Harvard East Asian Monographs, 367; Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; distributed by Harvard University Press, 2014. xvi, 250 pp. (Maps, figures.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-49198-4.
Solid scholarship and fresh research findings make Eric C. Han’s book a significant contribution to Asian Studies, expanding our knowledge on Chinese immigration to Japan and the history of Yokohama Chinatown in the context of tension and warfare between China and Japan from 1894 to 1972. A first in English, this book provides historical evidence of the Yokohama Chinatown, now the most popular tourist destination in Japan for tasting imagined and exotic Chinese culture. This research also contributes to social sciences discourses on the theory of ethnicity and national identity, adding vivid testimony to the flexible, paradoxical and plural existence of a global Chinese diaspora. Drawing on rich Japanese literature, archival records and local newspaper articles since the 1880s, Han convincingly argues how the Yokohama Chinese enacted multiple roles of patriotic overseas Chinese (huaqiao), cooperative local sons or “Yokohama-ite” (hamakko), to eventually become a Japanese ethnic minority. This study provides useful demographic data of the Chinese in Japan over 80 years, while old photographic copies illuminate the physical transitions in Yokohama Chinatown residents’ daily lives.
Consisting of five major chapters, the “introduction” spells out research goals and methods; what global diaspora means; and the chapters’ main points, with each chapter covering a landmark historical period or key warfare between China and Japan.
Chapter 1, “The Sino-Japanese War and Ethnic Unity, 1894–95,” first accounts for the arrival of the Chinese in Yokohama, predominantly Cantonese compradors and merchants who accompanied Western traders in the 1880s. Assigned to the Chinese quarter of the Nankinmachi in this emerging port town of international trade, they were welcomed as prestigious foreign merchants. Following China’s first major defeat by the Japanese in the 1894–95 war, although anti-Chinese sentiment grew, it did not stop friendships and intermarriages between the Chinese and local Japanese, and thus commenced an emerging local identity for Chinese sojourners.
Chapter 2, “Expatriate Nationalists and the Politics of Mixed Residence, 1895–1911,” examines the in-fighting amongst Chinese centred on Chinese organizations such as guilds and schools, because of revolution and other political movements in China and overseas. Vivid anecdotes highlight the fight for control of Chinese institutions between cliques adhering to conflicting political ideologies as well as different hometown origins.
Chapter 3, “Cooperation, Conflict, and Modern Life in an International Port, 1912–32,” tells how the Chinese citizens of the new Republic of China (founded in 1912) achieved commercial success and cultural acceptance in Yokohama. Two interesting activities won the hearts of the Japanese. They popularized exotic Chinese cuisine (Cantonese shumai in particular) in luxurious Chinese restaurants; Chinese schools built modern “Chinese” baseball teams (they had a Chinese coach from Hawaii) that defeated all other local and regional Japanese school teams in this budding American sport in Japan. Also discussed is the direct intervention of China’s new government in Chinatown’s schools by exporting teachers and official Chinese textbooks in order to indoctrinate overseas Chinese children to become patriotic Chinese citizens. Then the Chinese faced harder times when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931.
Chapter 4, “Sino-Japanese War, Sino-Japanese Friendship, and the Yokohama-ite (native son) Identity, 1933–45,” portrays the Chinese enduring eight long years of hardship under police abuse, general distrust and coercion into openly supporting the cause of the Japanese invasion and occupation of their homeland. To survive in this enemy country, some Yokohama Chinese leaders compromised by openly demonstrating loyalty to the Japanese puppet region in Nanking, China. The long war period also saw the Yokohama Chinese cultural integration into the mainstream Japanese society, thereby adopting a stronger and paradoxical local Japanese identity. Along with other major cities in Japan at the conclusion of the Pacific War, air raids on Yokohama Chinatown turned it to ruins.
Chapter 5, “A Town Divided: The Cold War in Yokohama Chinatown, 1945–72,” describes the postwar period when the Chinese status in Japan was suddenly elevated to the citizens of the “victorious nation” of China. Many Chinese took advantage of their new status by engaging in black market trading, prospered and reconstructed a new Chinatown. Then the Cold War and Korean War periods also witnessed a positive transition of Yokohama Chinatown into a major tourist attraction when the majority of the residents received Japanese citizenship. However, the political split in China into ROC and PRC induced fierce fighting between rival supporters, when each faction sought control of Chinese schools and associations. Han tells of dramatic stories, for instance, of how at Chinatown schools’ board meetings, thugs were hired and Japanese police summoned to physically remove members of opposing political factions.
Han in his “conclusion” reminds us that Yokohama Chinatown is now dominated by Japanese nationals of Chinese ancestry who join the “Minorities in a Monoethnic State,” as his study shows a marked assimilation and identity change among Chinese in the “Micropolitics of Everyday Life.” He emphasizes, once again, the flexibility of ethnic and national identity as being a historical and social process, not fixed essential markers. By the end of the twentieth century Yokohama Chinatown had become a plural community: a Japanese town engaged in the business of commodified Chinese culture. After the 1980s, enormous numbers of new immigrants arrived from China, and they gradually took over old restaurants and souvenir shops. That, of course, is a subject for another book.
This book may serve as a timely reference for opinion leaders and specialists of East Asian international politics, given the current intensified conflicts between China and Japan, such as the almost daily skirmishes on the high seas surrounding the Diaoyutai (Chinese name) or Senkaku (Japanese name) Islands of Japan. Although Han’s book focuses on the “Rise of a Japanese Chinatown,” it actually provides condensed background information on a century of international rivalry between Japan and China. In sum, while interesting for general readers, this book is a must read for students of diaspora Chinese and East Asian Studies.
David Y.H. Wu
East-West Center, Honolulu, USA
pp. 709-711