The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  My family slept behind me, piled close

  Like a tribe camped at some ruinous place

  Then I placed my tongue on the wall

  To leave a humid mark before we left

  —JOSÉ WATANABE, FROM “WALL,” IN Flags behind the Fog (Banderas detrás de la niebla)

  Luxury cruise ships sailing the Pacific today tie up at Callao, Peru’s major port, and passengers depart for the museums and colonial center of nearby Lima, lush with history, old gold, and the ornate marble tombs of Spanish conquerors. Or they board minibuses to the airport, where they fly to Cuzco, two miles high in the Andes, gateway to Machu Picchu, the breathtaking fifteenth-century citadel capital of the Incas. They usually skip the port city of Callao itself, the center of Japanese life in prewar Peru, because now it carries a reputation for drug-gang violence after dark.

  Walk Callao’s streets by day, however, and you find a bustling city where chalacos—the nickname for local residents—go about their business with spirit. Long-distance trucks pull away from the docks and drive along streets filled with small shops and chifas, eateries that dish up Peruvian-Chinese fusion food. Young men dare to cross traffic pushing a wooden cart filled with plucked chickens, ready for market. On the byways near a busy business street called Calle Sucre, it is not hard to imagine the neighborhood the way it looked when Cesar Tsuneshige was born here in 1935.

  “There was one Japanese shop after another,” said Tsuneshige, a veterinarian. His father Makoto was a neighborhood doctor. Tsuneshige exudes energy, walks tall, and was impeccably dressed in suit and tie as he showed me around the place he still lives. “This is where the beer factory stood, and here was the milk shop.”

  In the first decades of the twentieth century, Japanese immigrants came on mostly rural labor contracts but often headed for Lima or Callao as soon as they could. They may have been working on cotton plantations or fleeing cruel overseers in Amazonian rubber camps. Whatever their path, in Callao they found a community where hard work could help them survive and often prosper.

  A newcomer might set up first as a barber with only comb and scissors, placing a chair on a street corner. (By 1924, Japanese outnumbered Peruvian barbers three to one.) Or he might run deliveries for a general merchandise “bazaar,” working first for room and board but perhaps—and this often happened—becoming proprietor of a store with its name painted on an awning. Walking about Callao with Tsuneshige allowed me to see its prewar past. I felt as if I were reading an urban palimpsest, where traces of what came before still seeped through.

  “And this was my old school,” Tsuneshige said. A door silently opened in the long white metal wall.

  “I saw you waiting,” said a doorman.

  Across an open playground, kites in the shape of golden carp fluttered from the roof against a cloudless blue sky. The schoolyard had been dirt when Tsuneshige was young, but it was paved now, marked with numbered yellow circles where children were drilled to gather in case of earthquake. “When we came to school we stopped and bowed toward the Dirección, out of respect,” he said, indicating the director’s office. Inside, Tsuneshige mused on the years from 1942 to 1944 when his mates disappeared from the schoolyard. “They took the families away, and I never saw them again,” he said.

  The school director, a Peruvian who carries “not a drop of Japanese blood” as he told me later, entered and bowed deeply, Japanese style. “It remains our custom,” he said. Just 8 percent of four hundred current students “are what you might call ‘Japanese,’” he said.

  “So much changed in our lives during the war,” Tsuneshige said. His father escaped capture when a neighbor warned the family with hand signals from across the street that unknown men in plain clothes—detectives—were at the door. “He climbed a floor and jumped into the yard where he kept the gamecocks,” then fled.

  This school had been saved from government takeover by the same kind of quick thinking. When Peru declared war on Japan, word came that authorities had taken control of the Lima Nikko, the big Japanese-owned academy in the capital ten miles away. Directors at Tsuneshige’s school hurriedly transferred ownership to a Peruvian staff member. When detectives arrived, the new owner-director introduced students and staff as “my clients.” Schools like this one were a centerpiece of prewar Peruvian Japanese life, symbolizing roots in a new land, but also harking back to the homeland, which was retreating ever farther away in the older generation’s memory.

