Author Bio
• Birth—1909
• Where—Hokkaido, Japan
• Education—architectural degree, Hozen Technical Institute
• Death—1997
• Where—Honolulu, Hawaiik US
Born into rural poverty in a remote mountain village in Hokkaido, Japan, young Higashide eventually made his way to Tokyo. Engulfed there in a struggle to survive that included collecting and reselling bottles, selling newspapers, and performing hard manual labor, he engaged in night-school studies in engineering and architecture, fields yielding him no opportunity in Japan. Always a student and contemplating migration to Peru, he studies Spanish to ease his immersion into a strange world. Tears marked his sailing from his homeland in 1930, at the age of twenty-one.
Inured to hard work and uncertainty in Japan, Higashide encountered both in Peru, in addition to a language barrier, prejudice, and countless points of cultural collision. He labored many months, room and board his only remuneration. He taught school. His work ethic, earnestness, and other positive qualities gradually won him helpful contacts and advancement. In 1935 he married Angelica Yoshinaga. Launching into shopkeeping and family building, he prospered in both. By the late 1930's he was a community leader in Ica, a provincial town five hundred miles south of Lima. But just when he was savoring success and some affluence in his adopted homeland, storm clouds gathered.
Anti-Japanese rioting and the approaching collision of Japan and the US skewed Higashide's prospects. Events of December 7, 1941, and the swift issuance by the US of the Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals (blacklist) hit home when his name, as a community leader, appeared on the initial list. For a long time, however, he evaded deportation.
Seized finally early in January 1944 by four policemen while he dined with his family, Higashide was spirited north to a urine-soaked jail cell in Lima. Ten days later, his distraught wife, pregnant with their fifth child, saw him forced aboard ship in Callao by Peruvian police and American soldiers. Sailing away a second time, he again shed tears.
The family was reunited in July 1944 at the Immigration and Naturalization Service facility (guarded with barbed wire, watch-towers, and armed personnel) in Crystal City, Texas, in the US.
Released after more than two years of internment, the Higashides moved cautiously, haltingly into mainstream American life, another bumpy beginning in a strange land. Years mounted into decades; roots deepened. Citizenship, schooling, hard work—all contributed to their pursuit of the American dream.
For years Higashide was a leader in the effort to obtain redress from the American government for the violation of the human rights of the Peruvian Japanese internees. In 1981 he testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. (From the book's Forward.)