COLUMN ONE : New Pride for <i> Nikkei</i> in Peru : The success of President Alberto Fujimori has made Japanese Peruvians feel more accepted by a society that once persecuted them.

According to a theory popularized early this century, wayward Japanese fishermen landed on South America’s Pacific shore in the 1400s and stayed to start a dynasty that ruled the Andes. Manco Capac, the legendary founding father of the great Inca Empire, was said to have been an immigrant from Japan posing as a god.

Although archeologists scoff at such a far-fetched notion, it has its modern-day parallel: Alberto Fujimori, the Japanese immigrants’ son who was reelected April 9 by a landslide vote, is the most popular Peruvian president of this century.

His success has been a source of pride and prestige for the nikkei, people of Japanese descent, whose ancestors began arriving here at the end of the last century. While the Fujimori phenomenon has not turned Peru’s nikkei into a ruling class, it has enhanced their collective stature and given them a new sense of belonging in a country where they once were resented and even persecuted.

“They feel more a part of society, and society is accepting them,” said Alejandro Sakuda, editor of the daily newspaper La Republica and the son of Japanese immigrants.

“The accession of Fujimori to the presidency has opened doors, made things easier,” said Luis Sakoda, president of the Peruvian Japanese Cultural Center.

The success of the Japanese Peruvian community is not just a product of Fujimori’s popularity, of course. In fact, his election in 1990 was attributed partly to the already well-established nikkei reputation for hard work, reliability and honesty.

Many of the more than 50,000 Japanese Peruvians have distinguished themselves as doctors, lawyers, engineers, farmers, government officials and business people. Several of Peru’s major business groups are dominated by nikkei entrepreneurs.

Peru also had nikkei members of Congress, mayors and other politicians before Fujimori entered the 1990 presidential race. But since he became president, the nikkei have found a much brighter place in the political sun. Four have served in his Cabinet, and three were elected in 1992 to Congress.

The speaker of the 80-member Congress is Jaime Yoshiyama, who previously was Fujimori’s minister of energy and mines. The current minister of energy and mines is a nikkei, as are the minister of fisheries, the vice minister of agriculture and the superintendent of customs.

“It’s like Japanese power,” said Carlos Ujike, a journalist on Lima’s daily newspaper Peru Shimpo (printed in both Spanish and Japanese). “There are nikkei in high public positions; there are nikkei on television.”

Prominent nikkei include a handful of Fujimori’s relatives. The ambassador to Japan is married to the president’s sister. Another sister, Juana Fujimori de Kagami, is head of Apenkai, an agency that distributes donated Japanese clothing to the needy. Two close presidential advisers, with offices in the government palace, are Fujimori’s brothers, Santiago and Pedro.

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The most prominent Fujimori relative is Susana Higuchi, the president’s wife, but she lost favor last year when he barred her from the presidential palace in a public marital spat.

Higuchi has accused Fujimori of being dictatorial, a charge that harks back to his use of military force in 1992 to breach the constitution and shut down a recalcitrant Congress. But most nikkei now overlook that episode and Fujimori’s troubles with his estranged wife as they emphasize his accomplishments and the benefits of his prestige.

Like Indians and blacks in Peru, nikkei in the past suffered racial prejudice. Before Fujimori, according to journalist Ujike, Japanese Peruvians were not invited to join some of the social clubs of Lima’s white elite, but that has changed.

“Socially, they now seem to be on a par with the whites,” he said. “Before, when there was a job opening, the employer wanted tall, white people,” he said. “Not today. Now, many companies want Japanese personnel.”

So far, no white backlash against nikkei success in the job market has become apparent. The Japanese-Peruvian population is a tiny part of the country’s total population of 24 million.

But backlash did break out in 1990, when Fujimori emerged from political obscurity to place second in presidential elections and force front-runner Mario Vargas Llosa into a runoff. During the ensuing weeks, Japanese Peruvians felt the racist resentment of some Vargas Llosa supporters, especially in upper-class neighborhoods.

In one infamous incident, a group of nikkei were drummed out of an expensive seaside restaurant by diners who jeered and rapped their tables with silverware. Other nikkei faced insults from neighbors.

