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The Japan Times: Saturday, July 22, 2006

Koizumi apologizes to emigrants

Dominican Republic settlers to paradise lie draw regrets

By HIROKO NAKATA

Staff writer

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi officially apologized Friday to Japanese who moved to the Dominican Republic with the promise of a Caribbean paradise and fertile farmland under a state-promoted emigration project between 1956 and 1959 and instead found sterile land and starvation.

"The government honestly regrets and apologizes for the enormous hardships the emigrants experienced due to the government's mismanagement at that time," Koizumi said in a statement.

News photo

Toru Takegama, 68, representing plaintiffs in a redress suit against the government over its emigration program to the Dominican Republic, meets Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Friday at the Prime Minister's Official Residence. KYODO PHOTO

The government admitted in the statement that it failed to conduct adequate prior research or provide accurate information about the land that would be given to the emigrants and thus the project brought hardships over a long period of time.

It also said it will pay compensation because the emigrants are aging and need an urgent and overall solution. Some media reports say each emigrant is expected to receive up to 2 million yen.

The official apology came after the Tokyo District Court ruled June 7 that the emigrants were legally ineligible to seek compensation for their hardship because they filed their lawsuit too late.

But the court also ruled that the state's faulty emigration policy, which had falsely promised "a Caribbean paradise" and title to rich farmland, was indeed to blame for their pain and suffering.

Soon after the statement was released, the plaintiffs dropped an appeal with the Tokyo High Court against the lower court decision.

Later Friday, Koizumi offered the government's apology in a meeting with some of the plaintiffs at the Prime Minister's Official Residence.

"I told them (the government) had placed on them hardships," Koizumi told reporters after the meeting. "I can imagine how big their efforts and their pains were."

Koizumi added that because of the emigrants' hard work, Japan was able to gain public trust in the Dominican Republic.

"As a representative for all of 1,319 Japanese immigrants in the Dominican Republic, I deeply appreciate the hearty words from the prime minister," Toru Takegama, a 68-year-old representative of the plaintiffs, separately told reporters after meeting Koizumi.

Over 1,300 Japanese moved to the Dominican Republic between 1956 and 1959, when the government sponsored emigration programs to mitigate the surging population as civilians and soldiers returned from other parts of Asia after the war.

But many were devastated by the harsh conditions that awaited them, and some committed suicide.

The government will dispatch Hidehisa Otsuji, a former welfare minister who heads a group of lawmakers working on behalf of the emigrants and their families, to the Dominican Republic from July 27 to Aug. 1 to attend a ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the relocation.

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(Constanza, Dominican Republic-AP, Tuesday July 25, 2006)

Japanese 'making it' in the Dominican Republic

- Between Teruki Waki's porch and the Constanza mountains lies the blooming farmland that hundreds of his fellow immigrants thought would never grow.

It is the unlikely triumph over a mistake made 50 years ago - a story of failure and heartbreak only now coming to closure.

Thousands of poor Japanese families came to the Dominican Republic in the postwar 1950s, encouraged by the Tokyo government to take the offer of free land and a new life. But the soil was bad and the Caribbean nation would soon be plunged into political chaos. In less than a decade nearly all the Japanese were gone.

Their story is a striking example of the convulsion that gripped post-World War II Japan. The ripples were still being felt last week, when the emigrants finally won an apology from their prime minister.

Dominican dictator Gen. Rafael Trujillo pushed the free-land program in hopes of creating a vegetable industry and bringing lighter-skinned genes to his country's bloodline. A similar Trujillo plan brought Jewish Holocaust refugees to the country's north coast from Europe to set up a dairy industry.

Postwar Japan liked the idea; it was desperate to house its soldiers and families returning from a collapsed empire. So from 1956 to 1959, some 1,300 Japanese made the 30-day, 8,000 mile voyage across the oceans.

The Nishio family was given arid, salty soil near the Haitian border.

"There was no water. There were so many mosquitoes. It was a disgrace," said Yoko Nishio, who arrived as a teenager and is now a 65-year-old grandmother.

Her family struggled to farm and sell crops to Dominicans unaccustomed to eating vegetables. Four years later, at age 20, her father demanded she find a husband to support her. She married a Japanese soil engineer and moved to the Constanza valley, where the land was more fertile, though overgrown with pine trees.

But in May 1961 Trujillo was assassinated, kicking off four years of violence and political turbulence that would end with a U.S. invasion. Nishio's parents moved to Brazil. She never saw them again.

Most of the other Japanese left too, including nearly all of the 37 families in Constanza. Only some 257 immigrants stayed past the early 1960s, according to the committee organizing the community's 50th anniversary celebration this month.

Ashamed of their failure to farm the difficult land and crushed by the breakup of their families, some committed suicide, said committee spokesman Yoshihiro Iguchi.

In 2000, Nishio and more than 170 other immigrants sued the Japanese government, claiming they were deceived into leaving Japan and taking bad land.

Japan settled the lawsuit this month, promising to pay up to $17,000 to each plaintiff as well as $10,000 to emigrants who did not take part in the suit.

And on Friday, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi issued a formal apology, "for causing immense suffering due to the government's response at the time."

Still, for some who stuck it out, the Dominican Republic is a comfortable home.

"It's good here. The mountain climate is very similar to where we're from," said Waki, a thin, 51-year-old man with skin tanned reddish-brown from five decades in the Caribbean sun.

The half-dozen families who stayed in Constanza blend prewar Japanese culture with their modern Dominican lives.

Even the youngest speak a dated version of the mother tongue. In Japan, a camera is a "kamera," but here it's still a "shashinki."

Koki Sato, a 42-year-old vegetable farmer, swears in Spanish but makes his daughters watch Japanese television via satellite to keep them connected to their ancestral language and culture.

The next generation of Japanese-Dominicans will now inherit the land. Waki's fields of ornamental flowers will pass to his 29-year-old son and Dominican daughter-in-law.

It will complete a journey begun by Waki's mother, Choko, from her childhood in Japanese-occupied China, back to Japan and then to this Caribbean island five decades ago. At 75, she looked across the wide valley where her family once struggled.

"It is paradise for us," she said.