@samuelszuchan: In November 2000, the president of Peru faxed his resignation from a hotel in Tokyo, and Japan wouldn't give him back to Peru for five years. Next month, his daughter is expected to visit Japan as Peru's new head of state. Keiko Fujimori won Peru's presidential election this June on her fourth try, by 49,641 votes. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has sent her a congratulatory letter and said she looks forward to meeting Keiko. When her father faxed his resignation, Keiko was 25 and the first lady. Ten years later, as she was preparing to run for president for the first time, a Spanish news outlet carried a report that she told a Peruvian radio station she disagreed with his choice to fax it. But she wouldn't say more than this: "I won't judge my father. I'm his daughter, and whatever disagreements I have with him, I tell him personally. It goes against natural law for a daughter to judge her father." Japan has never had to judge him. In 1997, he ordered the commando raid that rescued the hostages at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, and that's what Japan remembers. In November 2024, Japan's then prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, was in Lima for a summit and paid a visit to Alberto Fujimori's grave to pay his respects with flowers. Fujimori had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in two massacres committed by a clandestine army unit. Keiko has called for reconciliation in Peru, but the families of the victims are having none of it. This July, Gisela Ortiz, whose brother was one of the nine students killed with their professor in one of those massacres, in 1992, had this to say: "People who don't ask for forgiveness can't use the word reconciliation. That's not possible." So Japan is now getting ready to receive the daughter of the man it once protected from Peru's justice system, and whose grave its own former prime minister paid homage to with flowers. Japan has always judged Fujimori by what he did for Japan. Peru's courts judged him by what he did in Peru. For five years, it was Japan that kept him out of their reach.

Sam Szuchan

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Thursday 29 October 2026 17:00:00 GMT