The main objective was to explore how Japanese national identity traveled to Argentina and Bolivia in the post WWII era and how it is depicted in Bolivian and Argentine literature. However, due to a scarcity of primary works on this topic, I was only able to start writing one article on Japanese Argentinian memory and identity presented in the novel Gaijin authored by Maximiliano Matayoshi. I am planning to send it to a peer-review article in the U.S. Meanwhile, I have come across several new literary works about Japanese Peruvian communities and shifted my focus to the migrant voices that cross the border between Peru and Japan, which will be published in Peru as a book in March 2021. For the book project, I conducted an interview with Luis Arriola Ayala in Lima, a Peruvian writer who illegally worked in Japan at the end of the 90s as a “fake” Japanese Peruvian "dekasegi." I also presented a paper on another recent work on the process of reconciliation between Peruvians and Japanese Peruvians, which will be included in the book. Further, I have a forthcoming book chapter on Carlos Yushimito’s short story about the memory of a Japanese Peruvian family who underwent confiscation and deportation during WWII, which will be published in Cultural and Literary Dialogues between Asia and Latin America (Palgrave, 2020). Finally, on January 22 2020, I was invited as a panelist to give an interpretation of a book Historia cultural de los hispanohablantes en Japon by Dr. Araceli Tinajero, organized by the Instituto Cervantes-Tokyo.This project has focused on Japanese Peruvian literature much more than Bolivian and Argentinian literature. Since this project started in 2016, there have been new publications in relation to Japanese Peruvian communities. The recent literary works on Japanese Peruvians invite scholars of literary studies to look into the fundamental question: What is Nikkei literature? Drawing attention to this broader issue which entails the location and function of Nikkei literature within Latin American literature has become my principal interest rather than a simple analysis of a particular literary work from Bolivia or Argentina. In order to grapple with this question, I have been approaching many new texts depicting Japanese Peruvians in Peru and Japan and looking for a way to synthesize different forms, styles, and themes into a coherent articulation of what Nikkei literature is. Consequently, my studies on Japanese Bolivian and Argentinian literature have not progressed as much as I had initially planned. Especially, regarding Japanese Bolivian poet, Pedro Shimose’s works, I have not been able to connect the themes of identity and memory to his poetry. Studying his poems requires me to approach them from different perspectives that go beyond his Japanese Bolivian identity and memory. I realize that it may take a while to fully understand his poetry by rethinking how to connect his poetry to the other Latin American literary works in relation to Nikkei identity and memory.In the academic year 2020, I will publish a book on the migrants’ voices that cross the border between Peru and Japan (projected in March 2021) and an article on Japanese Argentinian identity and memory. I also intend to write an article on Pedro Shimose’s poetry, drawing attention to his social and political activism beyond his identity and memory. I will need to reflect on what I have read and rethink how to approach his poetry. Reading it as a poetic space for an exploration of identity and memory may not be convincing. If I cannot connect his poetry to the entire project, I will publish an article independent from the project themes.In the process of this project, I may have faced the impasse on discussing how Nikkei identity and memory have been constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed and how they have been represented in literary works. Instead of focusing exclusively on the national identity and memory of Nikkei communities, as mentioned above, I am interested in going back to the fundamental questions. What is Nikkei literature? Why is it important to (re)define it now? Contemplating these questions, I will scrutinize the themes of identity and memory through different angles, paying attention to the limits and possibilities of asserting the ontology of the genre of Nikkei literature

In this research, I mainly analyzed how Japanese Peruvian (Nikkei) identity was born and has been transformed into indefinable, diverse, and heterogeneous identities, in literary works authored by Jose Watanabe, Augusto Higa Oshiro, Fernando Iwasaki, and Doris Moromisato. More specifically, I examined the birth and transformations of the identity of "Nikkei Peruvians," through the exploration of Japanese Peruvians' immigration experience at the end of the 19th century and, then, the 20th and 21st-century reverse immigration and migration movements. I presented the studies that explored this theme at several conferences and symposia and published articles examining the theme in academic journals

