Towards an Archaeology of the Japanese Diaspora in Peru
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Towards an Archaeology of the Japanese Diaspora in Peru Patricia Chirinos Ogata 1
& Daniel
Dante Saucedo Segami 2
Accepted: 20 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Since the arrival of the Sakura Maru in 1899, and even back to the seventeenth century with the presence in Lima of Indios de Xapón, generations of Japanese immigrants and their descendants have settled across Peru. While this process has been thoroughly documented by other disciplines, there are almost no studies focused on the resulting material culture. In this article, we introduce potential research lines for the archaeology of the Japanese diaspora and the Nikkei phenomenon in Peru. These approaches shed light on the complexity of the Japanese diaspora, leading us to rethink the material expressions of these migrant populations. Keywords Japanese diaspora . Migration . Peru
Introduction On March 3, 2019, the celebrations for the 120th anniversary of the friendship ties between Peru and Japan began. As it had happened during previous occasions, important public figures, including Princess Mako from the Imperial Family (Redaccion RPP 2019) and Keiji Yamada, Governor of Kyoto (Andina 2019), visited Peru for the festivities. The event represented a very special date in the history of Japanese-Peruvian relationships, remembering the arrival of the first group of contract * Patricia Chirinos Ogata [email protected] Daniel Dante Saucedo Segami [email protected]
1
Department of Anthropology, University of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
2
College of Policy Studies, Ritsumeikan University, 2-150 Iwakura-cho, Ibaraki-shi, Osaka 567-8570, Japan
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
laborers to the Peruvian coast in 1899 on board the Sakura Maru. This first group of 787 Japanese men had to face numerous challenges after their arrival, and only a few dozen survived (Fukumoto 1997:127; Morimoto 1999:60). The migration and adaptation process continued for over 24 years, bringing more than 18,000 Japanese immigrants to Peru (18,347 according to Fukumoto, 1997:141, and 18,727 according to the “Pioneros” digital database; Asociación Peruano Japonesa and JICA Museo de la Inmigración Japonesa al Perú, n.d.), transforming both their Japanese culture and the local culture of each place where they arrived, and eventually creating one of the largest international migrant groups in Peru, what is now known as the Nikkei community. Among the migrant communities in Peru, the Nikkei occupy a distinctive place; the national census of 2017 included for the first time the category of Nikkei, or Japanese descendants, as a possible option in the question on ethnic self-perception, and 22,534 people identified themselves as such (INEI 2018:214). In addition, the idea of Nikkei in more recent times has been associated with political issues in the popular consciousness, due to the notoriety of a group of Peruvian governmental authorities who were Japanese descendants, including one
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