Susana Higuchi and the “mathematical” bond she maintained with Alberto Fujimori, narrated in a book

In the old center of Lima there is a small temple dedicated to the Virgen de la O. It is a chapel adjacent to San Pedro, church of the Jesuit fathers. Marriages happen there with astonishing regularity. Smaller and more versatile than the great central nave, the company has designated this chapel for the rites of the nuptial sacrament. Every day, starting at seven in the evening, middle-class couples pass before the altar at intervals of 30 or 45 minutes, joining their lives forever. Alberto Fujimori Fujimori and Susana Higuchi Miyagawa were married in the Virgen de la O. Chapel on July 25, 1974.

The popular tabloids, attending to the supposed pink taste of their readers, have made this event the pasture of a thousand insubstantial comments. It is said that they met by chance, when he suffered a tire blowout and went to the Higuchi establishment on Grau avenue. It was also said that the crush was instantaneous, that the courtship lasted four months, that the honeymoon was in the south of Chile and that, since then, everything was happiness. Currently, in the passageway of Grau 526, the neighbors believe that Alberto and Susana met right there, because, according to that same version, she lived in the opposite door. But the reality is different. He only told the beginning of the story when he had not yet been chosen. Alberto and Susana’s parents had known each other since at least the fifties, since they were in the same branch of business. According to Alberto, between one door and another there were exactly eighty meters4.

Susana Shizuko, whose Japanese name means tranquility, was the youngest of the children of a couple who emigrated from the Fukuoka prefecture, located on the same island and not too far from Kumamoto. Susana’s father, Koshio Higuchi, later named Tomás, was of the chōnin (merchants) and her mother was a nurse. They formed a thriving couple who crossed the sea and made a fortune. Apparently, shortly after Naoichi Fujimori had his retreading shop on Grau Avenue, Alberto Fujimori’s future father-in-law opened a similar workshop on the same block. There the similarities end. While the Fujimori workshop was the highest point of a relative economic ascent, the father-in-law’s workshop avoided the dangers of war, and his old retubber El Sol (a typical name in Japanese business) became the time in various shops and workshops which, in turn, were the basis for other interests.

Susana was born in 1950 and grew up in La Victoria, playing and working alternately, always with the family. «I worked from a very young age helping my parents. I got deeply involved with the world of tires »(The Republic, 11/4/90). From early on he went to school: national education like all nisei postwar. At the age of 15, he finished high school at the Great Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera School Unit and immediately entered the National Engineering University. In 1972 he had finished his studies and was still working with his parents. She was behind the cash register, in “the world of tires.” It was on one of those days, at the El Sol retreader, that Alberto Fujimori arrived.

The initial theme of that meeting, the pretext with which the lovers meet, says something about the style of the relationship they later had. Alberto was the eldest son of the Fujimori, someone Susana could surely remember. But neither the old truth nor the memory probably meant anything to the mutual attraction. Susana was a young woman of oriental beauty; Alberto was much older, a 36-year-old man, and yet he would not have lost a certain timidity. The pretext that united them could not be other than that of mathematics. Knowing that Susana had studied Civil Engineering, he turned the conversation to numbers. He got it right. A few days later, he came back with some nifty new math problems. «I didn’t know he was a teacher and between numbers we got to know each other. I was quite good in that field, I did not imagine that he was superior; it started there »(The Republic, 8/6/90).

Alberto impressed the girl with her intelligence, which was, apparently, what he also appreciated the most in her. As the relationship progressed, they realized their mutual potentialities. The romance was mathematical and the relationship was always very practical. Together with the children, who would later be the bridge between them, the couple exchanged some of their best gifts and made them come to fruition in reality. Alberto took over Susana’s career and, in doing so, learned a new trade. For utilitarian purposes, with her he achieved his only truly profitable and effective profession, something that was never agronomy, much less mathematics. Alberto became a house builder; for the next ten years, that would be their main activity and source of income. Like the sons, who were all baptized with a Christian name and another Japanese, the family business, the economic son of the Fujimori Higuchi also had a bilingual name: Fuji Constructions.

The token

Title: “Citizen Fujirmori”

Year: 1993 (original publication)

Publisher: Planeta

Label: Peru Memory Collection

Pages: 380

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