Introduction
At the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), 3,747 Chinese nationals lived in Japan's Kanagawa Prefecture, centered on the port city of Yokohama. Two years later, with much of their homeland under Japanese occupation, 2,364 Chinese remained in Kanagawa (Yokohama-shi Sōmukyoku Shishi Henshū-shitsu 1993b, 938). The war's destructive impact on China is well-known, but the story of the Chinese who weathered the war in Japan is not.Footnote 1 This study of Yokohama's Chinese community examines the symbolic importance of Chinese for Japan's wartime ideology and explores how their identities mediated complicities with the Japanese state. The issue of Sino-Japanese friendship and its contested meanings provide the key to understanding their experiences.
Friendship between Chinese and Japanese mattered crucially to the wartime Japanese state, at least as political rhetoric. Invocations of Sino-Japanese amity played on human sentiments and affect, but belied the real situation of conflict and hostility. An analogous situation obtains today. Diplomatic pronouncements between China and Japan since 1972 have repeatedly declared the friendship between the two countries; nevertheless, these pronouncements fail to reflect, much less reverse, the actual deepening animosity between the two peoples. This study addresses the historical significance of the term, both its political uses and popular understandings.
In wartime, even if few non-Japanese took such messages of friendship seriously, the rhetoric had material effects. The Yokohama Chinese community became a symbolic exemplar of Sino-Japanese relations, and Japanese authorities shielded them from overt repression and public animosity. The Japanese government left the Yokohama Chinese community intact and largely in peace; they would remain Chinese, neither forcibly excluded from Japanese territory nor forcibly included in the Japanese polity like Taiwanese and Koreans. Nor did Japanese authorities sequester the Chinese in internment camps, as the United States did to 110,000 ethnic Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor (Murray Reference Murray2008, 27). In return, they participated in collaborationist parades, celebrations, and propaganda broadcasts, under the watchful eyes of Japan's Foreign Police Section (Gaijika) under the Home Ministry.
The record of collaborationism among the Yokohama Chinese, however, poses problems for historical interpretation. Consider for instance a September 6, 1940, article in the newspaper Yokohama bōeki shinpō that introduced Yokohama-born Chen Dongting, the so-called “boss of Chinatown.” The newspaper declared him a “strong linchpin binding China and Japan, with fiery passion for ‘New East Asia’.” He was a man who contributed to Sino-Japanese amity (Nikka shinzen) through donations to the air raid defense fund and the Imperial Japanese Army, and other activities “too numerous to list.” Chen clarified his commitment to Japan in the following way: “We huaqiao [overseas Chinese] who reside in Yokohama are real huaqiao, but our relationship to Japan is akin to that of close relatives. It's because our shared history is so long, and many here have Japanese wives” (Yokohama bōeki shinpō 1940b).
This article illustrates how the friendship expressed by Chinese in Japan contained ambiguities of both motivation and message. In the public record, Chen and the Chinese in Japan endorsed Japan's military mission in China. Even if voluntary, however, Japanese wartime censorship constrained their expressions to a narrow range. It is impossible to ascertain their attitudes or motives from published accounts such as this. Their subject position also defies simple description. Chen's public insistence that the Yokohama Chinese are huaqiao implies more than the English rendering of the term suggests. Huaqiao is a late nineteenth-century neologism that came to signify, according to Wang Gungwu (Reference Wang1981, 123–24), “a militant commitment to remaining Chinese or to restoring one's ‘Chineseness’.” This conceptualization of overseas Chinese identity thus emphasizes Chinese patriotism and downplays attachment to place of settlement.Footnote 2 At the same time, Chen insisted that he and his fellow Yokohama Chinese strongly identified with their local society. The journalist even described Chen as “a pure-blooded child of Yokohama” (kissui no hamakko), suggesting that Yokohama society could accept them as members of the local community. Chen's statement grants these two identities, huaqiao and hamakko, equal weight. But as subject positions, they define radically different meanings for Chen's affirmation of the war.
