Philanthropist, volunteer worker and resident of Peru, Scott Jeppesen of the charitable organisation Sonrisas en Peru, explores the fascinating history of Japanese immigration to Peru and the strong influence that Japanese culture has played on various aspects of Peruvian society.

I currently reside in Lima, the capital of Peru. Every day I am faced with some characteristic of Peruvian culture that has been derived from Japanese origins. Urged by curiosity I soon discovered the intriguing story of the Japanese Peruvians, a large ethnic immigrant group in Peru.

The Japanese Peruvians

The Japanese Peruvians are Peruvian citizens of Japanese ethnic origin. They constitute around 0.3% of Peru’s population (estimated at nearly 90,000 in 2008) which is the second largest population of people with Japanese ancestry in Latin America after Brazil.

Peru was the first Latin American country to accept Japanese immigration. Back in 1899 the first wave of 790 Japanese immigrants arrived at the Peruvian seaport Callao aboard the “Sakura Maru” from the Japanese port of Yokohama and thus spawned the Nikkei ethnicity in Latin America.

The Sakura Maru

Most notably, Japanese Peruvians were brought to the world’s attention in 1990 by the election of Alberto Fujimori, son of Japanese immigrants and the 90th president of Peru. Fujimori was the first person of Asian descent to become president of a Western country.

Alberto Ken'ya Fujimori

Novelist, technologist, photographer and resident of Japan, Michael Werneburg, discusses the frustrations of living with a foreign name in Japan. This guest post is an expansion of an article on his own website that details his struggles with living with a foreign name in an English-speaking country.

Katakana Blues

My surname is “Werneburg”, and the name just doesn’t work in Japanese. It originates in the forested heart of Germany where its pronunciation is obvious even if it is by no means an everyday name. But Germany’s rolling hills and rolling r’s are a long way from Japan, and it’s here that the import—like an invader species—causes some chaos.

The first problem for foreigners like me is that the Japanese language has a range of sounds that is more limited than in our European languages. Whereas English has some twenty vowels and twenty-four consonants, Japanese has only five vowel sounds and nineteen consonant sounds. Further restricting the pronunciation in Japanese is the use of a syllabary rather than an alphabet. These syllables combine a consonant and a vowel together, so that when you want to use a consonant you have to follow it with a vowel sound that fits one of the available syllables. The ‘n’ sound sometimes stands alone, but the rest must always incorporate a vowel.

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G’day! This is Nunnster, long term subscriber of loneleeplanet. Having always enjoyed the articles on this site about the lighter side of Japanese culture, it is indeed an honour to be invited to provide the following guest article, reporting from Australia.

Sean Yoshiura created history by being the first ever Japanese-born player to be signed by an Australian Rules Football League (AFL) club. The 18 year-old Tokyo-born wingman was signed as a rookie by the AFL club Brisbane Lions. A world-class schoolboy cross country runner, he moved to Australia with his Japanese father and Tasmanian mother when he was seven.

Image source: SportingPulse

Brisbane Lion's Sean Yoshiura

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