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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972 by Eric C. Han Robert Eskildsen Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972. By Eric C. Han. Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. 266 pages. Hardcover $39.95/£29.95/€36.00. Eric Han has painted a wonderful historical portrait of Yokohama Chinatown. Perhaps not unlike the brushstrokes of an Impressionist painting, the details of his study sometimes have less impact when they are viewed up close, but from a broader perspective they convey a powerful image of Chinatown as a place where a prominent ethnic minority in Japan has negotiated its complex identity. In narrating the development of a Chinese community in Yokohama from the 1890s to the 1970s, Han investigates “the creation of mental categories of belonging, both national and local” (p. 5). His story thus combines two elements: the assimilation of Chinese expatriates into the citizenry of Yokohama and the emergence among them of a Chinese national [End Page 211] identity. The book’s most important message is that the Chinese of Yokohama resisted totalizing narratives of national identity and refused to see their identities as Chinese and as Yokohama residents as mutually exclusive. That flexible perspective contributed to the distinctive character of Yokohama Chinatown even as it undermined Japanese myths of national identity, and Han ends with the speculation that more recent Chinese arrivals to Chinatown may be able to negotiate their identity through a new iteration of this strategy. Han starts his narrative in the 1890s, around the time the treaty port system in Japan was nearing its end. He focuses on questions of nationalism and national identity, and later of migration, to explain the complicated process through which members of the Chinese community in Yokohama developed their identity as Chinese. Meanwhile he largely sidesteps issues of trade and diplomacy, which is perhaps why he does not engage with important recent works that overlap with his study, for example Pär Cassel’s discussion of extraterritoriality among the Chinese and Japanese and Urs Matthias Zachmann’s treatment of changing views of China among the Japanese elite between the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars.1 Notwithstanding this limitation, his account of identity formation among the Chinese of Yokohama is complex, weaving together details and insights from the politics and culture of China during the twentieth century, the widely varying provincial cultures that expatriate Chinese brought with them to Japan, and the economic and political changes that faced them in their adopted country. Chapter 1 deals with the changes in the treaty port system around the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 and the influence of this war on the identity of the Chinese residents of Yokohama. The main point of the chapter is that whereas this identity became more national and more totalizing as a result of the war, it still remained diverse and hybrid. Conflict between China and Japan provoked harassment of the Chinese in Yokohama and constrained the activities of Chinese traders. When the two countries broke off relations, the Chinese consulate in Yokohama closed its doors, depriving the local Chinese of both extraterritorial protection and diplomatic representation. The Japanese government in turn enacted laws that placed the Chinese under its jurisdiction and denied their commercial advantages, prompting some to leave Yokohama. Many remained behind, however, and as Han illustrates they were a complicated lot: not all of them were actually Chinese and not all of them actually lived in Chinatown, or even in Yokohama. The diverse examples he cites show that the Chinese community was a hybrid where people partook of multiple identities. Chapter 2 describes the period from the end of the Sino-Japanese War to the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, when events in China as well as political interactions between China and Japan deeply influenced the formation of national identity among the [End Page 212] Yokohama Chinese. Defeat in the Sino-Japanese War profoundly destabilized politics and society in China, provoking unsuccessful attempts at reform and rebellion, and the effects of that turmoil spread beyond the country as rebels such as Sun Yat-sen and reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao fled to Yokohama to escape suppression...