The Shibayama were just one of thousands of families that were expelled from the place they called their forever home.
In the decade of 1940, were taken from their home in Lima, Peru , and taken as prisoners to the southern United States, where they were imprisoned in a internment camp for Japanese, Germans and Italians.
The Second World War had exploded and Washington wanted to get the “possible enemies” under control.
The fact that the Isamu brothers, Kenichi and Takeshi Shibayama were born in Peru, and therefore had the nationality of that country, did not matter for the war policy that the United States coordinated with the Latin American countries.
The Japanese were to be stopped and in some cases used for the prisoner exchange , as happened with the grandparents of Isamu Shibayama, who laments: “I never saw them again.”
The surprise attack on the US military base in Pearl Harbor , December 7, 1941, by the Japanese army -which made the US enter. The US in the race – led to the acceleration of this ethnic policy, rather than military intelligence, as Washington would recognize many years later.
“Without a doubt, Pearl Harbor was the trigger that made that communities of Japanese origin, not only in the United States, but in all of Latin America , were considered as enemies ”, historian Sergio Hernández tells BBC Mundo.
Close to 2. 300 people were brought from 12 Latin American countries to detention centers in the United States. It involved Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and the Dominican Republic, according to an investigation by the US government of 1982.
The 80% of them came from Peru.
But to understand the harassment of the Japanese, we must first understand what happened since the beginning of the 20th century, “when Japan began to position itself as a great world power”, Hernández points out. .
Japanese prosperity
The case of Shibayama has been one of the best known because the brothers sought for decades that the United States apologize to Latin Americans unjustly confined in internment camps.
Their parents and grandparents settled in Peru at the beginning of the twentieth century and they created a textile business that made them prosper quickly. Successful business stories were common among families of Japanese origin in that country and others in Latin America.
But in Peru , that prosperity caused a anti-Japanese sentiment to grow ,
In May of 1940, Peru experienced a wave of looting that ended with the destruction of close to 600 businesses, homes and schools owned by citizens of Japanese origin.
This “despite the fact that they were highly integrated” in society, Hernández explains.
“They were educated communities, literate and, in general terms, had covered primary education. And in our countries this does not happen. So they move up socially very very quickly. They begin to form their small and large businesses successfully. And the same happens in the United States ”, says the researcher.
The largest Japanese communities in Latin America developed mainly in Brazil, Mexico and Peru , but there were them in almost the entire region.
But then came a American policy that sowed distrust in a generalized way.
The chasing
Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt had already issued the Executive Order 4739 , published in February 1941 and that stipulated the “relocation of the Japanese”.
Migrants and their descendants who were on the west coast of the United States .UU., “considered a threat to national security” , had to be taken to about thirty fields of ” internment “far from the Pacific.
Washington feared that there were collaborators of the Empire of Japan, which was part of the Axis powers (along with Germany and Italy) of World War II. They calculated that there would be sabotage in their territory or attacks on the Panama Canal, then administered by the United States.
This despite about what 80. 000 from 120. people of Japanese origin were U.S. citizens by birth.
And soon the Latin American countries were “invited” by Washington to follow this policy.
It was in 1944 when the Peruvian police took the two women from the Shibayama family: “They were put in a cell with criminals and prostitutes, they were afraid, hugged and cried all night,” Isamu Shibayama testified before the Inter-American Commission on Rights Human (IACHR) in 2018.
Behind the subsequent arrest of the father, the family was taken by boat to Panama, where many detainees -mainly adult men- carried out work s forced s . The father was confined to a separate section and only allowed to see his family 000 minutes a day.
In Panama they found other Japanese detainees from other countries. They were all taken to the southern United States, to internment camps where there were also people of German and Italian origin.
“I was very sad, because I was partly raised by my grandparents and they were used in one of prisoner exchanges. After they left Peru, I did not see them again ”, declared Isamu Shibayama -who died in 2017 – before the IACHR, in a hearing on his demand for justice.
Internment camps
Internment camps on US soil were not extermination camps or in them there was violence , as in those of Nazi Germany.
But yes They were detention centers in which entire families, including many children, were detained because of their ethnic origin and not because they were found guilty of anything.
The one in Cristal City, a small town in the South Texas, has been one of the most documented.
There I went eron carried almost all 2. 300 citizens of Japanese origin from Latin America , of which about 1. 900 were from Peru .
The 150 buildings originally constructed to house to migrant workers during the Great Depression, they were fenced off with high fences and watchtowers, and had armed guards who watched over “enemies” of the US, including women, the elderly, or children.
