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

Abstract

Rise of a Japanese Chinatown, Yokohama, 1894-1972, by Eric C. Han. Cambridge, Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. xvi, 250 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). In Rise of a Japanese Chinatown, Yokohama, Eric Han knits together a riveting account of Chinese migration, settlement, and the more elusive subject of identity. The Chinatown in the modern port city of Yokohama has enjoyed continuous existence since the late nineteenth century, but it has drawn relatively little attention from scholars, whether Japanese or non-Japanese, compared to other contemporary settlements established by the migrant Chinese around the Pacific. The monograph is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the Chinese Diaspora now that concerned scholars have begun probing the less familiar streams of Chinese migratory activities beyond the traditional focus on Southeast Asia and North America. For historians of China and Japan, the present study offers an uncommon perspective on Sino-Japanese relations through the prisms of Chinese migrant experience on Japan's home front. Han presents his account chronologically starting from the treaty port era--for Yokohama, in 1859--all the way to the establishment of diplomatic ties between Japan and the People's Republic in 1972, with a conclusion that reflects on the 1980s and beyond. The treatment covers the major developments, beginning with the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and the ensuing era of expatriate nationalism activated by exile political figures like Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Sun Yatsen, followed by the two decades of simmering conflict between the two countries in 1912-1932 (that also witnessed the destruction wrought by the catastrophic earthquake of 1923). The second half of the study examines the tumultuous, heart-wrenching years preceding and during the Pacific War, and then the Cold War period of diplomatic anomaly during which Yokohama Chinatown blazed its path of economic recovery. The author is primarily concerned with the question of identity. In an era marked by nation-building projects and rising nationalisms around the globe, individuals and communities engaging in migration increasingly used an ethnic-national optic to view their own worlds, and found themselves being viewed by others through that same lens. It subsumed subnational differences and fixated on the prerogative of and pride associated with the nation. Such was the experience of the Chinese migrants landing on Japanese shores who went on to build their families, businesses and communities in Yokohama. The first generation of merchants and labourers arrived with a local identity tied to their native places in Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang; over time, they and their descendants became Chinese. The change in self-understanding and the consciousness of being huaqiao (patriotic Chinese in diaspora) had to do in part with the cultivation by political activists and later on agents of the Guomindang government. …