The Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast.

Episode 207 Across the Sea, Part 3.

This week we're going to put a pin in things up in North America and take a trip down to America

del Sud. For you see, Japanese migrants didn't just come to the United States but spread

throughout the world, and in fact, destinations in South America in particular proved as or more

popular than ones in the United States.

Now, covering the entire Japanese diaspora would be like a 30 or 40 part series in its own right.

I mean, the most recent Swiss census had a few thousand folks with Japanese ancestry.

How did they get there? I have no idea, but I'm sure it's an interesting story. I'm aiming for something a bit more manageable, so we're going to focus primarily on the

Western Hemisphere.

But even within that, South America alone is, well, a continent, and it's a pretty big

one at that.

So to keep things within the scope of what I'm hoping for here,

we're going to focus on the two countries in Latin America

with the largest population of Nikejin,

a Japanese term meaning someone of Japanese ancestry.

Those two countries are Brazil and Peru.

That means we're going to ignore countries like Mexico with a comparatively small but fascinating Japanese immigrant community or the Dominican Republic,

where Japanese were brought over by the dictator Raphael Trujillo in order to block migration

by black Haitians into his territory.

Columbia, too, has a fascinating history with Japanese immigrants we're not going to cover,

but which intersects with that country's long history of internal political struggle,

...