Sojourners, spies and citizens : the interned Latin American Japanese civilians during World War II

Abstract

More than two thousand Japanese Latin Americans, seized abroad, shipped to the United States, and interned without charge, moved through a vast prison system that also held nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Fear and racism produced internment policies that conflated enemy nation with enemy race, making proof of guilt or innocence irrelevant. However, race-based imprisonment also intensified feelings of Japanese nationalism, strengthened ethnic identity and influenced resistance behavior among the detained. This study examines prisoner memoirs, interviews, government documents, and published reports to support these positions. Little is known about the individual experiences of the Japanese Latin American prisoners. Yoshitaro Amano's memoir, Waga Toraware No Ki (The Journal of My Incarceration), published in Japan in 1943 but never before translated to English, adds to a very limited literature from the Japanese alien detainee perspective that is accessible to western scholars. Amano, captured in Panama on December 7, 1941, chronicled his experiences of capture, internment, and repatriation along with opinions about the war and the differences between Americans and the Japanese. Peruvian immigrant Seiichi Higashide's memoir, Adios To Tears, published in 1993 and an interview of Peruvian citizen Art Shibayama contained in a 2003 documentary expose Peru's role in capturing ethnic Japanese and its subsequent denial of repatriation. Together, the experiences of these men, a suspected spy, a sojourner merchant and a second generation citizen of Peru offer eyewitness accounts of this relatively obscure segment of Japanese internees.