The main objective was to explore how Japanese national identity traveled to Argentina and Bolivia in the post WWII era and how it is depicted in Bolivian and Argentine literature. However, due to a scarcity of primary works on this topic, I was only able to start writing one article on Japanese Argentinian memory and identity presented in the novel Gaijin authored by Maximiliano Matayoshi. I am planning to send it to a peer-review article in the U.S. Meanwhile, I have come across several new literary works about Japanese Peruvian communities and shifted my focus to the migrant voices that cross the border between Peru and Japan, which will be published in Peru as a book in March 2021. For the book project, I conducted an interview with Luis Arriola Ayala in Lima, a Peruvian writer who illegally worked in Japan at the end of the 90s as a “fake” Japanese Peruvian "dekasegi." I also presented a paper on another recent work on the process of reconciliation between Peruvians and Japanese Peruvians, which will be included in the book. Further, I have a forthcoming book chapter on Carlos Yushimito’s short story about the memory of a Japanese Peruvian family who underwent confiscation and deportation during WWII, which will be published in Cultural and Literary Dialogues between Asia and Latin America (Palgrave, 2020). Finally, on January 22 2020, I was invited as a panelist to give an interpretation of a book Historia cultural de los hispanohablantes en Japon by Dr. Araceli Tinajero, organized by the Instituto Cervantes-Tokyo.This project has focused on Japanese Peruvian literature much more than Bolivian and Argentinian literature. Since this project started in 2016, there have been new publications in relation to Japanese Peruvian communities. The recent literary works on Japanese Peruvians invite scholars of literary studies to look into the fundamental question: What is Nikkei literature? Drawing attention to this broader issue which entails the location and function of Nikkei literature within Latin American literature has become my principal interest rather than a simple analysis of a particular literary work from Bolivia or Argentina. In order to grapple with this question, I have been approaching many new texts depicting Japanese Peruvians in Peru and Japan and looking for a way to synthesize different forms, styles, and themes into a coherent articulation of what Nikkei literature is. Consequently, my studies on Japanese Bolivian and Argentinian literature have not progressed as much as I had initially planned. Especially, regarding Japanese Bolivian poet, Pedro Shimose’s works, I have not been able to connect the themes of identity and memory to his poetry. Studying his poems requires me to approach them from different perspectives that go beyond his Japanese Bolivian identity and memory. I realize that it may take a while to fully understand his poetry by rethinking how to connect his poetry to the other Latin American literary works in relation to Nikkei identity and memory.In the academic year 2020, I will publish a book on the migrants’ voices that cross the border between Peru and Japan (projected in March 2021) and an article on Japanese Argentinian identity and memory. I also intend to write an article on Pedro Shimose’s poetry, drawing attention to his social and political activism beyond his identity and memory. I will need to reflect on what I have read and rethink how to approach his poetry. Reading it as a poetic space for an exploration of identity and memory may not be convincing. If I cannot connect his poetry to the entire project, I will publish an article independent from the project themes.In the process of this project, I may have faced the impasse on discussing how Nikkei identity and memory have been constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed and how they have been represented in literary works. Instead of focusing exclusively on the national identity and memory of Nikkei communities, as mentioned above, I am interested in going back to the fundamental questions. What is Nikkei literature? Why is it important to (re)define it now? Contemplating these questions, I will scrutinize the themes of identity and memory through different angles, paying attention to the limits and possibilities of asserting the ontology of the genre of Nikkei literature