LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

Immigration's Tangled Threads: Negotiating Immigration and Anti-Japanese Law in Peruvian-Japanese Bilateral Relations, 1935-1939

• In Event: Historical ties of Japan with Latin America

Abstract

In June 1936, Peru unilaterally ended Japanese immigration, with the Supreme Decree of 1936. Despite good trade relations negotiated with Japan that year, Peru legitimized anti-Japanese sentiment. The new cap of immigrants was 16,000 per year, effectively barring more entries indefinitely. Peru’s new law claimed these immigrants undermined “the wellbeing of the economy” and cultural customs. Ironically, Japan continued to be the biggest exporter (and a major importer) of cotton to Peru. A focus on these countries’ diplomacy surrounding trade quotas and the 1936 immigration ban demonstrates their connections in the Global South prior to WWII. I frame these negotiations as a site of contention between a nation (Japan) which wanted the power of Europe and another nation (Peru) whose rulers aspired to be like white Europeans. While anthropologist Ayumi Takenaka and historians like C. Harvey Gardiner argue pre-war Japan had little interest in economic trade with Peru, I argue there were prewar possibilities for expansion of trade that were stymied due to Peru’s fears of alleged racial weakening and of aggression in Asia (e.g. Japan’s invasions of China in 1937). Drawing on recent scholarship of Laura Benton, who acknowledges Latin America was not on the margins but instead, its own center “not … squarely in the West” (2004), I use declassified documents from the Peruvian consulates and Japanese embassy in Lima to trace racial characterizations expressed by Peru’s Ministry of Foreign relations from 1935 to 1939. Diplomats transformed abstract fear of the “Yellow Peril” into a concrete policy.

Author

• Benjamin J. DuMontier, SNA International