This is a story of families torn apart during war and never reunited. It’s a story of cultural identity and how that first disruption echoes into the present day. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is a well-known story. Little known is the deportation of people of Japanese descent from Central and South American countries to U.S. camps.
Most of the roughly 2,000 people deported to the U.S. came from Peru. Bridget Nakamura, an Illinois State University graduate student, said her great grandfather, Shiroshi Nakamura, was one of them.
"The American government and the Peruvian government agreed to send Japanese people to America that they deemed threatening. So, these people either had some type of involvement in the Japanese community, being Japanese teachers, language teachers, or they ran a Japanese newspaper," said Nakamura.
There were also restrictive laws prompted by anti-Asian sentiment in Peru. Derek Kenji Pinillos Matsuda, an associate professor at Meiji University in Japan, studies this particular expulsion of people. Matsuda will speak at ISU on Sept. 17.
His great grandfather, Tatsuki Yoshida, was also forcibly removed from Peru and sent to an internment camp in Texas in 1942.
"The American government asked for Latin American countries to send the enemies to the United States in order to exchange the hostages with the Americans who were captured here in Japan," said Matsuda.
Matsuda's great grandfather was sent to a camp near Crystal City Texas, southwest of San Antonio. Bridget Nakamura's great grandfather was interned not that far away at Camp Kenedy. Kenedy, Texas is southeast of San Antonio.
Nakamura's and Matsuda's ancestors had married Peruvian women and had children they never saw again.
"He wanted to go back to Peru...but since he didn't have the Peruvian passport, so he was not a Peruvian, and he was not allowed to go back," said Matsuda.
Matsuda said only about 600 Peruvian Japanese were exchanged for American prisoners of war. Many of the rest were left in a stateless limbo.
"He was actually as illegal alien in the United States for a long time, but there was a group of Japanese Americans who fought for their rights," said Matsuda.
Matsuda's great grandfather, Tatsuki Yoshida, eventually got a green card and became a citizen. He worked in a laundromat. During the war, Matsuda said Yoshida's Peruvian wife divorced him because it was difficult to survive as a single woman with two kids. She had few choices.
"She went to the mountains, La Sierra, in Peru. She was there during the war because she also was worried about her two daughters because they looked like Japanese. So, she escaped from the city and got married with a man," said Matsuda.
Tatsuki Yoshida never returned to Peru, though years later he did exchange letters with at least one of his daughters. Other Peruvian Japanese people wrenched away from their families didn't even have that. Bridget Nakamura said her family never knew what became of her great grandfather, Shiroshi Nakamura.
"Not really, honestly, no," said Nakamura.
Nakamura said she's still talking to family members and doing research to find out more. It has been tough because her relatives have only mentioned this as a footnote to the larger family story.
"I thought that was very interesting that they kind of just brushed that to the side," said Nakamura.
That's not uncommon for Peruvian Japanese families. Derek Matsuda said some Japanese Americans of Peruvian descent may not even know because the families lost the stories. Others don't want to talk about the "trajectory they had after the camps."
"When they were taken to the United States, they were kind of arrested in Peru, and in the Japanese culture, being arrested is a huge humiliation. They didn't want — they feel shame when they try to talk about what happened," said Matsuda.
These family ruptures and cultural dislocations have affected succeeding generations. Bridget Nakamura said there was prejudice in Peru against her grandparents.
"They were ostracized being Japanese, but they also weren't fully Peruvian, so they were kind of in this like weird middle space," said Nakamura.
Nakamura said her heritage also includes Chinese immigrants to Peru on her mother's side. The family moved to the U.S. in the 1980s. There was prejudice here too.
"I know I look mixed. I know I don't look completely what you would think a Peruvian would look like. I've never really had discriminations by white people. It was more just within the Latino community that I've really been discriminated against because I don't look brown enough," said Nakamura.
Nakamura said the name calling hurt because she grew up in a Latin American culture. She felt degraded and dismissed by her own community even though her family went through a common immigrant story, not speaking the language at first, struggling and working three or four jobs to make ends meet.
"I don't think there was a loss of identity. I think it was more that they began to build this hybrid identity of Japanese Peruvian, which is Nikkei. And so I feel like that's where they built their identity," said Nakamura.
When she started researching her great grandfather, Bridget Nakamura didn't know much about extended family who stayed in Peru. There were a lot of them. In learning about them, Nakamura said she found common ground in family holiday rituals, in food ways, [They eat Chifa, a fusion cuisine of Chinese cooking methods and Peruvian ingredients] and in how they fit into society. Nakamura said she found that affirming.
"Just hearing their stories and how they grew up and how similar they experienced being discriminated against to how I felt, you know, being in America and not looking a certain way. It's just mind blowing in the fact I was able to connect closer to them. I feel like that really enriched my identity and made me more secure with being Nikkei," said Nakamura.
That's true for others as well. Derek Matsuda said Japanese Peruvians tell him that belonging in multiple spaces at the same time turns them inward toward family to sustain culture.
"And they can find in each place, somewhere that you know that they can feel fulfilled, or they can feel as themselves. And I found that this kind of a trans-belonging concept is very interesting for me as well," said Matsuda.
Bridget Nakamura said until she started her research, she had no idea of the full extent of what the American government did to Peruvian Japanese people. She said it resonates today.
"With what's happening with ICE and with certain immigrant groups being targeted just by how they look, and this really anti-Latino or anti-Haitian or whatnot, sentiment being strummed up by the government and by these news corporations that are trying to instill fear in the American public that these immigrants are here to take your jobs or eat pets or whatnot," said Nakamura.
She said it's important to understand that taking people from their countries, stripping them of citizenship and shipping them to other countries has happened before and is happening again.
Professor Derek Matsuda will speak about wartime forced displacement of people and contemporary questions of belonging and identity 5-6:30 p.m. Sept. 17, in Schroeder Hall, Room 244. ISU graduate student Bridget Nakamura will join him after the talk for a question and answer period.
