(Japanese) Of course, since Buenos Aires is a big city and the capital of Argentina, it has one of the biggest Japanese populations — Okinawan Nikkei making up a large part of it — and for a long time most of the businesses have been cleaners, or tintorerías in Spanish. Going back, a decent number of Japanese people owned bazar or coffee shop Bazar is to say, general stores. There are still Japanese people running those now, but mainly, Nikkei in Buenos Aires are known for working in dry-cleaning.
Unfortunately, many of those businesses are closing, because there’s no one for the owners to pass them on to. Of course that’s happening in a lot of countries, but in the Americas and Europe there are really a lot of dry-cleaning chains and laundromats, so the businesses you could call more traditional have taken serious blows in the past twenty years, and a lot of them shut down.
Date: September 22, 2019
Location: California, US
Interviewer: Yoko Nishimura
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
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