In May 1940, as crowds swept through the streets of Lima smashing windows and setting fire to Japanese-owned shops, some of the owners tried a desperate trick; they hung Chinese flags above their doors, hoping to be mistaken for anyone but themselves. Fifty years later, crowds in the same city were chanting a very different word at a Japanese face. “El Chino!” they cried, as Alberto Fujimori – the son of Japanese immigrants and a former university rector who had no prior political experience – danced at rallies on his way to winning the presidency of Peru with over 62 percent of the vote. Between these two scenes lie three days of rioting that left as many as 10 Japanese Peruvians dead, a wartime deportation that sent some 1,800 of them to internment camps in the United States, and decades of quiet reconstruction. So how did a country that had looted its Japanese community elect one of its descendants to the presidency within a single lifetime?
The roots of this hostility were partly economic. In 1899, the first 790 Japanese migrants arrived aboard the Sakura Maru as contract workers for sugar and cotton plantations. Most were poor farmers from rural Japan, attracted by promises of higher wages and a better life. However, conditions on Peruvian farms rarely fulfilled these hopes: diseases like typhus and malaria were rife, working conditions were harsh and the workers’ contracts were restrictive. When their contracts expired, many Japanese immigrants moved to Lima and Callao, using skills from Japan to open small businesses which often competed with Peruvian ones. These businesses were often very successful and thus, alongside the high number of Japanese migrant workers in Peru (some 18,000 by the start of WWII), led to many Peruvians fearing their competition for jobs and customers. The main labour union set up an Anti-Asian Association in 1917 and lobbied to ban Japanese immigration, while successive governments supported policies restricting Japanese immigration. This discrimination intensified in the early 1930s after the 1929 stock market crash; Peru suffered heavy economic consequences, and Japanese commercial success and remittance payments back to Japan became a popular target for blame. Ironically, the very qualities Peru had imported the Japanese for – their discipline, their thrift and their capacity for hard work – were precisely what made them resented once they stopped working for others and began working for themselves. However, economic rivalry alone cannot explain the hostility.
By 1940, prejudice had been written into law. Immigration restrictions introduced in 1936 had severely curtained further Japanese immigration and limited citizenship rights for some Japanese Peruvians. Yet by then, around 26,000 Japanese already lived in Peru, including around 9,000 Peruvian-born children (Nisei). Legal discrimination and media campaigns had built immense pressure towards the community, culminating in the Saqueo, or “the Looting”, of May 1940. The riot began on 13 May 1940, initiated by an anti-Japanese march led by teenage students in Lima, and quickly spread to smaller cities. During the three-day period, about 600 homes, schools and businesses owned by the Japanese population were trashed or burned, with as many as 10 Japanese people dying during the riots. What was most revealing was the lack of police intervention; the public destroyed properties while the police stood by, showcasing how the hostility wasn’t just mob anger, but something tolerated at the very top.
This persecution only escalated during the Second World War, when state-organised deportations of Japanese Peruvians began. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States feared that Japanese communities based across the Americas might help Japan, and so asked Latin American governments to send them to the United States for internment. Peru responded enthusiastically, and of the roughly 2,200 Japanese Latin Americans forcibly taken to the United States, 1,800 came from Peru. Many historians have subsequently argued that Peru’s motive for this mass deportation was less about any security threat, but more strongly derived from economic interests, with Peru seizing the property and assets of those forcibly removed without compensation. If Peru’s motives were indeed economic, then the deportations were hardly a wartime security measure at all, but rather an institutional continuation of the Saqueo: what the mob had looted from Japanese Peruvians, the state now simply confiscated and took for themselves.
What was left in 1945 was a broken community: the Japanese Peruvians who remained had lost their leaders, their schools, their property and their newspapers. Yet the end of the war also allowed the community to redevelop their role in Peruvian society. Prior to the war, many immigrants had planned to earn money and eventually return to Japan. However, with Japan now defeated and devastated, there was little reason to go back, and so many families began to accept that Peru was their permanent home. An important part of this rebuilding was the Nisei – second-generation Japanese Peruvians. With Japanese schools shut, the Nisei studied in Peruvian state schools and grew up speaking fluent Spanish, integrating them more deeply into Peruvian society, with many subsequently becoming professionals or learning trades such as watchmaking and photography. Peru’s attitudes were also changing. After the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, diplomatic relations with Japan were restored, and in the 1960s the Peruvian state even compensated the community for the confiscation of Japanese community schools during WWII. During that same period, Japanese Peruvians became increasingly visible in cultural, professional and public life. Slowly, the image of the Japanese in Peru began to shift from that of a threatening alien presence to that of a hardworking, disciplined and honest citizen. If the prewar community had been seen as a foreign colony in Peru, the postwar generation set out to become a Peruvian community with Japanese roots, a shift captured perfectly in 1984, when its central association renamed itself the Asociación Peruano Japonesa, placing the word “Peruano” before “Japonesa“.
