas.