The degeneration of political anger into racist manifestations probably was an echo of anti-Japanese sentiment from World War II. But it also reflected traditional racism in Peru’s white upper class, which has a long history of discrimination against the country’s Indians and mixed Indian-whites.

“I think there is a very strong sentiment against Japanese . . . in certain high strata of the population,” said Julio Cotler, a sociologist with the private Institute for Peruvian Studies. But such feelings now conflict with upper-class support for Fujimori’s conservative economic policies and his hard-fisted campaign against terrorism, Cotler added. “There is a kind of ambivalence.”

He said anti- nikkei feelings do not extend to Peru’s poorer people, for whom Fujimori is not a foreigner but a Peruvian.

While the nikkei are riding high, some say their cultural and racial identity is beginning to blur. Morihisa Aoki, the Japanese ambassador to Peru, said that, in many cases, the process of assimilation leads to intermarriage and a complete loss of Japanese identity.

“Invisible nikkei , I call them,” Aoki said. “And their kids become, well, just ordinary Peruvians.”

Historian Amelia Morimoto estimated that half of Japanese Peruvians are of mixed origin and most do not speak Japanese.

“The language is used less and less,” she said. “And just as that happens with the language, it happens with the rest of the culture.”

This is part of the process of immigrant assimilation everywhere. Eventually, Morimoto predicted, the nikkei in Peru perhaps will be identifiable by their surnames and facial features, and probably proud of their origins, but culturally they will be a product of the country where they were born.

Fujimori, while openly proud of his Japanese heritage, carefully cultivates his contact with common Peruvians. He frequently visits provincial towns and urban slums, mixing easily with the people and donning ponchos and other typical garb.

Said Ambassador Aoki: “Fujimori does understand Japanese quite well but he doesn’t speak Japanese. He doesn’t want to speak Japanese, and as far as I’m concerned, he is more Peruvian than any Peruvians I have met.”

According to a 1989 census study headed by Morimoto, 92% of Japanese Peruvians were Roman Catholic, the nation’s dominant religion, and fewer than 3% Buddhist, although 32% said their homes had a Buddhist altar. About 40% of nikkei have no contact with Japanese Peruvian social or civic organizations, Morimoto said.

She estimates the nikkei population at 51,000; other estimates range to 100,000. Whatever the number, Peru has more nikkei than any other Latin American country except Brazil, which has about 1 million.

While there is no “little Tokyo” neighborhood in Lima, the nikkei presence is highly visible in the district of Jesus Maria, where the Peruvian Japanese Assn. is building a 10-story addition to its cultural center. The center already has a 1,000-seat auditorium, senior citizens activities area, museum, library, restaurant, karaoke bar, sauna and classrooms for lessons in Japanese language, cooking, origami, painting and other crafts.

Adjacent to the center is the Peruvian Japanese Polyclinic, where 80% of the 105 doctors are nikkei. Not far away, in the district of Pueblo Libre, is the 25-acre Estadio La Union, a Japanese Peruvian sports club with an Olympic pool, tennis courts, soccer fields and a baseball diamond. Next to the sports club is La Union school, one of half a dozen predominantly nikkei schools in Lima.

The cultural center, the sports club and the schools show that at least part of Peru’s nikkei community still does stick together. But with each new generation, these institutions seem to serve more as links to a fading cultural past and less as bases for preserving a Japanese way of life.

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Japanese immigration began in 1899, when a ship named Sakura Maru arrived with 790 people contracted to work on a large hacienda. By 1923, when such contracts were stopped, about 18,000 Japanese were in Peru.

Others, mostly relatives of previous immigrants, continued to arrive without work contracts. Fujimori’s father came in 1927 and his mother in 1932.

Some of the immigrants who came to work on haciendas ended up owning their own farms, but most migrated to Lima and other cities, where they opened small businesses such as grocery stores and florist shops. Fujimori’s father was a tailor, then owned a tire-repair shop.

