where neither Brazilian people nor European immigrants wanted to move. This strategy was sought to avoid any conflict of interest with local Brazilians and also to weaken the ethnic presence of Japanese people (Endoh 2009: 31).
Despite the precarious and hostile immigration environments in Peru and Brazil, Japanese proponents stimulated migration with a new approach, sending the immigrants to remote hinterlands while upholding Japan’s responsibility to protect its citizen-migrants at a minimum level. This decision led to the death of many immigrants from malaria and yellow fever in the Brazilian Amazon region and in São Paulo State. Why did the Japanese government have this attitude? It was a “result of a marriage of convenience between the different interests of the sender (Japan) and host states” (Peru and Brazil) (Endoh 2009: 34).
Japanese Immigration to Peru
Japanese immigration to Peru began in 1899 as a labor migration organized by a Japanese migration agency through an agreement with Peruvian sugar plantation owners. The Japanese government approved this contract despite inadequate information about local environmental and labor conditions. Seven hundred and ninety immigrants went to work on eleven sugar plantations on Peru’s Pacific coast, where they faced “harsh working and living conditions in the haciendas and an unfamiliar tropical climate” (Endoh 2009: 20).
Disputes quickly arose between Japanese laborers and Peruvian employees. Feeling the competition of the labor market, townspeople and Peruvian unions did not welcome the newcomers, and Japanese laborers felt exploited and mistreated. Some Japanese workers “fled the quasi-slavery of the plantations” (Endoh 2009: 21), appealing to the Japanese company for repatriation, while others went to Bolivia looking for better jobs. Those were the luckiest ones, because after the first year, 143 of the 790 migrants died from malaria. Due to increases in the settlement rate and the immigrants’ remittances, the Japanese state took over the migration business in the early 1920s.
By 1923, there were 20,630 contract migrants in Peru. The agreement between both countries ended that year. However, the Japanese government sent 12,440 immigrants as late as 1941, including new brides in arranged marriages and employees of Japanese-owned plantations in the Peruvian countryside (Endoh 2009: 22).
Japanese immigrants and their descendants improved their lives by moving to cities and finding jobs in the service sector, such as in barbershops, restaurants, tailor shops, and general merchandise stores. Nevertheless, urban Peruvians were hostile to their presence. They were concerned that the Japanese “would ‘Asianize’ their cities as Chinese immigrants had threatened to do half a century earlier” (Endoh 2009: 22). Therefore, in 1903, the first bill to eliminate Japanese immigration was proposed, but it was defeated in the national legislature.
The Peruvian government continued trying to prevent the entrance of Japanese and other Asian immigrants and enacted a bill in 1906 in favor of European and American immigrants, whose travel expenses would be subsidized. In 1918, the Peruvian Congress defeated another bill that proposed to exclude “people of color,” as Japanese and other Asian people were classified. The Peruvian population’s racist and discriminatory attitudes continued through World War I (Endoh 2009: 22–23).
The return to power of a former president (1919–1930), who was a sugar plantation owner and favored Japanese immigration, diminished the anti-Japanese movement and increased immigration. During the 1920s more than 9,000 Japanese arrived. However, the Great Depression of 1929 jolted Peru, which was heavily dependent on raw material exports. The following year, the president fell to a coup d’état, and the new leaders were far less sympathetic to this ethnic minority. The coup and the political instability of 1930–1931 involved physical assaults and looting against Japanese residents.
Despite the vehement anti-Japanese sentiment expressed by the Peruvian government and public, Tokyo did not suspend its emigration policy; it redirected its emigrants to the interior. But the new administration responded to public sentiment by increasing restrictions on Japanese immigration and the freedom of immigrants living in Peru. In April 1932, the government approved an Act that required all businesses to employ a workforce that was at least 80 percent Peruvians. The law’s intention was to prevent Japanese immigrants and Nikkei from achieving prosperity in Peru.
A trade dispute aggravated the bilateral relationship between the two countries in the 1930s. Peru felt disadvantaged in the cotton trade with Japan, and in 1934, the Peruvian Congress approved the unilateral repeal of its bilateral trade treaty with Japan. Following U.S. efforts to deter Japan’s imperialism, while at the same time making an agreement with that country, the Peruvian government exchanged its trade agreement for an intensified anti-Japanese campaign.
Therefore, at the Inter-American Peace Conference in Buenos Aires in 1936, Peruvian representatives asked neighboring nations to tighten legal restrictions on the naturalization of Japanese immigrants. They looked to prevent Japan from repeating its military-imperial expansion already achieved in Asia. The international zeitgeist against Japanese imperialism was quickly expressed as hate politics in Peru. The simmering racism finally erupted in 1940 in an openly anti-Japanese rally in Lima sponsored by the state. The demonstration deteriorated into looting, assaults, and murder, victimizing Japanese (Endoh 2009: 23–25).
The breakout of war between Japan and the United States in the Pacific struck a catastrophic blow to Japanese immigrants in Peru. The government of Peru joined the Allied Forces and soon severed diplomatic relations with Tokyo. Japanese nationals and their family members were forcibly relocated overseas. Japanese adult males became the target of arrests based on lists prepared by the U.S. Consulate. They were transferred to U.S. internment camps in Texas at Crystal City, Kennedy, and Seagovill. From January 1943 to February 1945, 1,771 men and women of Japanese origin were deported from Peru to the camps. That accounted for more than 80 percent of the total number of Japanese deportees from Latin American countries (Bolivia, Venezuela, Panama, and El Salvador), showing the severity of Peru’s persecution against the Nikkei. Those who remained faced the loss of their properties and were severely persecuted. After the war, it took a long time until the deportees could return to Peru to join their families. Others never did. Victory in World War II was seen to legitimize Peru’s mistreatment of its ethnic Japanese minority. Racism against people of Japanese origin persisted in peacetime society and workplaces. No postwar Japanese immigrants went to Peru (Endoh 2009: 26).
Japanese Immigration to Brazil
As Japanese immigration to Brazil is my ultimate focus, I will describe it in detail, especially immigration to São Paulo State, where Bastos is located. First, I deal with the characteristics of land ownership, the labor relationships between plantation owners and slaves and immigrants, and the Brazilian elite’s aspirations of making the population white through miscegenation, which would affect Japanese immigration.
Slavery, Land Ownership, and Immigration
The major source of property in Brazil was the Portuguese Crown’s donation of large areas of land called sesmaria, under the condition that it would be cultivated within six months (Candido 1971: 59). This form of land concession predominated in the 1700s.
The sesmaria system was created in Portugal at the end of the fourteenth century. Its goal was to solve the problem of supplying the country, putting an end to a severe crisis of general foodstuffs. The objective of legislation was not to prevent land from remaining uncultivated, but rather to impose the obligation that the soil be utilized. In an effort to understand the peculiar characteristics of the system, researchers have stressed that, in Brazil, the Portuguese Crown needed to establish a judicial system capable of securing colonization. The sesmaria system was established in Brazil not to resolve the question of access to land and its cultivation, as was the thinking in Portugal, but to regularize colonization. . . . Sesmeiro is used to indicate one who holds title to land under such system. (Motta 2005: 2, fn.1)
The
