Doris Moromisato Miasato is a Peruvian, daughter of Japanese immigrant parents from Okinawa. She received a degree in Law and Political Science from the University of San Marcos. She is a writer, and has published numerous books about poetry, short stories, essays, and about Japanese immigration to Peru. She is a journalist for “Perú Shimpo” and is director of various organizations like the Association for Okinawan Women of Peru and the Center for Women’s Communication and Culture (COMYC). She was a bibliographer during the first year of the INRP at the Museum of Japanese Immigration in Peru. She is a specialist in gender and she promotes women’s culture. Her interests focus on the symbolic, cultural, and artistic construction of the Nikkei community. e-mail: dmoromisato@blockbuster.com.pe

Research Proposal Abstract
The Symbolic Construction of the Feminine and the Masculine in the Peruvian Nikkei Community

Researcher Doris Moromisato Miasato, affirms that the persistence of Nikkei identity exists thanks to the affinity and complicity of a world which was created collectively and voluntarily; that the symbolic construction of the feminine and the masculine helped to nourish this creative act of identity. However, it manifests that in 100 years of Japanese immigration to Peru, the inequality of power between men and women is causing conflicts and resistance within the Nikkei community, in both their public and private lives and experiences; from family conflicts to the absence of women in its institutions. The research is based on the actual situation of the Peruvian Nikkei community: 1) A growing tendency towards interracial marriages: the 1989 census reported a third (33%) of marriages were interracial or with Peruvians who were not Nikkei: “Is it a will for racial fusion or racial dissidence?” wonders Doris Moromisato. 2) The values, beliefs and meanings of the feminine and the masculine are different for each generation. 3) The Sansei women, or women of third generation, born after 1960, refuse to participate in feminine institutions because they consider them domestic and segregationist, and as an obstacle to their search to become professional women and to become integrated in Peruvian society. 4) There is an absence of women who are leaders. Moromisato proposes an investigation regarding the construction of identity and the power relations in public and private spaces, from a perspective which will consider gender, through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of images, discourses, in texts and graphics, as well as interviews with women and men from different generations within the Peruvian Nikkei community.