Along these lines, this case study makes two interventions into the existing scholarship. The first deals with the diasporic identities of the Yokohama Chinese. The history of wartime Yokohama contributes to our understanding of the historical emergence of “multiethnic Japan” and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion that non-Japanese continue to experience in Japan.Footnote 3 The second deals with collaborationism and the interpretation of texts produced in a power-laden context. Here, I use the term “collaborationism” to denote “supportive engagement in the tasks and ideology of the occupier” (Brook Reference Brook2005, 10).Footnote 4 A critical reading of wartime records can shed light on the hidden negotiations that complicate the seamless appearance of such support.
Regarding the former, Yokohama's Chinatown is an ideal site for examining the tension between local integration and long-distance nationalism because of the community's size, permanence, and importance in the city's economy.Footnote 5 The ethnic enclave that would grow into Yokohama Chinatown originated with the 1859 opening of the city to international trade as a treaty port. The Chinese did not arrive in Yokohama as a preformed, self-aware diaspora. Rather, they were initially organized according to province of origin and dialect, with the majority from Guangzhou and another significant fraction from the so-called Sanjiang (three Jiang) provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Jiangxi (Yamashita 1979, 37–44). Nationalist activists in the 1890s and, later, representatives from the Republic of China (ROC) sought to subsume these preexisting native-place groups into the emergent Chinese nation.Footnote 6 In addition, jus sanguinis (Latin: right of blood) citizenship laws in Japan in 1899, and in China in 1909, legally defined nationality by ethnicity, a combination of biological and cultural difference (Morris-Suzuki Reference Morris-Suzuki1998, 189–90; Tsai Reference Tsai1910, 407–8). Distinctions between Chinese and Japanese thus became mutually exclusive, essential, and permanent across generations.
Concurrently, Chinese adapted to daily life in Yokohama through business relationships, friendships, and a significant degree of intermarriage.Footnote 7 Yokohama society moreover recognized Chinese contributions to the local culture, particularly Chinese cuisine. One of the most famous examples is the open-topped steamed dumpling known in Japanese as the shūmai. Restaurant owner Bao Bogong (1890?–1958), the half-Japanese son of a Cantonese immigrant, popularized this dumpling and made it a distinctive feature of Yokohama cuisine (Sugawara 1991, 23–24).Footnote 8
These competing attachments are typical of diasporic identities, but in wartime brought political consequences. As we will see, Chinese could not publicly express their Chinese identities during wartime without affirming a Japanese construction of Sino-Japanese amity. At the same time, the decision by Yokohama Chinese to remain during the war depended heavily on their integration into Yokohama society. These years thus constituted a watershed in how they defined their communal boundaries.
This empirical case study also contributes to the scholarship on Chinese collaboration during the Sino-Japanese War; diaspora and collaboration in fact share a conceptual basis in the idealized relationship between an individual and a nation. In a recent exchange published in this journal, Timothy Brook (Reference Brook2012, 104, 107) has argued that collaboration as a concept derives its coherence from nationalism, and the charge of collaboration, a “moral filter” on the past, depends on ideological commitment to a singular nation. By rejecting the givenness of diasporic Chinese identity, this study also questions the nationalist assumptions of the “resistentialist” master narrative—that is, the application of a stark dichotomy between loyal resistance and moral failure—that has dominated postwar reflection on Chinese behavior under Japanese occupation (Brook Reference Brook2005; Zanasi Reference Zanasi2008). This master narrative has led to a myth that all true Chinese resisted Japan, a characterization that extended to huaqiao as well. Accordingly, postwar memoirs and histories by Chinese in Yokohama have emphasized the “fascist” coercion behind their wartime cooperation, implying the oppression of an innate Chinese patriotism (Chūkakaikan and Yokohama Kaikō Shiryōkan Reference Shiryōkan2010; Yokohama Yamate Chūkagakkō Hyakunen Kōshi Henshū Iinkai 2005, 78–90).
