The Japanese Peruvians

Recently I was honoured to write a guest post about the Peruvian-Japanese over at loneleeplanet. During my time living in Peru I have always been curious about the large number of Peruvians of Japanese descent (including former president Alberto Fujimori, born in Peru of Japanese parents), not to mention the strong influence of Japanese cuisine in the national diet.

I soon discovered that Peru has a long history of Japanese immigration. On April 3, 1899, some nine years before emigration to Brazil began (Brazil has the highest population of Japanese outside of Japan with 1.5 million), a group of 790 Japanese became the first to emigrate to Peru. Today 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.

Read more of this fascinating piece of history in my article at Nikkeijin – The Japanese Peruvians.

Check out the amazing pics in the embedded video below.