Mexico City has a community of Japanese Mexican people and Japanese expatriates that is dispersed throughout the city. Many Japanese persons had moved to Mexico City in the 1940s due to wartime demands made by the Mexican government. Multiple Japanese-Mexican associations, the Japanese embassy, the Liceo Mexicano Japonés, and other educational institutions serve the community. The residents are educated through the LMJ, the part-time school Chuo Gakuen, and the adult school Instituto Cultural Mexicano-Japonés.
History
In 1936 there were about 602 Japanese nationals living in Mexico City. By 1939 there were 967 Japanese persons, mostly owners of businesses, grouped into 295 families resident in the Mexico City area.
After the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor in the United States the Mexican government severed relations with the Japanese government and ordered the closure of all existing Japanese organizations; at the time Mexico City had the Japanese Association of Mexico City.
In 1941 the Mexican government began forcing Japanese from a zone in northern Mexico near the U.S. border and along the Pacific Ocean to move out. They were permitted to move to Guadalajara or Mexico City, so the Mexican government could more easily control them and engage in surveillance. The Mexican government required all Japanese immigrants to move to either Guadalajara or Mexico City after it declared war against Japan in 1942, and relocation began in January of that year. Most Japanese moved to Mexico City instead of Guadalajara because there was a pre-existing Japanese community. According to Nihon-jin mekishiko ijūshi (日本人メキシコ移住史; "The History of the Japanese Immigrants in Mexico") by Minoru Izawa, about 80% of the relocated Japanese, with Baja California supplying the largest number of them, settled in Mexico City. There were no organizations or people who made an exact count of the internal migration, and Jerry García, author of Looking Like the Enemy: Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican State, and US Hegemony, 1897-1945, concluded that trying to determine the exact number of Japanese who settled Mexico City is "difficult".
By March 1942, about 4,000 ethnic Japanese were located in Mexico City. Stephen R. Niblo, author of Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption, stated that the decision to ask persons of Japanese descent to move to Mexico City "probably" shielded them from harm, and Mexican government officials of the era felt sympathetic towards persons of Japanese descent.
Japanese were allowed to have any type of employment and the government allowed the establishment of a Japanese-language school in Mexico City. They had been forbidden from having meetings with over 10 persons and from traveling during the night since 1941. The Japanese community in Mexico City housed new arrivals in a large building that they got permission to use, and they formed their own mutual aid committee, the Comité Japonés de Ayuda Mutua (CJAM; "Japanese Committee of Mutual Aid"). The CJAM was founded by March 4, 1942, the day a circular announced the foundation of the organization. The CJAM, the sole official Japanese organization in Mexico during World War II, originally located at No. 112 Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, funded by 230,000 pesos collected from property sales, including the property sold by the defunct Japanese Association of Mexico City, and donations. Ethnic Japanese originating from various states who were formerly leaders in other Japanese associations became the leaders of the new CJAM. The CJAM later moved to No. 327 Calle de Antonio Abad. The CJAM had difficulty getting financing due to the Mexican government's December 10, 1941 freeze of Japanese assets, and throughout the war U.S. intelligence agencies suspected that the CJAM was a Japanese intelligence asset. In the 1940s the CJAM obtained a hacienda on of land in Temixco from Alejandro Lacy so it could house newly-arriving Japanese coming from other parts of Mexico.
Officially the Japanese were allowed to leave Guadalajara and Mexico City in 1945 but many had left earlier than that to go to their prewar communities. Most ethnic Japanese in Mexico in the postwar era remained in Mexico City and Guadalajara. Daniel M. Masterson, author of The Japanese in Latin America, wrote that many of the Issei stayed after the war ended because they became used to contact with the Japanese community and that many Issei were too old to restart their lives on the former seized lands. Masterson wrote that many Nisei stayed because Mexico City had schools catering to Japanese people which reinforced Japanese culture in Sansei and younger Nisei.