There were food stores, auditoriums, warehouses, administrative offices, a hospital, places of worship, schools and recreation areas.
Many relatives of the detainees chose to be taken to Crystal City to join the heads of the family: “In N New Orleans they confiscated our passports. They put us on a train and took us to the Crystal City internment camp, in Texas ”, Blanca Katsura, a Peruvian-Japanese woman, told BBC Mundo in an interview in 2015.
Another of them, Chieko Kamisato, recalled: “When we got to New Orleans by boat, they forced us to undress and sprayed us with DDT (a highly toxic insecticide). I know it was a very humiliating moment for my mother. ”
The testimonies that emerged years later show that it was a relatively quiet place, mainly for the children who did daily activities, such as going to school or playing in various spaces.
But for the Japanese community and experts like Hernández, the fact that they were not extermination sites did not imply that they were not camps concentration.
“ They were forced to go there, they couldn’t go out. They were guarded by the military. I think this is very severe “, says the researcher.
By December 1945, approximately 1. 260 Japanese Peruvians were taken from Crystal City. 600 were brought to Hawaii and 660 to Japan, because Peru did not accept them back.
“We really do not know a single case of a spy who was detained in an internment camp ”, explains Hernández.
The others exiled
Although most were not sent to the US, citizens of Japanese origin in Mexico and Brazil were also victimized.
“My great-grandfather’s name was Jimpei Ogata,” Jumko Ogata, an activist from the Nikkei community, tells BBC Mundo.
At the beginning of the 20th century, when to Mexico, he worked under conditions of slavery in coal mines and even participated in the Mexican Revolution on the side of Pancho Villa.
To the Settling in Otatitlán, Veracruz, he formed a family of seven children. But, like other members of the Japanese community, during WWII was forcibly taken away from his house.
“In World War II my great-grandfather was taken away, despite there was no proof that he was a spy. In fact, he didn’t even know there was a war, because the communication networks weren’t the same as they are today, ”says Jumko Ogata.
Like many other Japanese, he was forced to concentrate in Mexico City , where he was guarded. Others had to settle in Guadalajara.
Those who had a better economic position They could buy a house and stay in it, while others, like Jimpei Ogata, were imprisoned.
“He was in prison for about three years, or between prison and a designated space from which he could not leave in Mexico City ”, explains his great-granddaughter.
“ But there are many cases like my great-grandfather’s. Most Japanese people, even though they were already Mexican citizens, were forced to concentrate. And this was therefore a racist policy promoted by the United States government ”, he points out.
“ If they had businesses, the they lost. If they lived in a house of their own, they lost it too. There was really a great displacement and loss , they were traumatic processes for the community. ”
Hernández indicates that, unlike other Latin American countries, In Mexico, the Japanese were not summarily sent to the United States .
In Brazil, where there was a Japanese community made up of more than 250. 000 people, the Nikkei were forbidden to speak Japanese.
Some were segregated to towns such as Paranaguá and Tomé-Açu.
Demands for forgiveness
The United States recognized a Partial responsibility for what happened to the Japanese many years after they were held in internment camps.
President Ronald Reagan issued a statement of lost on and offered up to US $ 20. 000 to Japanese Americans who were unjustly taken prisoner.
But Latin Americans like the Shibayama were left empty-handed having been classified as undocumented , despite having been brought to the US against their will.
Although some received residency or nationality, as well as subsequent compensation of US $ 5. 000, Washington has not offered apologies to date to Latin Americans of Japanese origin as demanded by the Shibayama family, despite the fact that the IACHR agreed with them in 2020.
In Latin America, it was not until 2011 that the Peruvian president Alan García apologized for “forgiveness for this serious attack on human rights and the dignity of the Peruvian-Japanese and Japanese.”
“Many of the deportees did not return, many of those unjustly imprisoned behind barbed wire, saw how their property had disappeared and their small businesses and industries had been destroyed. And many were unable to regain their farms and agricultural land, ”he said in an informal statement.
Jumko Ogata has tried to get Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to apologize, as the president has requested from Spain for the conquest of the indigenous peoples.
“In the case of my family, because there was a very strong disruption of the family dynamics, because being seven children, my great-grandmother was pregnant with her youngest child when they took her husband away. They are things that cannot n repair “, he says .
However, did not find answers from the authorities or a “gesture” that allows us to recognize “the violent history that the Mexican government had towards the Japanese community in order to make a kind of reconciliation”.
That it happens, however, is something important, according to historian Sergio Hernández.
“All governments have to apologize to them. This is very little known. And it is important that it is known so that this type of stories, of racial and ethical persecutions, is not repeated . ”
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