Title: Growing up as a Japanese person in Peru | Discover Nikkei
Headings: Growing up as a Japanese person in Peru
Growing up as a Japanese person in Peru
Author
Shigueru Julio Tsuha
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Content: I imagine that my brothers had similar experiences. In order to understand how this process of naming takes place within my family, we must first understand the experience of racism that the Japanese encountered in Peru. First, the Japanese entered Peru as cheap, exploitable labor. Such oppression can be compared to that of other indentured and contract laborers in the Americas. Today, many Asian workers are brought to work in sweatshops in the United States. They are promised the opportunity to work off the price of coming to this country. They are contract laborers, but it is not uncommon that these workers are held in slave-like conditions in which they can never fully pay off their debts because the wages they receive are extremely low. The Japanese were in similar conditions. Their entry into Peru as cheap labor marked them as second-class citizens. During World War II, the Japanese population in Peru came under attack as racist hysteria swept the Western hemisphere.