Modern and Stateless: A Case Study of the International, Racialised Modernity of the Peruvian Nikkei in Seiichi Higashide’s Adios to Tears

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the process of Japanese emigration to Peru in the early-twentieth century, culminating in their extraordinary rendition from the same country at the hands of the United States government at the height of World War II, analyzing the processes through the lens of Seiichi Higashide’s 1981 testimonio Adios to Tears (Namida no Adiosu). It follows Higashide’s journey from Hokkaido, Japan to Ica, Peru, and finally, via rendition, to the United States, first to Crystal City internment camp in Texas before being ‘paroled’ as an ‘undocumented immigrant’ to Seabrook Farms, New Jersey to provide labour for a privately-held company. Higashide, along with many other Peruvian Nikkei of the same era, fell victim to a series of treaties, laws, and finally, global conflicts that ultimately rendered them stateless. Arguing that this history is the product of the fundamental irrationality of racializing global forces implicit in the notion of modernity, I suggest that its aftermaths continue to resonate today.

KEYWORDS:

• Japan
• Latin America
• modernity
• rendition
• Nikkei

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Amy C. Obermeyer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her current research focuses on gender, race, and subjectivity in the literatures of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Japan and Latin America.

Notes

1 In incidents similar to the United States’ involvement with The Amistad, diplomatic relations between the two countries were first established when in 1871 a second ship, the Mariá Luz (the first had been the Cayaltí) carrying illicit Chinese coolies found itself stranded in Yokohama Harbor. Without diplomatic relationships, the affair became an international incident involving officials from multiple states, ultimately impelling Peru and Japan to sign treaties establishing relations. For further information regarding, see C. Harvey Gardner’s chapter ‘Of Coolies and Diplomats’ in The Japanese and Peru, 1873–1973.

2 Ignacio López-Calvo provides a particularly useful read of the manipulation of race and ethnicity in Alberto Fujimori’s campaign and subsequent dictatorship in the introduction to The Affinity of the Eye.

3 Recent scholarship, most notably that of Junyoung Verónica Kim and Ma Ning, has been grappling with conceptualizing a framework for comparison that does not reproduce the Eurocentrism of the center-periphery model favoured by scholars such as Moretti and Wallerstein. See Kim’s (2017) ‘Asia-Latin America as Method’ and Ma Ning’s (2017) notions of multipolarity and horizontal continuity in The Age of Silver.

4 First-generation immigrant: the ‘sei’ here refers to the specific generation, while the ‘i’ denotes first. Second and third generations are called ‘nisei’ and ‘sansei’ respectively.

5 An individual of Japanese descent living outside of Japan.

6 In fact, until the Meiji period, Japan was not fully unified as a nation, and the twelfth through nineteenth centuries were marked by diminished imperial power. During this time period, both Hokkaido and the Ryukyuan Kingdom began their affiliations with Japan as tributaries of specific clans – in the case of Hokkaido, the Matsumae clan and in Okinawa, the Satsuma clan – thus it is somewhat controversial to suggest they were unified as a part of Japan more broadly.

7 Japanese immigration to the United States was first banned informally through the so-called ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ of 1907, which was later formally codified into law via the Immigration Act of 1924.

8 In the case of China, the effects of Japan’s so-called ‘informal imperialism,’ as Peter Duus frames it, are already apparent. Although China is ostensibly sovereign, Japanese machinations and propaganda regarding China-bound emigration has seemingly achieved the desired hegemony in Japan by this time. Duus notes that ‘by the turn of the century, Japanese began pouring into China in large numbers just as they were pouring into Korea and Taiwan,’ residing in both urban and rural areas, occupying seats in local governments, and flooding Chinese markets with Japanese goods (Duus 1989: xxiii). The Japanese immigration and imperialism machine had already begun to dominate China to the extent China was no longer sufficiently foreign for the putative settler.

9 An in-depth discussion is beyond the scope of this article. However, the Denaturalization Act of 1944 was passed to create a means for Nikkei populations residing in the United States to renounce their US citizenship. The means of doing so was widely considered coercive, and ultimately, most but not all of the renunciants who desired to do so (over 5000 in total) were able their citizenship back (Christgau 1985: 13). For more information see Christgau, John. ‘Collins versus the World: The Fight to Restore Citizenship to Japanese American Renunciants of World War II’.

10 Tracing the similarities of the internment of Japanese Peruvians to those populations in Europe in an in-depth fashion is beyond the scope of this essay. However, it is difficult not to find consonance with, for example, Arendt’s assertion that

there was hardly a country left on the Continent that did not pass between the two wars some new legislation which, even if it did not use this right extensively, was always phrased to allow for getting rid of a great number of its inhabitants at any opportune moment

or the specific condition wherein ‘in the Third Reich there existed a law according to which all Jews who had left the territory – including, of course, those deported to a Polish camp – automatically lost their citizenship’ (Arendt 278–9; 280).

11 A full examination of the concept of dekasegi is likewise beyond the scope of this investigation, however, a brief introduction here is necessary. The term ‘dekasegi’ in Japanese means something akin to ‘working away from home,’ and was the terminology used in Japan to describe immigrants travelling to Peru. The term again came into use in the 1990s in Japan, when the country actively solicited Nikkei Brazilians and Peruvians to work as ‘guest workers’ in Japan during the decade’s economic boom. Presently, the Japanese government is offering financial incentives for guest workers to return to their countries of origin, but with a contractual agreement that they will not return to Japan for a set period of time. This term actively characterizes workers as ‘not at home’ wherever they are, and seems to insinuate perpetual homelessness for the Nikkei community. The connection to statelessness here should not go unnoted.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by New York University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) Field Research Grant.