The aim of this project was to explore four life-writing texts focusing on the first group of Japanese immigrants who arrived in Peru in 1899. These immigrants worked as contract laborers in hacienda farmlands. This exploration has been conducting through the lens of the Plantationocene, a variation derived from the Anthropocene, underscoring environmental damages caused by the large-scale capitalist monocropping plantations. What I accomplished during this year was 1) to conduct a close reading of the four texts, 2) to discover another interest related to this project during my library research, and 3) to start analyzing one of the four texts. First, I looked into the concept of the Plantationocene (and the Anthropocene in general) by obtaining materials from libraries in the United States. This library research enabled me to articulate the general notion of the Plantationocene and also led me to find a clearer connection between environmental crises and migration, not only in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but also in the present day. Contemplating the connection, I became interested in analyzing a short story about Peruvian workers who are obliged to leave their country due to socio-environmental crises at the end of the 20th century, subsequently working as dekasegi contract labor workers in Japan. Although I had to set aside what I initially intended to do, I was able to complete an analysis of the short story by applying L. Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism.” In this study, I examined the push factors for migration in the time of the Anthropocene (Capitalocene) and the enduring motivations that migrants have, despite their harsh living and working conditions, through the notion of “cruel optimism.” I presented this paper at the annual LASA (Latin American Studies Association) conference in Vancouver, Canada and received valuable feedback. Then, I revised it and submitted it to an international peer-reviewed journal. Returning to my initial plan, I started analyzing the first life-writing memory text through the notion of the Plantationocene, drawing attention to the ambitions and desolations of Nikumatsu Okada, a Japanese immigrant depicted in the text. In order to gather further information, I visited Okinawa Prefectural Archives, the Central Library of Okinawa, and other relevant sites, where I collected documents pertaining to the records of the first 799 Japanese immigrants, including Okada’s birth name and the fact that he was on the vessel that took them to the Callao port from Yokohama.

Four memorial texts were published between 2017 and 2020, under a series of Japanese Peruvian immigration memory project, by the editorial house of the major cultural association, the Japanese-Peruvian Association (APJ), around the time of the 120th anniversary of the Japanese immigration to Peru. The purpose of this study was to explore how and why the texts bring a dissonance to the aim of the APJ, which attempts to celebrate the Japanese and their descendants’ experiences and contributions to the Peruvian nation as well as their successful integration in society as a prominent minority group. As a point of departure, I endeavored to read them as the sites of storytelling which reveal the performative function of both reinforcing and disturbing the APJ’s normalized presentation of Japanese immigration memories as an archive of the consecrated legacy of suffering and overcoming. First, I collected materials closely associated the notion of storytelling as a performance in Japan and in the US. Second, I analyzed one of the memory books, Crónicas de mujeres nikkei (Chronicles of Nikkei Women) (2019), for a round table discussion organized by CANELA (Japanese Spanish Latin American Academic Confederation) at Waseda University on May 29 2022.  

Due to the pandemic of COVID-19, my research did not advance as much as I had expected. I initially planned to visit the Okinawa Prefectural Archives and the library at the University of Ryukyu in order to collect archival materials of Okinawan immigration to Peru. However, I could not conduct archival research. Despite this obstacle, I accomplished the following activities. 1)  I revised my literary criticism on a novel, Gaijin: La aventura de emigrar a la Argentina (2002) by an Argentine writer of Japanese ancestry, Maximiliano Matayoshi, and submitted it to a peer-review journal in the United States. I am waiting for an answer from the journal. 2) Through an online meeting initiated by Nobuaki Hamaguchi, specialist of economics in the context of Latin America, at Kobe University, and JICA’s researchers, Facundo Garacino and Yukako Nagamura, specialists on Nikkei community in Argentina and Nikkei community in Brazil respectively, we prepared a plenary session titled “Nikkei Communities Intersecting Latin America and Japan,” which was presented at the LASA/Asia 2022 conference. 3) Finally, I started analyzing a testimonial memory book through the ecocritical lens based on the notion of the Anthropocene, articulated by Timothy Clark. 

The purpose of this study was to explore the socio-political roles of Japanese Peruvian literary and cultural works which depict the precarious and exploitative conditions that Peruvian migrants face in Japan. I started to analyze two short stories about undocumented Peruvian migrant workers authored by Luis Fernando Arriola Ayala, as well as two reggaeton songs by Los Kalibres, group composed of dekasegi workers’ children. However, I could not produce a paper on a comparative analysis. What I accomplished during this year was the following. I reexamined my previous study on another short story by Arriola Ayala and presented it at a seminar series organized by the National University of Asuncion (Paraguay) and the Embassy of Paraguay in Japan. I also analyzed a poem about a Japanese Peruvian dekasegi woman who works like a machine at a factory in Japan, hoping that she will find a better life, through Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism,” and presented it at a conference. Also, three different media sources (public in general) interviewed me about my recent book publication.

The initial purpose was to explore the Japanese Paraguayan community in Paraguay in order to expand my knowledge of Japanese communities in Latin America beyond Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. However, I was only able to gather materials about the historical overview of Japanese immigration to Paraguay in the 1950s in Washington D.C. and Chicago. I was planning to go to Paraguay to give a talk on a comparative study of Japanese Peruvian poetry and Japanese Paraguayan poetry in October 2019, however, this project did not go through due to a budgetary issue. Instead of starting a new project without being able to explore further Japanese Paraguayan poetry, I decided to use the half of the funding to explore new Japanese Peruvian writers at Elena Kohatsu Library at the Japanese Cultural Center in Lima, Peru, where I found several new materials, including non-Japanese Peruvian writers who write about the Japanese community. I also spent some time in Mexico City in order to explore how haiku was imported to Mexican poetry by Jose Juan Tablada at the beginning of the 20th century and examine how his haiku poetry has influenced Japanese Peruvian poetry.