THE SHAME OF CRYSTAL CITY:

By the 1940s, an estimated 25,000 people of Japanese descent lived in Peru. Many had become lawyers and doctors, or owned small businesses.

Their prosperity, further fuelled by racism, soon triggered anti-Japanese sentiment in Peru, Stephanie Moore explains.

Ms Moore, a scholar at the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project, says after the outbreak of World War Two, the Japanese community in Peru became a target, and their assets were confiscated.

"In May 1940, as many as 600 houses, schools and businesses belonging to citizens of Japanese descent were burned down," she says.

Following Japan's 1941 attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the US government asked a dozen Latin American countries, among them Peru, to arrest its Japanese residents.

Records from the time suggest the US authorities wanted to take them to the US and use them as bargaining chips for its nationals captured by Japanese forces in Asia. [...]

"You could call it a concentration camp, because we were surrounded by barbed wire fences and guards with guns," she says.

"We couldn't go out at all, although we were free to move around inside," she recalls.

"My parents were really bitter about the situation because they were forced to come to the US. They had no choice," she says.

Ms Kamisato's father had moved to Peru from Japan in 1915 and had worked hard to open a bakery in the capital, Lima.

Now 81, she lives in Los Angeles.

Of the 2,200 Latin Americans of Japanese descent to be interned in the US, 800 were sent to Japan as part of prisoner exchanges.

After World War Two ended, another 1,000 were deported to Japan after their Latin American home countries refused to take them back.

Ms Katsura's and Ms Kamisato's families successfully fought deportation and were eventually allowed to remain in the US.

In 1988, then-President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act and apologised on behalf of the US government for the internment of Japanese-Americans.

Under the act, the government paid tens of thousands of survivors of the camps $20,000 (£13,000) each in reparation.

But Japanese-Latin Americans did not qualify for the payments because they had not been US citizens or permanent residents of the US at the time of their internment.

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