Japanese scholarship has offered correctives to this patriotic huaqiao narrative. However, these works rely heavily on records published or compiled by Japanese authorities during wartime, and thus exaggerate the hegemony of Japan's wartime ideology. For instance, the official Yokohama city history takes the view that there was a significant pro-Japan faction among the Yokohama Chinese who voluntarily cooperated with Japanese authorities (Yokohama-shi Sōmukyoku Shishi Henshū-shitsu 1993b, 943–49). Kikuchi Kazutaka's Sensō to kakyō: Nihon, kokumin seifu kōkan, kairai seiken, kakyo kan no seiji rikigaku (Overseas Chinese and the Asia-Pacific War 1937–1945: The political dynamic among Japan, China, and the puppet regimes) reaches a similar conclusion. Kikuchi (2011, 479, 480) eschews the subjective record of memoir in favor of newspaper articles and government documents, and argues that huaqiao in Japan “greatly welcomed” the new puppet regimes, and “objectively (kyakkan teki ni) speaking, supported Japan's policy of invasion.”
However, there is no compelling reason to accept this documentary evidence as an accurate reflection of political commitments. The appearance of Chinese compliance should not automatically be treated as proof of Japanese ideological hegemony. It is necessary to question the notion of Japanese hegemony, even while rejecting the a priori assumption of patriotic resistance. Here, James C. Scott's concepts of public and hidden transcripts can offer insight into the meanings inherent in the transactions between Japanese authorities and the Yokohama Chinese. By expressing support for Japan's war mission, the Yokohama Chinese helped construct a “public transcript,” defined by Scott (Reference Scott1990, 2, 18) as “the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate” designed to “affirm and naturalize the power of dominant elites.” But where there is domination, we may also posit a hidden transcript—that is, those conversations “beyond the direct observation of powerholders”—that sustains a reservoir of resistance (5).Footnote 9 We can move beyond myths of resistance by directing our attention to the gaps between public and hidden transcripts, to gain purchase on what Scott calls “infrapolitics”: the invisible “social and cultural underpinning of . . . more visible political action” (183). This approach helps us see that the Japanese state was not all-powerful in the realm of ideological production. Chinese leaders did not necessarily accept the mission of Sino-Japanese amity on the terms offered by Japan's wartime authorities. To these Chinese, “true” Sino-Japanese amity was a distant, far more difficult objective to achieve.
Wartime Japan and the Uses of Huaqiao Nationalism
In the years before 1937, Japanese authorities considered Chinese nationalism a threat to their position on the Asian mainland due to its strongly anti-Japanese character. After Japan's establishment of a series of Chinese collaborationist regimes at the end of 1937, however, they treated Chinese nationalism as an ideological tool to justify their mission in Asia.
From the 1910s, Japan's Foreign Ministry, the East Asia Common Culture Society, and the research arm of the South Manchuria Railway Company had monitored the anti-Japanese content of Chinese textbooks (Kantō Butoku 1914; Makino 1936; Tōa Keizai Chōsa Kyoku Reference Chōsa Kyoku1929). Japan's Home, Foreign, and Education Ministries also cracked down on textbooks containing similar sentiments at Yokohama's Chinese school (Gaimushō 1936; Naimushō Keihōkyoku [1936] 1980, 48–50). Nevertheless, after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Japan's government attempted to foster a Chinese nationalism that would be compatible with its narrative of the war. By affirming, if only superficially, Chinese nationalism, Japan sought to legitimate the war as a joint struggle against Western imperialism.
