Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972 by Eric C. Han

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Reviewed by: Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972 by Eric C. Han Madeline Y. Hsu Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972 by Eric C. Han. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. Pp. xvi + 250. $39.95. Taking his cue from Prasenjit Duara to rescue history from the nation, Han offers a nuanced, thick history of Yokohama's Chinatown to explore local and transnational contexts for the multiple and constantly shifting affiliations and identifications of Chinese making lives in this localized yet cosmopolitan place. Drawing upon individual and family narratives that capture the conflicting and sometimes irreconcilable choices faced by ethnically demarcated populations, Han argues that the history of Yokohama's Chinese community illustrates how a minority population carved out an "enduring place within a mono-ethnic state. It is a paradox that explains much about the challenges of integration faced by municipalities all over Japan today" (p. 5), particularly in the face of rising foreign migration. According to Han, modern Japanese state and society do not accommodate hybrid or ethnic subjects; there are no conceptual or legal categories such as "Chinese Japanese" or "Korean Japanese" (p. 15). Individuals are identified as either wholly Japanese or some other nationality or ethnicity. Against the grain of such "terminal ethnic-national identities" (p. 17), the more complex realities of daily encounters and lived experiences as "neighbor, friend, husband, business partner, shareholder, etc." (p. 54) generated a Chinese version of Yokohama-ite (Hamakko 横浜子) identity. Han argues that the historicity and multiplicity of identity claims and affiliations provide constructive alternatives to the dead-end of nationalist ideologies that, in the words of Duara, seek to "fix and privilege a single identity from among the contesting multiplicity of identifications" (p. 8). Yokohama and its Chinatown present rich materials to explore such dynamics of evolving ethnic and nationality identifications. Yokohama became a treaty port in 1855, a transformation allowing influxes of foreigners, including Chinese who began sinking roots. Unlike in the older trading port of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Nagasaki, where Chinese were able to leach into local populations, by the mid-nineteenth century, the ascendance of the nation-state as the key [End Page 228] international organizational principle for peoples, places, and sovereignties had rendered ethnic and national affiliations increasingly immutable and monolithic. This gradual shift was codified by the Sino-Japanese Amity Treaty of 1871. Thereafter, "where nationality would be informed by ethnic criteria, as in China and Japan, the status of foreignness would be difficult for an immigrant to shed, a central factor in the permanence of Yokohama's Chinese enclave" (pp. 34–35). Nonetheless, Han seeks to emphasize the many contradictory factors for Chinese belonging and identification in Japan that shifted along with the changing relationship between the two nations and the waxing and waning of their respective international standings. Both countries embarked on the path to self-strengthening in response to Western aggression during the mid-nineteenth century, with China beginning a couple of decades earlier yet quickly falling behind its smaller and more coherently governed neighbor. By 1894, Japan had so strengthened its industrial and military capacities that it was becoming the dominant power in East Asia, claiming proprietary influence in Korea; it was poised to defeat China in naval confrontation. Although both understood their categorization into the "yellow" race, Chinese and Japanese people were set by their nation-state formations onto starkly different paths. Associated with a declining power, Chinese in Japan navigated the lower status and lesser legal rights allocated to a weak ethnic-national group, managing to establish families, businesses, and community organizations such as temples and cemeteries. The predominantly male Chinese community formed families by incorporating Japanese women who assumed the status of their male partners, producing generations of locally-born, mixed children. These children went on to pursue a range of livelihoods—not only the "three knives" of the chef's cleaver, tailor's scissors, and barber's razor, but also import-export, currency exchange, and traditional Chinese crafts. At the interstices of Japan's consolidating emphasis on indigenous belonging and Chinese diasporic political claims, Yokohama's Chinese nonetheless carved out lives interwoven socially, culturally, and economically with aspects of both...