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27 October, 2003
Nikkei, not just JA
I identify myself as a Japanese American, but I use the term "Nikkei" or "Nikkeijin" freely. Yes, the Nikkei is the word for the Japanese stock market. But no, that's not what I mean.
 The logo for the 2003 Convention in July, of the Panamerican Nikkei Association |
"Nikkei" means "of Japanese descent," and "Nikkeijin" means someone of Japanese descent who is not-Japanese, a citizen of another country. And that includes a significant number of Japanese Canadians and Japanese Latin Americans.
According to the exhaustively researched book "Encyclopedia of Japanese Descendants in the Americas" (a 2002 project of the Japanese American National Museum published by Altamira Press), there were 760,916 Nikkei in the U.S. in 1993. Nikkei were also spread throughout Asia (the largest number, almost 30,000 in China), Europe (3,886 in the U.K., 3,296 in Germany and 2,832 in France), Africa (all of 120 in Egypt in 1993), 55,111 in Canada and in Latin America, an astonishing 620,370 in Brazil.
There's even an Panamerican Nikkei Association (APN), which was started in Mexico City in 1981 and has representatives from 12 countries in the Americas. According to the APN, there are currently 1,227,000 Nikkei in Brazil, followed by 1,000,000 in the U.S. and 80,000 in Peru, 55,000 in Canada and 40,000 in Argentina.
The first Japanese government-sponsored group of laborers were sent to Hawaii in 1885 to work on the sugar and pineapple plantations, but it didn't take long for entrepreneurs to send laborers from Japan elsewhere: in 1886, 40 workers were sent by an Englishman to Thursday Island in the Pacific, and 100 Japanese were sent to a sugar plantation in Australia. The first Japanese immigrants in Mexico arrived in Mexico; 28 laborers were sent to begin a farm colony in Chiapas. The Japanese didn't arrive in Brazil until 1908, but the Portuguese-speaking country became the largest stronghold of Nikikeijin in Latin America, second only in the Americas to the U.S.
The first 790 Japanese landed in Peru in 1899, with a portion of those leaving for Bolivia to work in the rubber forests there. Japanese Peruvians are commonplace enough (there were 55,472 in 1993) that a Japanese Peruvian, Alberto Fujimori (he was nicknamed "Chino" in his country) became Peru's president in 1990. In 2000, he fled the country after series of scandals. The final scandal was that though he was a Nisei born in Peru, his birth was registered with the Japanese consulate, making him a dual citizen. He never renounced his Japanese citizenship, making him legally ineligible to run for president in Peru, but making him eligible for political asylum in Japan, where he's stayed since he left office.
 A well-researched resource from JANM. |
Peruvian Japanese are still embroiled in a controversy over the same internment that JAs were subjected to during WWII.
In 1996, almost a decade after the U.S. government's official apology to Japanese Americans for internment, a class action suit, Mochizuki v. the United States, was filed to gain redress for the wartime incarceration of 2,000 Japanese Latin Americans, most of whom were from Peru.
When the war began the U.S. pressured Latin American countries into signing a unity pact to protect the Western hemisphere, which included the forced repatriation of Axis officials through the U.S. Peru sent not only Japanese officials to the U.S. to be repatriated to Japan, but also people who had nothing to do with the Japanese government, including women and children. Many were simply kidnapped by the Peruvian police and handed over to the U.S. These people of Japanese descent from Latin America, whether they were Japanese citizens of citizens of Latin American countries, were imprisoned in a U.S. Justice Department camp in Crystal City, Texas during the war.
The first Japanese Canadian was a sailor and laborer from Yokohama named Manzo Nagano, who arrived in 1877 in Vancouver and worked for seven years before returning to Japan, opening a restaurant in Seattle and finally settling in Victoria and ending up a successful businessman and a major figure in the local Nikkei community. IN 1977, the centennial of Nagano's arrival in Canada was marked by a ceremony naming a mountain after him - an honor yet to be bestowed on any Japanese American.
The first group of contract laborers from Japan arrived in Canada as mineworkers in Vancouver in 1891; the Japanese immigration to Canada was similar to the Nikkei experience in the U.S. They fought prejudice and racist legislation, established ethnically segregated communities, brought wives from Japan and began families (the first Canadian Nisei, Katsuji Oya, was born in 1889), formed churches for worship (the first Christian for Japanese parishioners opened in Vancouver in 1894, and the first Buddhist temple in 1905), started up Japanese newspapers, and found ways to maintain their heritage in the new world.
In 1919, because half of the fishing licenses in British Columbia are given to Nikkei fishermen, the government begins reducing the number of licenses made available to anyone "other than white."
Immigration of Japanese was limited several times in the years leading up to WWII.
Even though over 75 percent of the 23,303 Nikkei living in Canada at the start of 1941 were Canadian citizens, they were all required to register when war broke out against Japan. Parallel to the JA internment experience, over 12,000 people of Japanese ancestry were evacuated from "protected areas" declared along the coast of British Columbia and sent to internment camps inland. Though not as restrictive as the camps in the U.S., the Canadian government passes a law that allowed them to sell of the Nikkeis' property that had been held in custody.
Toward the end of the war, Japanese Canadians were allowed enlist in the military, and many were allowed to resettle throughout the country, so long as they were east of the Rocky Mountains.
Today, the heritage of the Japanese Canadian community is preserved by organizations such as the Japanese Canadian National Museum and the National Association of Japanese Canadians.
This is another excerpt from "Being Japanese American," my book due out next fall from Stone Bridge Press.