Pronouncements from Japanese leaders indicate that they acknowledged the strength of Chinese national sentiment and sought to integrate it into their justifications for the war. In the spring of 1938, Foreign Minister Ugaki Kazushige noted in his diary: “We Japanese always say that ‘China for the Chinese’ is what we desire, that this is our basic policy” (Boyle Reference Boyle1972, 148). In a 1940 pamphlet, War Minister Itagaki Seishirō admonished his men that “Japanese should be true Japanese and Chinese should be true Chinese” (Itagaki Reference Tang1941, 164). These were not superficial gestures toward pluralism, but the culmination of a shift in pan-Asianist discourses since World War I away from an emphasis on shared race (jinshu) toward an acceptance of ethnic nationality (minzoku) as the superordinate principle of identity (Doak Reference Doak, Saaler and Koschmann2007, 168; Weiner Reference Weiner and Weiner2009). While this principle may appear to vitiate the Asian regionalist imaginings that underlay Japanese colonialism and territorial expansion, during the 1920s and 1930s a variety of Japanese social scientists and politicians found ways to reconcile Asian solidarity and ethnic-national distinctions. These thinkers argued for either a hierarchical “league” of Asian nations led by Japan, or an organic body of complementary Asian nations described as an “East Asian Community” (Tōa kyōdōtai) (Doak Reference Doak, Saaler and Koschmann2007, 172–78).
This intellectual shift goes a long way toward explaining the strenuous nation-building efforts that Japan's military conducted on the Asian continent (Brook Reference Brook2005; Duara Reference Duara2003; Young, Reference Young1998). As Chiang Kaishek's government retreated inland to Chongqing under the Japanese onslaught, competing wings of the Japanese army installed collaborationist regimes. The first of these with national aspirations was the Beijing Provisional Government, inaugurated on December 14, 1937, by Japan's North China Area Army (Boyle Reference Boyle1972, 85–91). On March 30, 1940, Wang Jingwei, former Nationalist Party deputy leader and disciple of “father of the Chinese nation” Sun Yatsen, established the Reorganized National Government that superseded the other regional puppet regimes (238). These regimes ruled occupied areas of China and established a Chinese national identity under Japanese purview.
In Yokohama, Japan's Home Ministry did not intend to dislodge the Chinese population. It only sought to crush the influence of the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD), which played a major role in maintaining Chinese patriotism (Kikuchi 2011, 29–31). The party collected donations and disseminated anti-war and anti-Japanese propaganda until twenty-four members were arrested in a police raid on December 12, 1937. Kanagawa Prefectural Police promptly deported nine of them (Naimushō Keihōkyoku [1938] 1980, 83, 290–91).
From early 1938, Japan also conducted a version of Chinese nation-building in Yokohama, since new circumstances on the mainland had transformed the huaqiao from potential threats to nominal allies. By either coaxing or coercing expressions of support from the Yokohama Chinese, Japanese authorities attempted to buttress the legitimacy of the hastily assembled collaborationist regimes. Japanese authorities made the logical link between Chinese patriotism and Japan's war aims with the familiar phrase “Sino-Japanese amity.” The concept and the slogan dates to the generation of Chinese activists who sheltered in Japan in the waning days of the Qing dynasty. Liang Qichao and Feng Jingru expressed this principle as early as 1898, when they published the first issue of their political journal Qingyi bao in Yokohama. The editors declared that one of the central aims of the publication was to facilitate the exchange of views and friendship between China and Japan (Qingyi bao 1898). From the 1910s, Japanese diplomatic records also indicate efforts to promote friendship with China through educational projects (Yasukawa 1917). In addition, Sun Yatsen called for Sino-Japanese cooperation in his 1924 speech on “The Problem of Greater Asianism” (Da Yaxiya wenti). Prior to the 1930s, these catchphrases primarily signified cooperative diplomacy and grassroots networking.
