The story starts with a closing door. Japanese emigration in the early twentieth century had flowed heavily toward Brazil, but in 1934 Brazil sharply curtailed immigration from the Far East, and families who had pinned their futures on crossing the Pacific suddenly had nowhere to land. Those looking for somewhere to begin again turned to Paraguay instead, a country with vast empty land and an open policy toward newcomers. The man who made it concrete was Dr. Kunito Miyasaka, who secured roughly 11,500 hectares in the Paraguarí department and organized the venture. On May 15, 1936, the first settlers founded their colony there. They were a small group — about eighty people in the first wave — and none of them could have known they were laying the first stone of what would become a lasting Japanese-Paraguayan community, the seed of generations to come.

The land tested them immediately. La Colmena sits on the gentle lower slopes of the Cerro Apitagua, a ridge running some 40 kilometers east to west, raised long ago by volcanic activity. The soil is red and friable, a sandy loam that looked rich and behaved otherwise. Cleared forest yielded well at first, then faltered — in some fields harvests fell by half within only a few years, and researchers later wondered whether the sandy ground simply could not hold its fertility. Rainfall was erratic, drowning some seasons and vanishing in others; three droughts struck between 1941 and 1947 alone, and downpours could wreck the cotton crop outright. Farming here was an argument with the climate, settled only by stubbornness.

Settlement was not a single landing but a slow, interrupted tide. Families kept coming in groups from June 1936 onward, until the Second World War cut the route. By 1941, roughly 790 people from 123 families had made their homes at La Colmena. They built farms across the subtropical forest, where the canopy could rise 50 to 70 feet overhead, and they grew citrus and cotton and whatever the red soil would tolerate. The forest itself thinned under their work — by 1967, only about half the original cover remained. What grew in its place was a community that had taken root and was not leaving.

Today La Colmena is no longer purely Japanese; many native Paraguayans live here too, and the two cultures have grown together over the better part of a century into something neither would have been alone. The town lies about 130 kilometers southeast of Asunción, reached by a chain of detours off Route 1 through Carapeguá and Acahay, into a landscape of hills, streams, and swampy lowlands. It is a place of citrus groves and small farms, of festivals that braid Japanese custom into Paraguayan life. La Colmena carries the quiet pride of a first — the place where Japanese Paraguay began, where families measured their belonging not in years but in generations. For a colony named after a beehive, that steady accumulation of patient work into permanence is exactly the right metaphor.