Japan's Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900-1930

2. Integrating into Chinese Society: A Comparison of the Japanese Communities of Shanghai and Harbin

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2 Integrating into Chinese Society: A Comparison of the Japanese Communities of Shanghai and Harbin JOSHUA A. FOGEL In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japanese began settling in what were to become famous as the two most “international” cities in East Asia, Shanghai and Harbin. The Japanese communities that formed in these multicultural metropolises varied widely as they faced different issues and developed within different contexts. Writing in 1933 and 1934, the renowned journalist Edgar Snow cut through the “internationalist” hyperbole and inadvertently shed light on the question of ethnic integration within Shanghai and Harbin. Harbin, once delightful, today notorious as a place of living death, the worst-governed city in Manchukuo. Probably in no other city of the world is life so precarious. Harbin residents, including the 100,000 White and Red Russians, who here bend to the law of the yellow man, risk their lives if they go unarmed anywhere, even in daylight. Holdups, robberies, murders, kidnappings are common occurrences. . . . Some of the worst criminals are White Russians. Destitute, broken in spirit, unwilling to return to Russia under the Bolsheviks, unable to earn a living in China under the Japanese, they turn to crime, nourished on a diet of drugs, which are sold openly in shops infesting the city. . . . In Harbin alone there are more than 2000 licensed shops for the sale of opium, heroin and morphine. (Snow 1934, 81, 84. Emphasis added.)
Within Greater Shanghai dwell nearly 3,000,000 people. The vast majority is of course Chinese. The last censor’s notes list 50 different foreign nationalities with a total of 48,000. . . . To find men of all creeds and colors is not so phenomenal perhaps; New York, Paris, Berlin and Vienna can point to a medley of races. But in Shanghai there is for the most part no mixture; that is the phenomenon. Here, generation after generation, the British have stayed British, the Americans have remained “100 percenters.” In Paris the foreigner enjoys learning French; in Berlin he must acquire German; in New York the American dialect is considered essential. But in Shanghai he does not learn Chinese, although it is the language of the city’s 3,000,000, and beyond them, of the hundreds of millions from whom he hopes, with a little surprise, to extract a few coppers. It is believed that the study of Chinese weakens the fiber of the mind, and the few foreigners who do master the language are pointed out as eccentrics; significant smiles are exchanged behind their backs. . . . [I]n Shanghai [the foreigner] . . . is immune from all but his own consular jurisdiction. . . . Many believe that it is advisable to have as little contact with the Chinese as possible. (Snow 1933, 173–174; Takatsuna 1995, 98–99) Both cities were hailed throughout the early decades of the twentieth century—and they have been so remembered in the memoir literature since—as the “Paris of the East,” because of their “international” (read: European) flavor. As one Japanese journalist wrote in 1940: “Harbin! . . . International capital of northern Manchuria amid the swirling eddies of extravagant and romantic adventure, where past and future play a zigzagged symphony. . . . What a wonderful place” (Tachibana 1940, 264, 266). Where else in East Asia could one on a daily basis brush shoulders with so many foreigners, dine in foreign restaurants, and shop in foreign stores? In fact, Shanghai and Harbin were probably far more cosmopolitan than Paris at the time. The central question I address here is how the Japanese fit into Shanghai and Harbin, if indeed they tried. What roles did they play in these international communities? How well integrated were they into their economic , social, political, and cultural life? In the period preceding the concerted military invasion of the 1930s, what role did these cities play for the Japanese? Edgar Snow’s words offer a hint. Shanghai was a mosaic world of different ethnicities living side by side but having as little to do with one another as possible, while Harbin was a melting pot, more a city of pioneers whose residents, even the Chinese, were newcomers and mixed far more in good times and bad than in Shanghai. I begin with a look at the origins of the two Japanese communities, then looks at the sorts of occupations Japanese residents of Shanghai and Harbin undertook before examining the 46 FOGEL communal organization they established in China. I focus...