The slogan acquired a different valence during the Sino-Japanese War. On January 16, 1938, Japan Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro famously declared that Japan would “no longer deal with” (aite ni sezu) the ROC. Japanese propagandists then unilaterally redefined Sino-Japanese amity to signify cooperation with the Chinese collaborationist regimes. Japan's authorities hoped the Yokohama Chinese could serve as spokesmen for a narrative that their military actions served to liberate, not dominate, China. Moreover, some Japanese researchers believed that the huaqiao in Japan could aid in the construction of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. One such advocate was Matsumoto Otō, one of the trustees of the Nanpō kyōkai (Southern Society), a research and planning organization involved in Southeast Asia and Taiwan. In the Chinese-language magazine Kabun Osaka mainichi, he argued that the “pernicious and meaningless” support of Chiang Kaishek's regime among huaqiao in Southeast Asia derived from their years under the “authority of the white man,” which had destroyed their Asian consciousness and bequeathed them a faulty view of Japan. Matsumoto believed that huaqiao in Japan would be useful in rectifying this situation because they “have seen more than any other Chinese the sincerity of the Japanese, have already put Sino-Japanese cooperation into practice and have contributed to the reconstruction of a revived China” (Matsumoto 1942, 11).
By the end of the war, Japanese government policymakers proposed similar roles for the Chinese in Japan. For instance, in April 1944, the Japanese Ministry of Greater East Asia (Daitōashō) produced a secret plan outlining the deployment of huaqiao in Japan for three main purposes: to aid in propaganda, shipping, and the investigation of enemy territory; to recruit and supervise Chinese coolies at mines and ports in Japan; and to engage in the “enlightening” of Chinese inside and outside the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Daitōashō Shina Jimukyoku Sōmuka 1944). It is unclear to what extent the Ministry of Greater East Asia implemented this plan. It is also doubtful such operations would have been effective, given Japan's deterioriating military situation and the atrocities it inflicted on China and ethnic Chinese populations across Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, the ministry's plan demonstrated that the Japanese government did not attempt to assimilate the Chinese in Japan as imperial subjects; to the end of the war they saw them as useful for the roles they could perform as huaqiao.
Complicities and Appearances: Yokohama Chinese Responses
If accounts published in Japan during the war are to be believed, the Yokohama Chinese were willing to offer thorough support for Japan's military actions. Before evaluating the actions of these Chinese, however, it is necessary to consider who stayed, who left, and the struggles over community representation that took place from the summer of 1937 through early 1938.
Over the first two years of the war, approximately 40 percent of the Chinese in Kanagawa Prefecture departed for the homeland (Yokohama-shi Sōmukyoku Shishi Henshū-shitsu 1993a, 36). Most left in the latter half of 1937. This development was driven by both political protest against Japan's invasion of China and an economic collapse. In the autumn of 1937, uncertainty, shipping disruptions, and Japanese commercial restrictions reduced Chinese financial transactions and sales of general goods by 90 percent, sales of food and textiles by 50 percent, exports by 70 percent, and imports to next to nothing (Naimushō Gaijika 1939). Starting in mid-August of 1937, the Chinese Consulate-General in Yokohama, following an August 3 ROC policy directive, also began encouraging the voluntary return of its compatriots on commissioned Japanese postal and P&O Line steamships (Kikuchi 2011, 19–20; Yokohama bōeki shinpō 1937).
The immediate returnees, however, were by and large short-term residents, such as immigrant laborers, itinerant peddlers, and students. These groups had a weak economic base in Japan and were relatively free to act on their political consciousness. For instance, on August 20, the Asama-maru left Yokohama bound for Hong Kong. It carried 170 Chinese, a majority (100) of whom were students (Kikuchi 2011, 19–20; Yokohama-shi Sōmukyoku Shishi Henshū-shitsu 1993b, 940). For those with deeper familial or commmercial roots in Yokohama, the decision to return to the homeland could be traumatic. Those who had left during the relatively brief Manchurian Incident of 1931–32 suffered immense economic losses, and were loath to repeat that experience (Kikuchi 2011, 19; Murakami 1997, 140). Even so, Ye Xiaolin (b. 1915) recalled that in 1937 many Chinese men left their children as well as their Japanese wives behind in Yokohama. She saw those wives “crying and crying, standing in front of the Chinese Guild (Zhonghua huiguan).”Footnote 10 Ye's mother brought her younger brother back to China on that ship, but she and her husband remained (Chūkakaikan and Yokohama Kaikō Shiryōkan Reference Shiryōkan2010, 41). The conflict divided families in other ways as well. Two brothers of restaurateur Bao Bogong elected to enter the Japanese army, one as an army doctor and the other as a Chinese-language interpreter. The latter brother died in the fighting on the Chinese mainland. Another brother served as a doctor for the Chinese Nationalist army (Sugawara 1991, 20–21).