Nevertheless, the changes within the community alone cannot explain 1990. Peru itself had also changed. By the end of the 1980s, the country was close to collapse, with the economy is disarray – inflation hit approximately 7,650% in 1990 – and an environment of political violence – demonstrated by the Shining Path, a terrorist group who planted car bombs in Lima to kill civilians in the late 1980s – which exposed the state’s inability to maintain order. As a result, many Peruvians had lost faith in their traditional politicians, and showed their disapproval in the 1990 election. The favourite, Mario Vargas Llosa, was a white, upper-middle-class novelist, whose coalition included established centre-right parties. In contrast, Alberto Fujimori, the head of Lima’s Agricultural University, was a political newcomer and had only formed his party, Cambio 90, in September 1989. Despite this, he rose from just 6% in the polls a month before the election to second place in the first round, forcing a runoff. By 1990, Peru’s crisis had turned political inexperience from a weakness into a qualification: in a country that had lost faith in its rulers, being unlike them was one of the most persuasive credentials a candidate could possess.
What made Fujimori’s rise so striking was that he did not hide his Japanese background, but used it. His campaign slogan, “honesty, technology and work”, deliberately drew on the new stereotype of Japanese Peruvians as hardworking and disciplined. Furthermore, his background set him apart from Peru’s white political elite. Fujimori would visit poor highland farmers wearing a poncho and a chullo, the traditional Andean hat and dance at rallies to a cumbia song called “El ritmo del Chino”, embracing a nickname much like the one once used to insult Japanese shopkeepers. The strategy worked; on 10 June 1990, Fujimori defeated Vargas Llosa in the runoff, winning over 62% of the valid vote. Fujimori did not so much overcome his difference as turn it into a brand, proving that the stereotype which fuelled the riots of 1940 had never disappeared; it had simply been given a new and more flattering meaning.
It would nevertheless be misleading to interpret Fujimori’s victory as proof that Peru had fully accepted Japanese Peruvians. His nickname, “El Chino“, still labelled him as ethnically distinct, showing that many voters continued to see him as different, even if he claimed to take it as a sign of affection. Moreover, many Peruvians may have been voting against the old elite rather than explicitly for a Japanese Peruvian; Fujimori himself later said his victory came from the same frustration with politics that had fuelled the Shining Path. His presidency also complicates the story; in April 1992 he shut down Congress with the help of the military, taking a more authoritarian turn. His government was later linked to torture, forced disappearances and the intimidation of journalists, leading to his conviction for human rights abuses. Yet, opposition to Fujimori was largely about his authoritarian rule rather than his ethnicity, which itself shows how far attitudes had shifted since 1940. Peru’s acceptance of Japanese Peruvians was therefore real, but it was never unconditional; it rested less on Peruvians seeing them as equals than on what they could offer the country at a time of crisis.
Ultimately, Japanese Peruvians’ journey from looted shops to the presidential palace was real, but the stereotype behind it never truly changed. In 1940, being seen as different made Japanese Peruvians targets; in 1990, it made one of them president. Even in 2026, when Keiko Fujimori narrowly won the presidency, a fringe claimed her victory was a Japanese plot, despite her being born in Peru. The difference, it seems, was never truly accepted; it was simply found useful.
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Shintani, R. “The Nikkei Community of Peru: Settlement and Development.” Ritsumeikan Journal of International Relations and Area Studies.
Calderón Bentin, S. “The Politics of Illusion: The Collapse of the Fujimori Regime in Peru.” Theatre Survey, Cambridge University Press.
“Japanese Peruvians.” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America.
“Japanese Latin Americans.” Densho Encyclopedia.
Gardiner, C. H. Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States. University of Washington Press, 1981.
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