Japanese Latin Americans Deported to Internment Camps in the United States During World War II
Did you know that during World War II, Peru deported over 2,000 Japanese to the United States to be held captive in internment camps?
I did not. Not until a student this week told me that they had met a Japanese Peruvian woman recently who had been deported and detained in this way as a child. The student went on to describe that the US had paid Peru and possibly other Latin American countries to facilitate this scheme.
My jaw was on the floor. I had never heard of this. And although I’m not trying to overestimate my knowledge (there’s a lot I don’t know), there aren’t a lot of entirely new events in immigration history that I’ve simply never even heard of.
I had to ask several follow-up questions to make sure I had heard her right.
“Japanese people in Peru?” I emphasized.
Yes.
“Were deported to the United States?”
Yes.
“In order to be held in internment camps?”
Yes.
“And then forced to work in a labor camp in, sorry, did you say, New Jersey?”
Yes.
It was really quite a revelation, not because I was shocked that the United States had done such a thing (I have long since stopped being shocked by the depravity that the US is capable of when it comes to the treatment of migrants), but because it seemed like such a peculiar and far-fetched geopolitical arrangement. Which indeed it was.
South America was a major destination for Japanese emigration, that much was clear. Brazil, in particular, was a major destination for Japanese nationals and their descendants, and still today is (I believe) home to more Japanese people (or of Japanese descent) than any country except for Japan.
I was also aware (obviously, at this point) of Japanese internment in the United States. But I did not know that the US had paid countries to send Japanese people here to be interred. The more I read the more disturbing the facts became.
I found one story about a woman named Blanca who was interviewed a few years ago about her experience by the BBC. "The Peruvian government sold us out to the US government and that is not a very nice feeling. How would you feel about it?" said Blanca Katsura who was deported from Peru to the US at age 12.
Many of the people were kept at Crystal City Family Internment Camp in Texas.
It wasn’t alone in being shocked by all this. I posted this revelation on Twitter yesterday, expecting to receive comments to the effect of, “yeah, we all knew this already,” and feeling somewhat sheepish about my lack of awareness. To the contrary, very many of the commenters (many of them immigration experts) shared the same shock. This made me feel a little better about myself, but it made me feel worse that more people don’t know about this and aren’t teaching it. (You can bet I’ll be teaching this in my course going forward.)
As I said, all of this was news to me. But it wasn’t news to everyone. This is, as you can imagine, common knowledge among people who study this period of history in depth or are more personally connected to this atrocity in US history.
My colleague Elliott Young, also part of the Migration Scholar Collaborative, wrote a chapter about this stomach-churning episode in US history for his book “Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System.” Chapter 3 is titled “Japanese Peruvian Enemy Aliens during World War Two”—so clearly I need to read that.
Andy Turban, a professor at Rutgers University, is currently looking into what happened to Japanese Peruvians in the United States in the 1940s and 1950. Turban’s online exhibition describes how Seabrook Farms, one of the largest agribusinesses in its day, fell short on labor during World War II and made up for it by relying on “approximately 2,500 American citizens (Nisei) and immigrants of Japanese descent (Issei) incarcerated in internment camps.”
Annie Wang (@wanganniej) shared information about the Campaign for Justice that has been organizing to raise awareness and secure redress for people affected by these deportations. Campaign for Justice describes what happened to those people deported to the United States after the war.
“Many of those interned in the DOJ and Army camps were forced into war zones in hostage exchanges for U.S. citizens held in the Far East and Europe. In the two hostage exchanges with Japan, over 2800 civilians were exchanged, including over 800 seized from Latin America.”
Historian Steph Hinnershitz recently wrote a book called “Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II” (read more about the book here).
Carl Takei also described that the issue went far beyond Peru and provided a helpful link to much more information about Japanese Latin Americans. It was there I learned that Peru and the United States never took responsibility for the atrocity.
Finally, Immigration geographer Joseph Nevins shared this documentary called “Hidden Internment”, which is maybe the most gripping and powerful resource of all and worth including on your syllabus if you’re a teacher.
Needless to say, I have learned a lot in the past 24 hours about this truly terrible event in American history. My ignorance has been corrected—at least partly; I have more to learn.
Thank you to the anonymous student who raised this in the first place and to the rest of you who shared such valuable resources.
And finally, my sincere apologies to those Japanese Latin Americans, not only for what the US did to you but also for the fact that we—so many of us, but especially those of us who definitely should have known this story—are just now learning about this.
You deserve justice.
If you have further resources not mentioned here, please post them in the comments so I can add them. I would like for this to serve as a one-stop-shop for anyone trying to incorporate this terrible event into their syllabus or teaching.
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I didn't know this awful fact, either. They barely taught us about American Japanese internment camps in high school history class. Thanks for sharing this information.