‘Shake Hands with Lima-chan’

In 1899, 790 Japanese immigrants boarded the Sakura-maru at the Port of Yokohama and set out for Lima, Peru. Ninety years after that journey across the Pacific Ocean, a statue of a girl called Sakura-chan was installed at the Japanese cultural center in Lima, commemorating the transpacific friendship between the two nations.

In 1999, on the centenary of the mass migration, a sister to Sakura-chan was created in Yokohama. Known as Lima-chan, the statue stands in Rinko Park with her hand outstretched for a shake, looking towards the port—the Pacific and Peru beyond, where her sister stands, also facing the direction of the ocean.

Between the late 19th century and the start of World War II, some 240,000 people migrated from Japan to South America. Many of those men and women moved to Peru as contract workers at sugarcane and rubber plantations, where they faced harsh working conditions.