Adios to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps (book)

Adios to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps relays the life story of Seiichi Higashide (1909–97). The book was translated from Japanese into English and Spanish through the efforts of his eight children, and was first published in 1993 by E&E Kudo. A second edition of the book was published in 2000 by the University of Washington Press, with a new foreword by C. Harvey Gardiner, professor emeritus of history at Southern Illinois University and author of Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States ; a new epilogue by Julie Small, co-chair of Campaign for Justice-Redress Now for Japanese Latin Americans; and, a new preface by Elsa H. Kudo, the author's eldest daughter.

Seiichi Higashide was born in Hokkaido, Japan, and emigrated to Peru in 1931. By the late 1930s, he was a shop keeper and community leader in the provincial town of Ica, and witnessed outbreaks of riots and looting stemming from anti-Japanese business competition. It is estimated that there were around 26,000 people of Japanese descent in Peru at the beginning of World War II. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan, Higashide was seized by police and forcibly deported to the United States along with other Latin American Japanese . He was incarcerated behind barbed wire at the Immigration and Naturalization Service facility in Crystal City , Texas, for more than two years. Following his release, Higashide stayed in the U.S. and eventually became a citizen. For many decades, he was a leader in the effort to obtain redress from the American government for the violation of human rights of the Peruvian Japanese internees. In 1981 he testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians and eventually retired in Hawai'i.

Might also like: The Crystal City Story: One Family's Experience with the World War II Japanese Internment Camps by Tomo Izumi; An Internment Odyssey: Haisho Tenten by Kumaji Furuya; Imprisoned Apart: The World War II Correspondence of an Issei Couple by Louis Fiset