BBC from 2015:One of my political geography students is doing their project on this historical event: Peru deported over 2,000 Japanese people to the US to be placed in internment camps during WWII; many of them ended up at a work camp in NJ. I study this stuff and I had never heard of this.
— Austin Kocher, PhD (@ackocher) September 28, 2022
an estimated 25,000 people of Japanese descent lived in Peru...after the outbreak of World War Two, the Japanese community in Peru became a target, and their assets were confiscated."In May 1940, as many as 600 houses, schools and businesses belonging to citizens of Japanese descent were burned down," she says.Following Japan's 1941 attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the US government asked a dozen Latin American countries, among them Peru, to arrest its Japanese residents.Records from the time suggest the US authorities wanted to take them to the US and use them as bargaining chips for its nationals captured by Japanese forces in Asia....After World War Two ended, another 1,000 were deported to Japan after their Latin American home countries refused to take them back