There was a strong wave of Japanese immigration to Peru during the period comprising the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. But, what I really need to know is that if at anytime during that period any historical theory, even if fringe or far-fetched, was developed within Japanese academic environment that would claim any racial-cultural-historic relationship between the Japanese people/culture and the Incas or even South American natives in general.
I am writing a short story that uses as background a Japanese intervention in Peru based on a racial relationship claim between Japanese and Quechua. The Japanese use that as an excuse to intervene in Peru to support an insurrection of Native peoples and Japanese immigrants allied against people from European ancestry and Criollos that controlled the government and Peru's institutions.
Just wondering if there was any possible historical theory that could justify Japanese imperialism and interventionism towards Peru. TIA for any reply.
There's a lot to say about this and its rather a complex topic, but here's a bit of background.
From the Japanese perspective, settlements in Latin America were always about developing Japanese business interests to compete on the international scene, to ease civil unrest as a result of huge economic upheavals in the Meiji Era (Japanese to Latin American immigration began in 1891, with the Enomoto Company in Mexico), and to cultivate remittances to be sent back home. Both Latin American countries (especially Mexico, Peru, and Brazil) and Japan were struggling to be recognized on the international stage in a world dominated by European and American interests, so immigration arrangements were mutually beneficial. Japanese immigration to Latin America increased rapidly following the US' passage of the Asian Exclusion Act (1924). Meanwhile, Latin American countries were desperately trying, but failing, to attract European immigrants, at least partially motivated by race-lightening ambitions, a common national project during the era.
To speak to the since-deleted comment here, there were a few Japanese officials during the Showa era who talked of conquering Latin America, but they were never very influential, nor taken too seriously domestically or abroad. If you’re looking for racialized mythologies, it’s a lot easier to find from the Peru side. Japanese immigration was cultivated under and at the behest of President Leguia, who was the owner of a large sugar farm and had brought in Japanese labor explicitly to undermine the power and drive down the wages of the Incan population (at the time it was said—likely not correctly—that the Incan population was something like 70% of the total), who were unwilling to work in slave-like conditions. Thus cultivating some idea of shared culture would have served to ease rising racial tensions.
Interestingly, a Spanish linguistic anthropologist in the 1920s, Francisco Loayza, developed a theory that the Incan empire was founded by Japanese sailors blown off course, and wrote a book titled Manko Kapa, El fundador del imperio de los Inkas fue japonés proposing that theory. He argues that a lot of Quechua words and symbols are derivations of Japanese language and writing respectively. I don't speak any Quechua so I can't speak authoritatively, but it's a pretty far-fetched and fringe theory. Nonetheless, here's a link to more info, if you read Spanish. [IIRC, there's something like 2 extant copies of the original text--one in Lima and one NYC, but this touches on the main points as I remember them. ]
Another text you might be interested in is Jose Vasconcelos' *La raza cosmica* (in Engish as *The Cosmic Race*). Vasconcelos was an early 20th c mexican philosopher, but was widely read and respected across Latin America. This text makes a eugenicist claim (this was, after all, the era of eugenics) for Latin American superiority based on "hybridization" (mixed-race) ideology, with the specific "contributions" of each race to the greater so-called "cosmic race" explicitly described.
If you'd want to think more about connections from Japan to Latin America, you'd have to think more abstractly about the notion of modernity, which is always a racialized concept but particularly so around the world during that era, and which was very much at stake for both parties during the negotiations and relations I touched on above. As this era was rife with positivism, eugenics and social Darwinism were flourishing, and scholars and cultural theorists were trying to find “scientific” reasons for Euro-America dominance. You’ll find this to be the case for early twentieth-century intellectuals and politicians in Japan as much as Latin America.
Secondary sources: Endoh, Toake. Exporting Japan: Politics of Emigration toward Latin America. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009
Gardiner, C. Harvey. The Japanese and Peru, 1873-1973. University of New Mexico Press: Albaquerque; 1975
Irie Toraji. “History of Japanese Migration to Peru, Part I”. William Himel (trans.). The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Aug., 1951). Duke University Press (pub.). pp. 437-452. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2509401 (Accessed: 8 May 2015)
---. “History of Japanese Migration to Peru, Part II”. William Himel (trans.). The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Nov, 1951). Duke University Press (pub.). pp. 648-664. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2509359 (Accessed: 8 May 2015)
Takenaka, Ayumi. “The Japanese in Peru: History of Immigration, Settlement, and Racialization” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 31, No. 3, East Asian Migration to Latin America(May, 2004), pp. 77-98 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3185184(Accessed: 02 December 2014)
I wanted to post a quick follow-up, as I was looking over an article I've been working on with regard to historical relationships between Peru and Japan. I'm replying to the main post as I hope you'll be notified.
I found the following passage from a 1935 article from Carleton Beals, which appeared in The American Mercury.
“In Indian countries such as Peru and Mexico, the Japanese make a race appeal. The Incas, they declare, are really Oriental peoples, their ancestors came from Japan and Manchuria; the two peoples should be friendly allies—a sort of Pan-Japanesism”