As Japanese businesses prospered, resentment among their competitors grew. Then came rumors that the increasingly belligerent Japanese Empire planned to conquer Peru. A popular book by a Peruvian journalist, contending that the Inca Empire founder Manco Capac was a Japanese fisherman, fanned speculation that Japan would try to lead Peru’s Indian majority in an uprising against the white power structure.

“This was one of the reasons that served for attacking Japanese people,” historian Morimoto said.

In early May, 1940, a rumor spread through Lima that caches of weapons had been uncovered on property owned by Japanese immigrants. On May 13, mobs rampaged through commercial districts, sacking and burning nikkei businesses and homes. About 600 properties were damaged and, according to some accounts, as many as 10 people were killed.

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the government closed Japanese schools, shut down nikkei civic and social organizations and seized their business properties. More than 1,700 nikkei were deported and taken by the U.S. military to relocation camps in the United States.

Kishiro Hayashi was on the “black list” for deportation, apparently because he managed an import business for his uncle, who had returned to Japan in 1938. The police knocked on Hayashi’s door at dawn one day in January, 1943.

“It was 6 a.m. when they came to my house,” said Hayashi, now 77. “They said they wanted to ask me something, that I had to go with them to the prefecture, that it wouldn’t take long.”

But it took almost nine years for Hayashi to get back home. Six months after he was taken to the United States, his wife and baby boy were allowed to join him in a crowded compound surrounded by barbed wire at Crystal City, Tex.

They stayed there until September, 1946, when Hayashi was paroled to Seabrook, N.J., where he worked in a canning factory.

Fewer than 100 of the Japanese deported from Peru to the United States during World War II returned after the war, Hayashi said. Some stayed in the United States, but most went to Japan.

Despite the traumas and setbacks of World War II, Japanese Peruvians have made notable progress since then. With borrowed money, Hayashi started a gift shop that still supports his family, even paying for occasional trips to Japan.

The 1989 census of the Japanese Peruvian population found 4,800 nikkei- owned businesses. It also found that one of four adults had attended a university. The community’s success is also apparent in the names of major business conglomerates such as Ichikawa, Takagaki, Sakata, Ikeda and Hiraoka.

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Like most Peruvians, however, many nikkei suffered economic hardships in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Peru’s economy was racked by rampant inflation and a deep depression.

Terrorism was also a menace. In 1991, Shining Path rebels killed three Japanese Peruvian agricultural experts. When at least two nikkei were killed and others were kidnaped, fear spread that the Maoist terrorists were pursuing an anti-Japanese vendetta to defy Fujimori.

An estimated 15,000 nikkei left to work in Japan, where a shortage of manual laborers coincided with Peru’s economic and security problems. Thousands have returned, but thousands more have stayed there.

“It is almost a whole generation that has gone to work in Japan,” said Carlos Coche, 26, who was there along with his two brothers in 1989 and 1990.

Money from Peruvian workers in Japan has helped many families here get through hard economic times. The dekasegi , as the workers are called, still send home an estimated $150 million a year.

And savings by the dekasegi have helped them finance small businesses and higher education on their return to Peru. Many also bring a recharged work ethic, sharpened punctuality and renewed interest in Japanese culture.

Older Japanese Peruvians are pleased to note a revival of interest in things Japanese. They attribute it not only to the return of dekasegi , but also to Japan’s increased stature in the world--and to Fujimori’s success as a president.

With his government austerity and free-market policies, Fujimori has conquered inflation and helped stimulate rapid economic growth. Last year’s 12.7% growth rate was one of the highest in the world.

Under Fujimori, security forces have all but crushed the Shining Path rebel movement. Guerrilla attacks, terrorist bombings and assassinations are increasingly rare.

When Fujimori ran for president in 1990, many Japanese Peruvians did not support him, partly because of fears that if he failed there would be a revival of the anti-Japanese sentiment that swept Peru in the 1940s. But when he ran for reelection this month, the nikkei community proudly backed him.

“One hundred percent of the community supports him, because it knows that he is a person who gives himself completely to his country,” said Daniel Tagata, manager of the Peruvian Japanese Cultural Center. “Besides, we want to make a mark on the country, to go down in history as contributing to the country’s development.”