1 Nuevo Sol Japanese Immigration

Peru issued this coin in 1999 to mark the centennial of organized Japanese immigration, which began with the arrival of 790 contract laborers aboard the Sakura Maru on April 3, 1899. Those first immigrants were bound primarily for sugar and cotton haciendas on the coast, working under conditions that bore little resemblance to what the labor recruiters had described. Within a generation, the community had moved heavily into urban commerce and agriculture on their own terms.

Peru's Nikkei population would later be subject to forced deportation to U.S. internment camps during World War II — a largely forgotten episode in which Lima cooperated with Washington at considerable cost to its own citizens.