  Parents like Tsuneshige’s father and his good friend Iwaichi Naganuma, who owned a laundry on Calle Sucre, founded the school. On a wall hung black-and-white photos of directors who had served in continuous succession since 1926. Tsuneshige walked up to the wall and pointed one by one to pictures of the school directors who had been deported to U.S. concentration camps. They started with Iwaichi Naganuma, known in Peru by his Spanish name, Luis, thin-faced, serious, with frameless glasses and a trim mustache.

  * * *

  In 2016, Naganuma’s sons, Kazushige, Kazuharu, and Kazumu, came to my home in San Francisco, where they now live. In Peru they also had Spanish names, and when they began school in the States their older sister Kiyo gave them English names their teachers could easily pronounce: Jimmy, George, and Tony. Today, however, they prefer to use the full Japanese names their parents gave them at birth.

  Kazushige, the oldest, told me he had retired from work at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park; Kazuharu had also retired, from a job at a printing firm; and Kazumu, the youngest at age seventy-six, was a graphic designer and active soccer coach. Kazushige and Kazuharu had memories of many scenes of their childhoods, and over the years their sister Kiyo, who died in 2012, had filled in certain details. It was clear the brothers, the only survivors of seven siblings, wanted to keep the family story alive.

  The first time detectives knocked, Kazushige said, his father ran from a back door and repaired to the mountains outside Lima with their eldest brother, who was fifteen, because their father was afraid the youth would be arrested too. They hid for days, then returned. The scene repeated itself until FBI agents finally entered the house and stayed, so Naganuma gave himself up. Agents ordered him to report to the docks at Callao to board a U.S. Army transport, with his family if desired—the Peruvian government wanted to get rid of as many Japanese as possible. Parents and children packed a single trunk. Little did they know that their story would be that of almost all captured Peruvian Japanese, permanent exile from home. Peru would not take its “Japanese” back.

  The Naganumas told me their father had come from Japan to Peru in 1910 on an agricultural labor contract and sent home for a picture bride. Iwaichi met their mother Isoka for the first time as she disembarked from her ship; without words, he wrapped a watch around her wrist as a wedding gift. Kazuharu remembered the family’s Callao house with its attached commercial laundry on Calle Sucre, “all hand wash, with big paddles and metal tanks and clothes and sheets hanging outside and a sewing room to make repairs.”

  In the 1930s, the lives of the couple, Iwaichi and Isoka—who often went by a Spanish name, Maria—were filled with work at the laundry, with children, and with tragedy, too. Their three-year-old boy, Guillermo, “swallowed a pin,” perhaps a straight pin picked up from the laundry floor or a decorative pin twisted off his cap, and choked on it. The Naganumas’ friend Dr. Makoto Tsuneshige, Cesar Tsuneshige’s father, could not save him.

  To hear them tell their story, the Naganuma boys thrived in the streets of prewar Callao. Spanish was the language of play. They celebrated Peruvian holidays as well as undōkai, traditional Japanese sports festivals. “We had a big yard,” remembered Kazuharu. “A garden, dogs, cats, chickens.” Their father built a music studio. “I used to watch people dancing, mostly legs through the lower half of a swinging door, because I was still small.” Once a week Dr. Tsuneshige’s wife gave lessons to the Naganuma sisters on the Japanese koto, an instrument like a zither. When Kazushige was lucky, his sisters might take him along to the movies,
to see a Western like Santa Fe Trail with Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan.

  Once he saw an animated feature that made fun of Japanese, with a General Tojo–like figure wearing big black-rimmed glasses, “with buck teeth” and other stereotypical features (perhaps You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap, from Paramount). “I went home and talked about it, but I wasn’t offended,” Kazushige said. “I was thinking of it as a Peruvian kid.”

  In 1947, the Naganumas, bedraggled and impoverished, suffering from tuberculosis, were released from the U.S. Justice Department concentration camp in Crystal City, Texas. The only one to return to Peru, briefly in 2016, has been Kazushige, to pick up the ashes of his brother who had died from swallowing a pin. During all those decades, Cesar Tsuneshige’s family had tended the tomb of the toddler Guillermo. In California, Kazushige, Kazuharu, and Kazumu had the ashes of their brother interred in the grave of their parents. The young Guillermo’s Japanese name, Kazuaki, was already on the tombstone. Their father had ordered it engraved, thinking until the end of the son he had left behind in Peru.