Through the fall of 1937, Japanese police investigations created an atmosphere of fear that contributed to the departures. Japanese police surveillance convinced many prominent members of the community to avoid meetings held by Shao Yulin, the Chinese Consul-General (Naimushō Gaijika 1939; Naimushō Keihōkyoku 1937). Then, in the December crackdown on the GMD, police jailed teachers with party affiliations at the Chinese school (Chūkakaikan and Yokohama Kaikō Shiryōkan Reference Shiryōkan2010, 58). Wu Bokang, acting principal of the Chinese school, was among them; Japanese police arrested him on suspicion of espionage, and detained and interrogated him for three months (Wu 2005, 133). This type of police persecution led GMD sympathizers to either leave or conceal those ties.
After Japan's North China Area Army established the Beijing Provisional Government, the Foreign Police Section coerced Chinese institutions in Yokohama to recognize the regime's authority. According to Japanese propagandists, this would be the new Chinese patriotism. ROC diplomatic officers, however, resisted this appropriation to the extent that they could. According to the January 15, 1938, Yomiuri shinbun, representatives from eighteen Yokohama Chinese associations met the previous day and resolved to fly the five-color flag of the Beijing Provisional Government. At that meeting, Consul-General Shao Yulin stood before the gathered community leaders in tears, calling for those who did not wish to fly the five-color flag to join him in walking out of the meeting. Several did (Kikuchi 2011, 108).
ROC Ambassador Xu Shiying faced a similar situation when he visited Yokohama on January 18, 1938, shortly prior to his departure from Japan. While the ambassador was delivering a fiery speech at the Chinese Guild, a Japanese policeman strode up to the podium, took down the two ROC flags that stood beside the ambassador, and attempted to hang the five-color flag in their place. Xu thundered, “This is absolutely impermissible. You can take them down after I leave, but while I am here you are not to touch them.” Xu's prerogative as ambassador prevailed, but only for the moment (Chūkakaikan and Yokohama Kaikō Shiryōkan Reference Shiryōkan2010, 145). Soon thereafter, most Chinese buildings in Yokohama flew the five-color flag (Yokohama bōeki shinpō 1938).
From early 1938 until the end of the war, Yokohama Chinese organizations and their leaders led celebrations and commemorations in support of Japan's war mission and invoked the slogan of Sino-Japanese amity. We should not presume that they accepted the message they were compelled to endorse. Nevertheless, Yokohama newspapers publicized a variety of such activities, including an evening of traditional Chinese music that the Chinese Guild hosted on May 29, 1940. Newspapers termed it a “Sino-Japanese amity concert” (Yokohama bōeki shinpō 1940a). Exchanges of these sorts had abundant precedent in Yokohama, but under conditions of war affirmed Japan's wartime ideology.
The most visible Chinese supporter of Japan's war mission in Yokohama was a Cantonese business-owner named Chen Dongting (1895–1966). Japanese police records indicate that he was elected to head the Chinese Guild in 1937, a position from which he engineered the break with the Chinese Consulate the following year (Naimushō Keihōkyoku 1937). For his efforts to realize friendship between Chinese and Japanese, Kanagawa Prefecture nominated him for special recognition at the 2,600-year anniversary of the (mythical) emperor Jimmu's ascension.Footnote 11 Among his accomplishments that made him “a model for both foreigners and Japanese alike,” Kanagawa Prefecture enumerated the following: on July 7, 1939, the second anniversary of the start of the war, he invited professors to lecture in Chinatown on the importance of Sino-Japanese unity; later that month, he led a contingent of Yokohama huaqiao to participate in an anti-British rally; and he steered the community to donate cash to various Japanese governmental organs and military associations (Kanagawa-ken 1939).
