In Peru and Lima there’s a big Japanese stadium called La Unión … Asociación Estadio La Unión – I know it’s really hard for me to say – and it’s a stadium that a lot of the Nisei that came to Peru built – Japanese and Okinawan. They put in all their funds and they built this huge…kind of like the equivalent of what Budokan would be to us today. They have swimming pools and tennis courts and all this good stuff and in it they also had a Japanese school called La Unión and so my mom grew up going to that Japanese school and most Japanese Peruvians grew up going to that school so it was just a Japanese Peruvian school.
My father on the other hand, him and his siblings grew up going to…I believe it’s called Lincoln, which is more of an American school, I want to say. It was more multi-cultural so my father grew up still doing these activities within La Unión, or there’s another school club called Sakura that my grandparents Yamashiro and Arakaki founded. So they still did all these different Japanese things but my dad grew up with different friends. A lot of them live in the United States now too.
Date: August 30, 2018
Location: California, US
Interviewer: Sharon Yamato
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
Journal feed
