Enrique Higa Sakuda
@kikerenzoEnrique Higa is a Sansei (third-generation or grandchild of Japanese immigrants) from Peru. He is a journalist and Lima correspondent for International Press, a Spanish-language weekly paper published in Japan. He is also a co-editor and writer for Kaikan magazine, published by the Japanese-Peruvian Association.
Updated July 2024
Stories from This Author
Japanese Immigrants (and Their Descendants) in Cusco
May 13, 2025 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
They began during the pandemic. While mobility restrictions weren’t as severe as they had been at the beginning, in 2020 the world was still semi-paralyzed, on edge due to a disease that was decimating countries like Peru. Enrique Kawamura, a guide and writer, and Harumi Suenaga, a visual artist, both Cusco natives of Japanese origin, then embarked on an ambitious project: to graphically document the history of the Nikkei community in Cusco. Four years later, they gave birth to Japanese …
Japan: The camp that became a home
April 30, 2025 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
The economic crisis and terrorism drove thousands of Peruvian Nikkei to travel to Japan between the 1980s and 1990s. As much as a decision, it was a need for refuge, a truce, a white flag in the midst of ubiquitous violence. However, there were also those who embraced migration as a challenge, a way to prove their worth outside their comfort zone. One of them was Rafael Tokashiki Kishimoto. He was working for a Japanese automotive company in Peru when …
“Carlos Chiyoteru Hiraoka”: A Museum to Share
April 1, 2025 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
The Carlos Chiyoteru Hiraoka Museum of Japanese Immigration to Peru is being modernized. With technology as its main ally, this facility—which exhibits objects and documents alluding to the Nikkei community and tells its history through panels—pursues three major objectives. One of them is to digitize the history of Japanese immigration to Peru, a mammoth and long-term task that involves, above all, transferring tens of thousands of photographs to virtual format. Another aspect: the reorganization and classification of the pieces it …
Yurei : the ghosts of Japanese immigration to Mexico
March 18, 2025 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
Yurei ( Ghosts ) is memory, silences, nostalgia and secrets. The documentary directed by Mexican filmmaker Sumie García Hirata delves into the history of Japanese immigration to Mexico, marked by untransmitted experiences, hidden by its protagonists from their descendants. A history marked, as in the United States or Peru, by the Second World War. “The term Yurei represents those ghosts of the past, the stories that have not been told, the silenced memories that have endured through generations and that …
From dekasegi to eternal tourist
March 4, 2025 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
In 2024, not only was the 125th anniversary of the beginning of Japanese immigration to Peru commemorated. With fewer speakers, the reverse path followed by the descendants of the Issei was also remembered: the 35th anniversary of the migration of Peruvian Nikkei to Japan. In 1989, Peru seemed to be sliding down a slide towards catastrophe. A nightmare with open eyes: a brutal economic crisis that diluted wages and catapulted prices; attacks by an extremist group that spread terror like …
125 years of Japanese immigration in Peru: history and memories
July 7, 2024 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
When my cousins and my brother get together to eat on a holiday, we always remember the sushi that our “okachan” (that's what we called our Japanese grandmother) prepared when we were kids and that we devoured by the roll. We also remember that she grated katsuo in a long wooden box whose name escapes me. It amazes me how these memories keep their freshness, they never get old. We always tell each other the same thing, and the smiles …
Nikkei Paraguayan Identity Center: History, memory, identity and legacy
May 14, 2024 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
“We wanted any place in America to come and live. We heard very nice things about Paraguay,” says Ryuichi Hashimoto. “There was propaganda (in Japan) that land in Paraguay was cheap,” recalls Kaoru Nishii. Both are Issei. They left their country in the 1950s and are part of a group of immigrants that the Japanese Association of Encarnación has interviewed to recover their stories and the story of their community. The association seeks to preserve and transmit these stories, building …
Juana Miyashiro: sensei and entrepreneur
April 1, 2024 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
His first student was his mother, an Okinawan immigrant. When she was a high school student, Juana Miyashiro discovered that her mother could not read Latin characters and became her literacy teacher. It was the 1950s, embers of the war still lingered and the Peruvian government vetoed the entry of Japanese immigrants. However, their relatives in Peru had found a way to get around xenophobia: to make them enter surreptitiously through Bolivia. Those Japanese who had recently arrived clandestinely in …
President of the Peruvian-Japanese Association in a year for history
Feb. 12, 2024 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
2024 will be a big year for the Nikkei community in Peru because it celebrates the 125th anniversary of Japanese immigration to the country. But before getting there, it is worth stopping for a while in 2023 whose echoes can still be heard, a special year for the governing institution of the Peruvian Nikkei, the Peruvian Japanese Association (APJ). Its president, Juan Carlos Nakasone, looks back to share his memories and impressions about a period full of experiences to frame. …
Growing up with the Nikkei community
Jan. 10, 2024 • Enrique Higa Sakuda
Medical technologist Pedro Ruiz's relationship with the Nikkei community began in 1980, when he was eleven years old and his father enrolled him in La Unión school. The seed, however, was planted several decades ago, when his father was studying at Guadalupe School and made Nisei friends. Later, during his studies at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of San Marcos, he made friends with students of Japanese origin. Time progressed, young people graduated as doctors and his Nikkei …
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