From a distance, the long pier seemed like a smooth line drawn out from the sandy cliffs: a slender division between a cloudless sky and the Pacific Ocean. Now, as I eyed the aging wooden railway ties, or rather, the uneven gaps between them, and the surging waves below, I thought – Don't slip… they'll never find you.
The railway pier, now over a century old, is a reminder of what the town of Puerto Éten used to be. Today, Puerto Éten is a quiet fishing village, but at the turn of the last century, it was a major regional rail and shipping hub. In 1899, it was also the first port of call for the first group of Japanese contract laborers sent to Perú.
This past summer, I traveled to Puerto Éten, and similar sites throughout Perú, to better understand the landscapes and locations at the heart of poetry written by Japanese immigrants to Perú and the poetry of their Japanese Peruvian descendants.
Two years ago, I began reading the poems of José Watanabe, son of a Japanese immigrant father and an indigenous Peruvian mother. I kept revisiting these lines from a poem-in-prose entitled "Elogio del Refrenamiento" – "A Eulogy to Restraint."
My father was a reader of haiku… Among the chickens and ducks in the yard of my home, he would translate for me, between long, reflective pauses, these brief poems that, at the time, I did not really understand. This was the first poetic language that I learned. The haiku is an exercise of modesty before the true discovery of beauty.
Mi padre era lector de haikus... En medio de los pollos y patos del corral de mi casa, me traducía, entre grandes pausas reflexivas, esos breves poemas que entonces yo no entendía claramente. Ese fue el primer lenguaje poético que conocí. El haiku es un ejercicio de pudor frente al propio descubrimiento de la belleza.
Watanabe's phrase, un ejercicio de pudor (an exercise of modesty), stands in stark contrast to a similar-sounding and more commonly-uttered phrase: el ejercicio del poder (the exercise of power). Written in 2002, two years after the fall of Alberto Fujimori, Watanabe's praise of personal restraint and poetic modesty contains an implicit response to the arrogant and unrestrained exercise of political power. Fujimori’s dramatic rise to the presidency, the corruption and human rights violations of his regime, his flight to Japan, and his ongoing court trials have all made political headlines. But behind these political headlines, there are lines of poetry, like Watanabe's, that remind us of alternatives to the exercise of naked force – the power of language to pass a memory from parent to child; the power to pause, reflect, and translate moments of beauty to others.
During the month I spent in Peru, it was impossible to miss the daily media coverage surrounding Fujimori's trial. Tabloid covers splashed images of Fujimori gazing “lovingly” at his former intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos. Evening news programs endlessly replayed old footage of Fujimori weeping in the back of a police car after his arrest in Chile. And graffiti in the streets provided spray-paint expositions on the guilt or innocence of El Chino.
The back room of the Museo de la Inmigración Japonesa al Perú provided some respite from Lima’s crowded streets and endless traffic jams. I spent two weeks working with the museum’s collections, gathering poems from Japanese-language newspapers, literary magazines, and commemorative anthologies. At the beginning of my time in the museum archives, I felt as if I had retreated from the turbulent world outside, and many poems that I read contributed to this feeling. Take for example, the following poem, a tanka of thirty-one syllables by Nakayama Hatsuko published in a Peru ni iki fuku (The Life-Breath of Peru) a 1992 collection of Japanese Peruvian women’s poetry:
At the foot of the Andes, ho, ho – what a lively poetry gathering
we lift our wine cups and toast in celebration!
Andesu no fumoto ni ho’ho’ to ibukisi kakai
jiki no iwai tudohi kotohogu (94).
In this poem Nakayama presents a centuries-old scene, borrowed from classical Chinese poetry, of friends gathering to drink and compose poems. She uses classical Japanese language and syntax, hewing closely to the conservative nature of the tanka form. In keeping with poetic convention, she adds her own elegant variation to the classical theme by setting the gathering, not at the base of a Japanese or Chinese mountain, but at the foot of the Andes.
Reading a poem like this, one could easily think that Japanese Peruvian poetry was mostly escapist and apolitical, a retreat from the real world. However, I soon encountered poems like the following, also by Nakayama Hatsuko:
The nation that sought independence in the name of freedom,
now turns totalitarian – how pathetic!
Jiyū wo ba mezasi dokuritu sesi kuni wo
totaritario ni kaeru wa kanasi (16).
Written two years into Fujimori’s first term, Nakayama’s poem expresses a direct political sentiment about the deterioration of freedom and democracy in Peru. Although Nakayama uses the Japanese words for freedom (jiyū) and independence (dokuritu), she borrows the Spanish word for “totalitarian” (totalitario). The abrupt contrast between languages and the starkly political nature of the poem’s content run counter to traditional expectations of tanka’s poetic form.
In addition to responding to Peru’s domestic political situation, other poems in the collection address the difficulties and discrimination faced by the return migration of Japanese descendants to Japan – the so-called dekasegi phenomenon. The following poem, by Kobayashi Mitsuko, takes the perspective of a grandmother who has to write letters that certify her grandson’s Japanese heritage.
Today I write yet again to the people of my homeland,
who ignore the visa application of a young dekasegi.
Dekasegi no seinen no iraisho mizu shirazu
sokoku no hito ni kyō mo kakitugu (89).
Kobayashi’s poem contrasts the personal act of writing letters “home” with the bureaucratic impersonality of Japanese immigration authorities. The fact that Kobayashi’s poem appears in perfect tanka form adds strength to her rebuke – not only are you ignoring my grandson’s application, but I’m going to criticize you in strictly regulated Japanese poetic meter!
These three poems are but a miniscule fraction of the thousands of Japanese-language poems available in the collections of the Museum of Japanese Immigration to Peru. Each poem presents its own moment: a moment of beauty, or sentiment, or political critique. There is a stark difference between seeing the past as a seamless line somewhere off in the distance, and seeing it one step at a time, attending to the texture of a moment, or to the gaps in between that reveal oceans of meaning. The Japanese poems of Peru provide us with the chance to pursue the latter.
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