  Before the Naganuma brothers left my house, Kazumu brought out a framed photo of his family standing under the sun in Crystal City where they had been incarcerated. The boys wore short pants and suspenders, their older sisters dressed in white. Their father wore large glasses, as he had in the picture on the wall at the Callao school. Their mother had pinned a flower on her jacket.

  They were throwing stones. I had to help push my sister up the ladder to another floor—she was eight months pregnant. While they were downstairs looting the bakery, we hid.

  —CHEIKO KAMISATO, ON THE 1940 ANTI-JAPANESE RIOTS IN PERU

  The groundwork for Peruvian collaboration with the U.S. capture program was laid with growing Peruvian nationalism and racial animosity, with political opportunism and economic pressure worsened by the Great Depression. Many Japanese in Peru struggled economically, but others—and these were noticed the most—were prosperous. By 1940, they owned 15 percent of the country’s major export production, cotton, a crop that could be grown on small parcels affordable for first-time entrepreneurs; a few companies became very large. Japanese enterprises were scattered throughout the country, not just in Japanese neighborhoods, and they served a wide clientele. The Naganuma laundry, for example, had the business of the Peruvian naval academy in Callao, with its steady flow of sheets and linens to be washed and ironed, a small commercial gold mine. Peruvian Japanese monopolized the barber trade, shirt making, watch and clock shops, bakeries. Sidestepping banks, they preferred to use a community savings and loan system called tanomoshiko (reliable group) that depended on a code of honor for timely repayment, and they were unlikely to go into debt.

  Success bred envy. In the 1930s, Peruvians accused “outsiders” of taking jobs. A whispering campaign grew. Newspapers published alarmist stories charging that Japanese dairies adulterated milk, their shops sold shoddy goods. Rising militarism in Japan spawned more vague, inflammatory articles claiming that local Japanese were agents for imperial reach, spies, a fifth column preparing an invasion of Peru with caches of hidden weapons. “Japanese” could be in league with native Peruvian Indians scheming to reclaim what was lost to them with the Spanish conquest.

  The most paranoid wondered what the Japanese were saying when they talked, or what they printed in Japanese characters. What had begun as handwritten sheets posted in barbershops, giving news of community and homeland, had long since expanded into mimeographed flyers, and finally into a host of newspapers and magazines.

  The Japanese were outsiders in ways different from Germans and Italians. They were not European. Newspapers warned against the “yellow peril.” Public intellectuals advised that immigration should be limited to those who would improve “the race.” Anti-Asian prejudice followed long-standing disrespect for Chinese, who had replaced black slaves emancipated in 1852; slaves and the Chinese had worked in rubber and sugar, just as the Japanese did when they came at the turn of the century. In the 1920s and 1930s, laws limited Japanese immigration and curtailed, or even rescinded, civil rights and citizenship of naturalized or Peruvian-born Japanese. The laws were politically popular, but the circle was vicious: Peruvian Japanese kept to themselves more as chances to mix and assimilate slipped away.

  On May 13, 1940, an anti-Japanese march by teenage students in Lima sparked rioting from the capital to small cities. Neighbors, thugs, and supporters of President Manuel Prado, who had made no secret of wanting to see a Peru without Japanese, trashed hundreds of businesses and homes. A mob invaded the house of Hijime Kikshi, who owned four thousand acres of cotton, and looted until a policeman showed up to announce laconically, “There’s nothing more here.” Timorous Chinese merchants hung the Chinese flag from their shops with signs that read in Spanish, “We are not Japanese.”

  Some defended their Japanese neighbors. “When the mob came to my mother’s dress shop, the neighbors came quickly, one hundred percent Peruvians,” recalled Carlos Shimomura. “The butcher stood in the door with his cleaver, the vegetable seller with a stake. They put up the Peruvian flag.” The shop was spared. Elsewhere, however, decent people closed their doors. Ten Japanese died, and hundreds more were injured. Police only stood by.

