The history of the United States’ incarceration of Japanese Americans is known as one of the darkest chapters of American history. But there are still many parts of this story that most Americans don’t know. The history of Japanese Latin Americans during World War II is one of those. Not just another example of wartime atrocity, it also sheds light on the impact of American xenophobia around the world and its tragic consequences.
Long before Pearl Harbor, Japanese immigrants had been the targets of some of Americans’ most virulent and violent xenophobia, purportedly in defense of an “America for Americans.” Labeled undesirable and dangerous foreigners in the United States, Japanese people were confronted with immigration restrictions and laws that curbed their rights in the United States. After the attack, they were feared for their supposed loyalty to Japan, and the U.S. government treated them as both a racial problem and a national security one. The response was harsh. After President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February of 1942, the government initiated the forced relocation and mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans. Forced from their homes, they were sent to prison camps as “prisoners without trial” for the duration of the war. Two-thirds were American-born citizens.
But as xenophobia became an integral part of America’s foreign relations during World War II, that defense of “America for Americans” expanded far beyond the actual borders of the United States. At the same time that it was incarcerating its own residents and citizens, the U.S. government was also orchestrating and financing the mass roundup of innocent men, women and children of Japanese descent in 12 Latin American countries, citing “hemispheric security.”
The officially stated goal was to make the nation’s southern border safe from infiltration or attack by the Japanese enemy, including Japanese-descended people in Latin America who had been in the region for generations. According to U.S. government documents analyzed after the war, the unofficial goal was to acquire a supply of people of Japanese ethnicity who could be traded for American civilians stranded in Japan after Pearl Harbor.
Beginning in April 1942, Peruvian and U.S. authorities started to initiate an extensive deportation and incarceration program that sent 1,800 Japanese Peruvians to the United States. The first ship sailed out of Callao on April 5, 1942. Between that month and October of 1944, four ships operated by the U.S. government transported Japanese Peruvians and other Japanese Latin Americans to the United States.