[Asian-American] What led to the large Japanese population in Peru? What was the non-Japanese-Peruvian reaction to Fujimori's election to the presidency?

Disclaimer: I am not a historian, though I do have a couple of political science degrees, and I've done a bit of work on Fujimori.

From what I understand, Peru’s tumultuous democratic past culminated in about a decade of military rule that ended in 1980 with the election of Fernando Belaunde as President. Under Belaunde and his successor, Alan García, economic conditions in the country failed to improve, and the communist insurgency active in the Peruvian jungle remained a constant threat. By the time the 1990 presidential elections rolled around, Peruvians were “thoroughly dissatisfied with their country’s political system, especially its parties, but still preferred democracy of military rule or leftist revolution.”[1] Alberto Fujimori’s 1990 candidacy for the Peruvian Presidency was, in some ways, a curious departure from the Latin American populist tradition. A consummate outsider who ran without the support of any established political organizations, any major media groups, or—uniquely for Latin American populists—the significant support of organized labour, Fujimori stressed his outsider credentials, railing against the party system and emphasizing how different he was from the political elite based in the capital that comprised old, wealthy, white Peruvians. Fujimori drew his support primarily from workers in the informal sector through measures designed to appeal directly to them (like the legalization of certain street vending practices and the creation of a special bank for vendors), and the redistribution of some of the profits from his government’s successful privatization initiatives to social programmes designed to ameliorate poverty (especially among opposition voters!). In so doing, he courted a class that the political elite in Peru had consistently ignored. At the same time, he championed aggressive neoliberal reforms helping rein in excessive inflation (immediately after taking office the elimination of price controls helped to reduce inflation by about 7000% ), and his successful campaign against the Shining Path communist insurgency rebels helped to build his popularity with the middle class.

I'm no fan of the man--he did a lot of terrible things while in office and a lot of people died--but at the time he was seen as an outsider (his membership in a non-dominant ethnic group actually helped on this front) and an outsider was exactly what many of the Peruvian people wanted.

Quick edit: I was able to dig up some info on racism during Fujimori's first campaign. It turns out that his opponent's supporters were known to shout things like "no Chinaman will be president of Peru," but Fujimori's supporters saw this as an exclusionary elite being typically exclusionary. That's in the Ellner citation below.

[1] Gregory D. Schmidt, “Delegative Democracy in Peru? Fujimori’s 1995 Landslide and the Prospects for 2000,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 42 (2000): 102.

Other sources:

Ellner, Steve. “The Contrasting Variants of the Populism of Alberto Fujimori and Hugo Chavez.” Journal of Latin American Studies 35 (2003): 139-162.

Stein, Steve. “The Paths to Populism in Peru.” In Populism in Latin America ed. Michael L. Conniff, 110-131. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2012.