Japan and Peru: a Test of Ties That Bind

LIMA, Peru — In 1992, when an attempted military coup caused President Alberto Fujimori to flee the presidential palace, he reportedly took refuge at the Japanese ambassador’s residence.

The coup failed, but Fujimori’s choice of sanctuary--reported back then by the respected magazine Caretas--reflected the special bond between Peru and Japan.

Four years later, the guerrillas of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement took aim at that relationship, choosing a target likely to cause maximum political and personal damage to the president. They stormed a building that has come to symbolize the Japanese-Peruvian connection: the same ambassador’s residence. More than a month later, the rebels still hold 73 hostages in a siege that has riveted international television cameras to the mansion.

“The Tupac Amaru struck at his roots,” said Carlos Alberto Irigoyen, a former top Peruvian diplomat in Japan who was a hostage for five days. “This was something they could not have done with any other embassy. It was the ideal place.”

In the revolutionary rhetoric of the Tupac Amaru, Japan has unseated the United States as the chief imperialist villain. The ill-fated Dec. 17 reception honoring the Japanese emperor’s birthday was the most tempting target for the rebels because it drew the most important people in the country. The annual occasion rivals the U.S. ambassador’s Fourth of July bash as Lima’s most high-powered diplomatic event.

Japan’s prominence in Peru grows out of the presence of the second-largest Japanese immigrant community in Latin America and the fame of Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants. Since the president’s election seven years ago, the Japanese government has poured loans and technical assistance into Peru’s economic resurgence, becoming a top source of foreign aid.

That makes Japan guilty, say the guerrillas, of meddling in Peruvian affairs and promoting unjust economic policies.

As the standoff drags into its second month, the Japanese and Peruvian governments continue to express mutual trust and admiration. The crisis “will not hurt the relationship,” Fujimori told The Times in a recent interview. “On the contrary, it will strengthen the relationship. But the impact undoubtedly is greater because the Japanese Embassy is involved.”

And the relationship is more delicate than appearances suggest. The flood of Japanese private investment that many Peruvians expected has failed to materialize. Japanese corporations are wary about Peru and, indeed, all of Latin America.

So the stakes are high. The crisis, especially if there is bloodshed, could hurt the relationship at a crucial moment.

“Until now the bond has been very sentimental, based on the ethnic connection,” said a Japanese journalist who has spent years in Latin America. “If the resolution is not peaceful, the relationship could become colder, more logical. And in any case, no matter how it ends, I think Japan will reexamine the relationship.”

It is a relationship that, formally, goes back to 1873, when diplomatic ties between Peru and Japan were first established. But the transpacific empathy between these two cultures reaches back further and has an almost-mythic aspect. Although the scientific evidence is skimpy, a theory flourished early in this century that Peru’s Inca empire was founded by a wayward Japanese fisherman--one version of the theory that the indigenous peoples of the Americas have Asian roots.

In 1899, immigrants here established Latin America’s first Japanese community, which today numbers about 80,000 and is second only to Brazil in size. Fujimori’s father, a tailor, arrived in 1927 and followed the immigrant’s traditional hard-working path. Fujimori, an agronomist and university president, catapulted out of obscurity into presidential politics in 1990 with a campaign crafted around the industrious and efficient image of Japanese Peruvians.

In his upset victory against writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Fujimori also skillfully took advantage of Peru’s profound class and race divisions. He appealed to the poor, indigenous and mixed-race majority as a nonwhite, a fellow outsider to the aloof Lima elite incarnated by the globe-trotting writer.

Back in the homeland of Fujimori’s ancestors, the election of the first president of Japanese descent outside Japan stirred interest and pride. The new president’s triumphant return to his family’s native town on the island of Kyushu initiated years of intense coverage in Japan’s media. Fujimori cultivated economic ties to Japan and other Asian nations, espousing a vision of Peru as a bridge between Asia and Latin America.

For ethnic Asians, Fujimori’s ascent opened the doors to the stately, colonial-era palaces of power here that were previously dominated by a clique of Peruvians of European ancestry. The current president of the Congress, Victor Joy Way, is of Chinese descent. Fujimori’s brothers, Santiago and Pedro--the latter now a hostage of the Tupac Amaru--and other relatives have served as presidential advisors and diplomats.

Cabinet ministers, government officials and commanders of the security forces are Japanese Peruvians, including Daniel Hokama, the president’s chief of staff, and Marco Miyashiro, a police major being held hostage in the mansion who is an expert on the Tupac Amaru and a hero in the fight against terrorism.

Before their recent transformation into political insiders, ethnic Asians in Peru were the classic self-made success story. The Asian presence has historically been associated with entrepreneurship; perhaps its most visible symbols are the ubiquitous Chinese restaurants in Lima heralded by signs that read “chifa,” slang for Chinese food.

The first wave of Japanese immigrants was divided between the countryside, where they worked as farm laborers or small independent farmers, and the city, where they opened flower shops and other small businesses.

The 1920s were the boom years of the Japanese colony, according to “Citizen Fujimori,” a biography that focuses on the president’s background and early years. Japanese entrepreneurs branched out into luncheonettes, low-priced bazaars, groceries, services. Two-thirds of the barber and beauty shops in Lima were owned by Japanese immigrants, according to the book’s author, journalist Luis Jochamowitz.