  Eleven days later an 8.5 earthquake shook Lima and Callao. Buildings fell, including houses called quincha, made of cane and plaster and considered earthquake-proof. Walls of the cathedral crumbled around exquisite chapels and the black marble figures guarding the tomb of Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru. In all, 179 people died, 3,500 were injured.

  To the astonishment of the Japanese, Peruvians came humbly to their doors or stopped them in the streets to plead forgiveness for the riots that preceded the earthquake, taking the natural disaster as punishment from heaven. “Please Lord, I did nothing bad to the Japanese!” a woman was heard saying.

  But the Japanese felt no satisfaction at the turn of events. The riots, tolerated if not encouraged by the government, meant a line had been crossed. Peruvian Japanese knew they could not count on support, or even protection, in their own country.

  * * *

  The riots didn’t touch peaceful, semitropical Chiclayo, a city founded by sixteenth-century Spanish missionaries ten miles from the sea, the hub of trade roads to jungle and highlands five hundred miles north of Lima. “My father always told me when he was leaving on a trip for business when he would be coming home, so I would know how long he would be gone,” his daughter Libia Maoki remembered. When detectives rounded up her father and other Japanese men from Chiclayo, along with a few Germans, Libia watched the truck drive away, and this time she would not know when he would return.

  Whenever she and I met to talk in a coffee shop in a suburban strip mall south of Sacramento, Libia Maoki maintained a coolness and attention to detail of the kind likely required for the job from which she had retired, overseeing charters for a long-distance bus company. In 1914, Victor Maoki started a small café and opened a general merchandise shop for workers on a cotton plantation called Hacienda Tuman, she said. A photo of the time, still dear to his daughter, shows him dressed in a suit, tie, and waistcoat, a kerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket, dark eyes looking out from behind rimless glasses. In a day when convention mandated serious looks in pictures, there is the hint of a smile on his lips. Maoki traveled back to Japan to find a wife and married Hitomi, a nurse.

  Hitomi Maoki was “shocked at how primitive everything was in Peru.” She took the name Elena, and as the family grew with children she looked for ways to help expand business. She cut shirts from white cotton and sold them to laborers. When Victor’s brother brought a contraption from Japan for making senbei, rice crackers, she created molds to stamp the top of the snacks with images of Charlie Chaplin, including bowler hat and mustache, and sold them. Libia pulled homemade taffy from a nail while her mother cut it to pieces and wrapped them in paper, distributing them to shops. Business expanded to downtown Chiclayo with a tire-repair shop, a wise investment at a time whe
n cars were hitting roads still largely unpaved.

  Some Japanese immigrants dreamed of saving money to return prosperous to Japan, but Victor Maoki planted himself firmly in the New World. “Father always said we should live like Peruvians,” said Libia. “He gave us Spanish names. To him it was important even that we worship like them.” He baptized his children as Catholics, and they made their First Communions. He organized construction of a school “with walls painted white, the classrooms open, airy, with maybe sixty children,” remembered Libia’s sister Blanca. “In Peru they were preparing us to be leaders. So it’s really too bad they got rid of us.”

  The Maoki shops, even modest in size and far from the capital, might have been prize enough to draw attention from greedy authorities. Yet thousands of other Peruvian Japanese were not kidnapped, even when their businesses were put on the U.S. blacklist and confiscated. Why, then, take a man like Victor Maoki?

  Maoki was the one who made the long trips to Lima to request donations of bricks from the Japanese Embassy to build the school. When someone in the community died, he handled paperwork and made funeral arrangements. Three of Maoki’s children had died at tender ages and were buried in the local cemetery, but the remains of non-Christians, including many Japanese, were forbidden in the hallowed ground; so he obtained land on a corner of the hacienda as a dignified graveyard for those who might rest nowhere else. On a low hill he erected a sixteen-foot-high cross facing the Pacific, in homage to immigrants who arrived on the first voyages from Japan in 1899 and 1903.

  A month after he was trucked away, a letter from Panama from Maoki arrived. A flattened portulaca flower, a moss rose, dropped from its folds. He had not forgotten his daughter Blanca’s twelfth birthday. He had lost twenty pounds, he wrote, and become very thin.