ONE "personal" beat this former P.C. editor has enjoyed were the PANA conventions since the first one in Mexico City in 1981. Chuck Kubokawa (Sequoia JACL), who headed JACL's international relations committee, invited one Nisei from Toronto (George Imai) and two from Mexico City (Carlos Kasuga and Enrique Shibayama) to relate their respective lives in the community.
Though the national JACL's travel program was officially discontinued, there were 80 in that first JACL contingent to PANA. Afterwards, some of us visited Texmico, an abandoned hacienda halfway from Mexico City to Acapulco that served as a WWII internment place for Japanese who were told by the Mexican government to move 100 km inland away from the U.S. border.
Swapping personal WWII experiences with Japanese in other countries began at a PANA convention. They still remain as currency in the Nikkei world.
The 'Fever' from the South
Whatever interest about Japanese in Latin America was mostly academic. Among JACLers, they read a 22-week series in the Pacific Citizen in the 1950s by Univ. of Utah professor of anthropology Dr. Elmer Smith on Japanese in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Peru. Photographs by Toge Fujihira of New York accompanied the entire series in the 1973 P.C. Holiday Issue.
An ever-present topic at PANA conventions has been "Nikkei identity" and it was fully explored at the 14th COPANI (COnvención PAnamericana NIkkei) in July at São Paulo with delegates from the Yokohama-based Association of Nikkei and Japanese Aboard (Kaigai Nikkeijin Kyokai).
In homogeneous Japan, the term "Nikkei" once reserved to mean "emigrant," has changed to include dekasegi or foreign-born Nisei who came to live and work in Japan from the 1980s, according to keynote speaker Prof. Kotaro Horisaka of Sophia University, Tokyo, on the convention theme, "Contributions of Nikkei to the Progress of Their Societies"
In America, the term Nikkei is inclusive of all persons of Japanese ancestry, even "children of international marriages and of corporate Japanese employees who have gone abroad and decided to stay," as Horisaka would identify.
And Counting the Hapa Nikkei
In Mexico, the question was "how can Nisei transfer their heritage to the younger generation?" There are 25,000 Japanese in Mexico, according to their 110th anniversary celebration report last year of Japanese immigration. And by adding Nikkei of mixed marriages where Spanish is the first language, the number is around 70,000, many of whom live in the state of Chiapas where the first Japanese landed in 1896.
In Argentina, the first Japanese group came from Okinawa in 1908 through Brazil. Others from Peru conquered the snow-covered Andes, walking down to Mendoza in the 1910s. Dekasegi returning now from Japan are able to promote cultural connections with government, contribute to schools and the care of elders.
In Bolivia, Nikkei are "well-regarded" as a class addressing community problems in health and education. Their identity has been maintained through language schools and promotion of cultural heritage since the 1950s in Santa Cruz, where PANA held its convention in 2003. The first Japanese came in 1899 to work in the rubber plantations in the tropic north.
The lone Kaigai Nikkeijin Kai delegate from Jakarta, Heru S. Eto noted there are 300 different ethnic communities in Indonesia today. Promoting education awareness of Japanese language is a real problem, but working with a college in Tokushima, Japan, has been worthwhile in this effort.
In the State of São Paulo
NIKKEI FROM NORTH and South America gathered with Japanese from Japan in mid-July in São Paulo, Brazil-where 1.8 million Nikkei live in the state of the same name (about the size, I estimate, of the state of Wisconsin - around 400 and 450 miles at the most distant points) and 80 percent of them in metropolitan São Paulo of 14 million.
So, how many Nikkei live in Wisconsin today? About 5,000? And the last U.S. Census tallied 800,000 Nikkei (Hapa included) in the nation.
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