From China to Peru: A Japanese solar physicist’s life as an accidental expat

Until he was seven years old, Mutsumi Ishitsuka lived in Hankou City, now a part of Wuhan, China. In 1937, with the onset of the Second Sino–Japanese war, his family returned to Japan. Twenty years later, toward the end of his doctoral research, Ishitsuka accepted an offer to go to Peru for three years. He has been there ever since.

When Ishitsuka arrived in Peru, the country was home to nearly 100 000 ethnic Japanese. Peru now has the second-largest Japanese expatriate community in South America after Brazil, but, Ishitsuka says, about a third of those expats return to Japan to work.

For this interview, Physics Today news writer Toni Feder sent questions by email and then edited the responses. Koji Mukai, an astronomer from Japan working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, generously translated Ishitsuka’s responses from Japanese into English. Some answers are drawn from an unpublished autobiographical text that Ishitsuka wrote, which his son, astrophysicist José Ishitsuka, provided.

Japanese residents were still regarded as enemies in Peru, 12 years after the end of World War II. My contract was supposed to be over in three years’ time. However, on the day I arrived in Lima, I met with the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Japan. His take was that it was essential for my trip to Peru to succeed, not only for the sake of Japanese science, but even more for the safety of Japanese residents in Peru. This meant I would not be able to leave after three years if my job was not completed.

The Huancayo Magnetic Observatory was built by the Carnegie Institution of the US in 1922. It was operated by the Americans until it was donated to the Peruvian government in 1947. During the 1930s, a spectrohelioscope—a solar telescope designed to observe only the chromosphere of the Sun—was relocated here. This became famous worldwide because it discovered the correlation between geomagnetic disturbances and the prominences seen in the solar chromosphere.

This instrument was my specialty. Before I left for Peru, I installed one in Japan and designed another. I remember the sense of nostalgia I felt when I saw the spectrohelioscope in Peru. When I took it apart and reassembled it, I noticed some differences between this one and the ones in Japan. The Huancayo instrument was somewhat better than the one I had assembled. I was impressed because the whole design was perfect and the technology used was impressive. I was crushed that there was such a difference. I decided to improve and complete the spectrohelioscope, and I did. Unfortunately, it was destroyed by a fire.

For the first three years, my duty was to observe solar corona from Huancayo Observatory. But I immediately found that Huancayo was not appropriate for corona observations. Then I began searching for a better place. After some years, in 1965, I found a good place, Cosmos, at an altitude of 4600 meters, near an old coke mine. Cosmos is not the best place in Peru, but to find the best sky in Peru would require more funds, so we decided to construct the observatory at Cosmos. It became my duty to oversee construction of a Solar Corona Observatory.

About two weeks later, the terrorists sent us an order to hand over the infrared detector that I had in safekeeping. I was surprised that the terrorists knew about the inner workings of the institute, that they knew I bought and had the infrared instrument. This was for my secret plan: Once we mapped the intensity of the FeXIV 5305-Å emission line, the easiest to observe of all the coronal lines, we would proceed to the next step of mapping the emission line intensities of FeXIII infrared lines at 10 746 and 10 797 Å.

I believed that they demanded the infrared instrument to gun down important Peruvian government officials at night. I pleaded with someone who worked with me to figure out a way to make the terrorists leave the Cosmos Observatory.

[A month later], while I was in Lima, I received a package from Huancayo Observatory. The package contained an envelope sent from Huancayo City from an unknown sender. It said “Kill that Japanese, Mutsumi Ishitsuka,” with the signature of a terrorist in red ink.

I went into hiding in Lima. The hideout became my house, and I still live in the same house over 20 years later. While in hiding, the detective bureau of the Peruvian Interior Ministry gave me much kind advice, such as to change the route I take every day, to move from house to house frequently, [and] to install good locks on my doors. That is how I managed to survive.

The leader of the Shining Path was arrested by the Peruvian police during the time of the Japanese-Peruvian president, Alberto Fujimori.

Early on, when I was told not to return to Japan, but to pray whenever I could at the Cosmos Observatory tomb, a call from the Japanese embassy in Peru changed many things. They gave me two optical telescopes, some gyroscopes and magnetometers, three cars, and later a planetarium projector. Nagoya and Kyushu Universities in Japan gave me some important instruments. A group of people associated with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan organized a fundraiser, and many of my classmates donated funds to run a new radio observatory—a converted 32-meter former satellite communications dish donated by the local telephone company.

That reminds me, earlier, a cotton factory president donated big funds to build a coronagraph in 1956. At that time for Japan, it was an amount to make you dizzy. And my tutor, Professor Joe Ueta, donated his retirement money for the construction of the Cosmos Observatory. His ultimate desire was to finish construction and initiate the corona observations as soon as possible. I am in debt to many people who believed in my dreams. What can I do to apologize to people for the destruction of the observatory by the Shining Path? Nothing. The loss of the corona observatory was comparable to the loss of a son. Now I cannot leave the Peruvian Andes—the tomb of my youth is here.

There is good news. In 2008, to celebrate the 51 years of my scientific work in Peru, a workshop was held that lasted almost two weeks. Many of my friends and colleagues from Japan came and participated in this interesting reunion.