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

For Western writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Yoko hama was exotic—think of Rudyard Kipling’s “Blood Street Joe”—and to many it was Chinatown that lay at the heart of the exoticism. Chinatown was a dark and mysterious place, full of gambling houses and sailors’ bars, usually known as “grogshops,” the whole pervaded by the smell of strange foods and spices. As with so much of old Yokohama, that Chinatown was swept away in the 1923 earthquake. The rebuilt area was in turn destroyed in the massive bombing raids of 1945. In the 1960s and 1970s, a postwar shantytown gave way to a far more glossy and glamorous complex of restaurants that has made the area a gourmet’s paradise. Although grogshops and gourmet eating are not neglected, Eric Han’s book is concerned with far more. As he explains at the very beginning, a chance visit to Yokohama’s Chinatown in 1996 converted him from a microbiologist to a historian and this book is the result.

Japan’s Chinese community has never been large compared to others elsewhere in Asia, even if the Chinese were the largest non-Japanese group in the treaty ports between about 1868 and 1894. Nowadays, it is outnumbered by Koreans even though the Korean population is falling and the Chinese increasing. Most Chinese in Yokohama do not live in Chinatown. From the beginning of the community, many have lived in surrounding areas, and some, as they grew wealthier, moved out of the old settlement altogether. Yokohama was not the first Chinese center in Japan. As with the Dutch, a Chinese trading community operated at Nagasaki from Tokugawa days. Also like the Dutch, it had been subject to restrictions on length of stay and the presence of women, yet it was easier for Chinese to pass as Japanese and some clearly did so. They acquired Japanese wives and, in a foretaste of what would often happen later in the treaty ports, some merged into the Japanese community. Chinese treaty port communities did emerge at Nagasaki after 1859 and at Kobe some ten years later, and both still have modern Chinatowns. But neither became as well developed as that at Yokohama. While there was some Chinese presence in the northern treaty port of Hakodate, marked by a fine memorial hall dating from 1910, the whole foreign community was always small and no separate Chinese area emerged, although numbers remained stable at around 30 during the Meiji period.¹ In all cases, numbers of residents were usually outnumbered by a large transient work force.

In the early years, Chinese in Japan, except those who came as foreigners’ servants, had no legal status. This meant in theory that they were subject to Japanese courts or police jurisdiction. The 1871 Sino-Japanese Treaty granted each country the right of extraterritoriality, to come into force once diplomatic and consular officers were appointed and Chinese residents could be registered in their own right as citizens of the Qing Empire. Until this happened in 1878, the Chinese came under Japanese jurisdiction and many Japanese officials continued to behave as if they still were so in the following years.

Most Chinese were accustomed to thinking in terms of belonging to their home area. It was no coincidence that the Chinese name for Yokohama’s Chinatown was Nankinmachi (Nanjing town). The concept of being a citizen was a novel one. This question of “becoming Chinese” rather than being a man—and they were usually men—from Shanghai or Nanjing is one that clearly intrigues Han, who pursues it right up to the present. There were a number of turning points. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 was the first. Chinese who had lived in Japan for many years, many of whom thought of themselves as permanent residents and who often had Japanese wives, discovered that they were enemy aliens. Although the Japanese authorities took...