The immigrant community endured a harsh chapter of backlash and persecution during World War II, when more than 1,700 Japanese Peruvians were deported to military detention camps in the United States. But the succeeding years continued the pattern of upward mobility and educational achievement.

Second-generation Japanese Peruvians became doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists, business executives and academics like Fujimori, who entered politics as president of an agricultural university and the host of an obscure television talk show with considerable viewership in the countryside.

Julio Higashi epitomizes the rise of the nikkei, as Japanese Peruvians are known. He is a veteran journalist and community leader who supported Fujimori’s upstart presidential bid. Today, Higashi runs a thriving public relations firm, and his daughter is a television reporter who covers the presidential palace.

The ripples of anti-Asian prejudice stirred by the first Fujimori candidacy were ironic, according to Higashi. Some opponents disdained the candidate because his parents were immigrants and his distinctive Spanish, while unaccented, has the second-generation sound of someone who grew up hearing both Spanish and Japanese.

Nonetheless, both Fujimori and Higashi belong to a segment of the nikkei community that “without question is more Peruvian than Japanese,” Higashi said.

When Fujimori took office in 1990, the United States was reducing foreign aid here and elsewhere. Japan filled the vacuum in Peru, which has historically kept more distance from the United States than have other nations in the region. The left-leaning military dictatorship of the 1970s flirted with the Soviet Union, and the armed forces still use Russian weapons and vehicles.

Japan’s support for the free-market shock policies that Fujimori introduced helped Peru’s economic “rehabilitation” after years of rampant inflation and disastrous confrontation between the previous president, Alan Garcia, and international lending institutions.

Japan became a leading provider of loans and credits to Peru, concentrating on infrastructure, agriculture, hospitals, education and other social programs to bring out the potential of a poor, violent nation that is rich in natural resources.

“Japanese loans helped Peru reinsert itself into the world economy,” said Higashi, who was among the hostages released by the Tupac Amaru during the first week of the standoff. “The aid has been mainly dedicated to development, the slums, providing water and sewers. So the people feel the impact and feel there is Japanese support.”

Japan grew closer to Fujimori after the president engineered a “self-coup” in 1992. Declaring that extreme measures were necessary to combat terrorism and governmental disarray, he sent tanks into the streets to shut down Congress and impose emergency rule. Seven months later he beat down a counter-coup by military officers and briefly sought refuge in the Japanese diplomatic compound.

The United States protested the decree of emergency rule, holding up its share of a $1.2-billion loan and military aid until Peru agreed to steps to restore democracy and protect human rights. In contrast, Japan went forward with its part of the loan with no strings attached, according to Coletta Youngers, who studies Peru for the Washington Office on Latin America, a U.S. think tank.

“The Japanese policy in Peru has been more practical, as compared to the more moral role of the United States,” Youngers said. “The U.S. has been more vocal about human rights concerns. Japan has maintained complete silence on these issues.”

The Tupac Amaru’s actions during the hostage crisis are a sign of those shifting influences. The guerrillas surprised U.S. diplomats in the first week of the siege by releasing six U.S. hostages, including a chief of anti-drug operations. This was partly because the focus of the attack is Japan and partly because the barricaded rebels believe the United States is more willing than Japan to urge the use of force against them, Youngers said.

In September, Japan announced a new loan package worth about $600 million that typifies a strategy of encouraging long-term growth. The money went largely to a sewer project in Lima and to rural road and hydroelectric projects. Visiting Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto also pledged $300 million in trade insurance to Japanese firms doing business with Peru.

The latter was a reminder that Japanese private investment remains a largely unfulfilled promise. Many of the voters who elected Fujimori in 1990 and again in 1995 expected that he would bring Japanese corporations, factories and jobs flocking to Peru.

“They thought there would be rivers of yen flowing,” Irigoyen said. “It did not happen. Then it was said that first, the government had to demonstrate that it had established peace in the nation, and in 1995 the rivers of yen would come. But it hasn’t happened. The Japanese want to see if the stability endures.”

The nations whose companies account for the bulk of direct private investment here are Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, in that order, according to statistics compiled by the National Commission on Foreign Investment and Technologies. Investment by Japanese companies ranked 13th on the list.

“Japanese investment has not materialized because Japanese companies are somewhat conservative about their decision-making,” Fujimori said.

Despite the Fujimori connection, Japanese investors are more active in the larger economies of Mexico, Brazil and Chile. The peak years of Peruvian terrorism between 1988 and 1992 alarmed Japanese just as they did other foreign investors. The Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) rebels killed three Japanese agricultural experts in 1991, causing a pullout of advisors and other officials.

In 1993 and 1995, however, the Japanese Foreign Ministry sent two missions to investigate security conditions and concluded, according to a briefing paper, that “the anti-subversive policy of President Fujimori has improved public safety.”

The Tupac Amaru rebels carried off their stunning attack at a critical moment of Fujimori’s second term, when the long-awaited increase in Japanese private investment might have become a reality. Now terrorism in Peru is the biggest story in Japan and will stay on the front pages until the crisis is resolved.

Despite Fujimori’s assertion that the bond remains strong, others wonder whether the wounds will heal among Japanese diplomats and businesspeople. About 60% of travel from Japan was canceled after the government put out an advisory to tourists.

The long-term impact of the crisis will probably be determined by the outcome. While Japan can make its presence and opinions felt, the resolution is ultimately in the hands of Fujimori and the group of rebels who have attacked a symbol of his past and Peru’s future.