Japanese Diasporas by Nobuko Adachi

Author:Nobuko Adachi [Adachi, Nobuko]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415497459
Publisher: Routledge

9 Japanese Latin Americans during World War II

A reconsideration

Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and Akemi Kikumura-Yano

C. Harvey Gardiner is one of the pioneers in the study of Japanese in Latin America. In a widely cited book, Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States (1981), and in a subsequent article titled “The Latin-American Japanese and World War II” (1986), Gardiner offers a very detailed and disturbing portrait of different aspects of this topic.

In this chapter, after summarizing a number of Gardiner’s points, we synopsize various case studies based on data from The Encyclopedia of Japanese Descendants in the Americas (Kikumura-Yano 2002) in an effort to supplement his seminal contributions. Almost every chapter of the encyclopedia was written by insiders working together collectively to represent their own community’s histories and experiences.1

Our thesis is that individually and collectively these community histories paint a somewhat different overall picture of Japanese Latin American experiences than the one portrayed by Gardiner. At one level, this may be because Gardiner’s actual focus is not Japanese Latin Americans per se - despite the title of his 1986 article 一 but specifically those Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes in Peru and to a lesser extent in Panama.2 These individuals and families were then incarcerated in special camps in Texas and New Mexico operated by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service during World War II. And although Gardiner does not cite Michi Weglyn’s book, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (1976: 54-66), Gardiner thoroughly documents the fact that the U.S. federal government was interested in using these Japanese Latin Americans as a “barter reserve.”

In sum, we will argue that when one considers the experiences of Japanese Latin Americans in the Americas during World War II as a whole, they were much more diverse than Gardiner indicates. Although further primary research, both in terms of oral histories and archival work, will be needed to fill in the overall picture, we offer an outline of the variations for Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru. We also offer a preliminary analysis to account for how and why individual Latin American countries responded differentially to their Japanese and Japanese Latin American residents.

C. Harvey Gardiner9s thesis

In his well-known article “The Latin-American Japanese and World War II,” C. Harvey Gardiner gives a concise summary of his previous research.3 His basic claim is that persons of Japanese descent in Latin America suffered egregious treatment and endured profound suffering during this period.

Gardiner’s primary focus is on the 2,264Japanese Latin Americans who were arrested and deported from twelve different Latin American countries during the war. These people were brought into the United States and “experienced the violation of their civil and legal rights, both by their country of residence and by various branches of the American government” (Gardiner 1986: 142). Although the original target of deportation and incarceration was supposedly Japanese diplomatic personnel, Gardiner notes that ordinary persons were swept up as well in some Latin American countries.

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