In 1938, Yokohama Chinese also broadcast three shortwave radio programs from JOAK—the precursor to Japan's public broadcasting company, NHK—to ethnic Chinese audiences worldwide. Chen Dongting led with a Cantonese address on August 2, introducing the secure and prosperous life enjoyed by huaqiao in Japan. Next, on September 19, Chinese Guild trustee Bao Qikang gave a fifteen-minute English-language broadcast for huaqiao in America and Southeast Asia, supposedly “to great effect.” Finally, on November 24, two twelve-year-old students from the Yokohama Chinese Public School, Wang Jinzhou and Chen Huicai, offered a “poignant” appeal to Chinese children with Chinese and Japanese songs (Naimushō Gaijika 1939). In candid moments, however, Japanese observers admitted that these and other propaganda efforts were ineffective, or worse, counterproductive. They acknowledged that Chinese in China saw these expressions as coerced and inauthentic (Iriyama 1941, 191; Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai 1939, 52).
Another performance of Chinese collaborationism was the Kenkoku taisō (Establishing the nation gymnastics) movement, developed in late 1937 by former Home Ministry Police Chief Matsumoto Manabu. Matsumoto designed these patriotic radio gymnastics to reform the morals and national consciousness of Japan's citizens (Fujino 2000, 50–53). Working with local police, Chen Dongting introduced Kenkoku taisō to the Yokohama Chinese school on December 15, 1938 (Kanagawa-ken 1939). Wu Bokang, now the school's director of moral education, also participated (Fujino 2000, 58–61). At a December 1938 celebratory banquet in honor of the police sponsors of Kenkoku taisō, Wu toasted his former jailers and praised these gymnastics as “the best way to initiate Sino-Japanese amity.” He noted with approval that his young son and daughter cheerfully braved the early morning cold to begin their days with these exercises (Wu 1939, 8).
This new era of purported friendship between China and Japan also brought new institutions to link the two countries. At a December 9, 1939, meeting, Japan's Home Ministry resolved to establish a new umbrella organization called the General Assembly of Huaqiao in Japan (Quanri huaqiao zonghui). The timing was meant to coincide with the inauguration of Wang Jingwei's Reorganized National Government (J. Chen 1941, 11; Naimushō Keihōkyoku [1939] 1980, 12). According to its bylaws, this body aimed to coordinate existing huaqiao community organizations, “unify the huaqiao living in all regions of the Great Japanese Empire, promote Sino-Japanese amity and cooperation, support the construction of the New Order in East Asia, and further the overall welfare of the huaqiao” (Naimushō Keihōkyoku [1939] 1980, 12–13). In practice, the embassy and consulates of Wang Jingwei's government passed commands to the local huaqiao organizations through the General Assembly, which also mediated between the local community and Japanese authorities (Kikuchi 2011, 55–56).
The General Assembly actively promoted the message of Sino-Japanese amity through political pageantry, beginning with an inaugural convention in Tokyo on March 6, 1940. They proved themselves, however, to be no more autonomous than the Reorganized National Government itself. A Japanese War Ministry document noted that the Kōain, a high-level governmental body established in 1938 to administer occupied China, exercised supreme control over the General Assembly and provided a good deal of its funding.Footnote 12 The Kōain in fact orchestrated the March 1940 conference. It directed the General Assembly to host a representative from Wang's regime, and planned far in advance the congratulatory telegram the General Assembly would send to Wang Jingwei on March 30 (Naimushō Keihōkyoku [1941] 1980, 54). Internally as well, the new organization was far from a grassroots operation because Japan's Home Ministry and Kōain monitored and directed its activities. The January 1943 roster indicated three posts occupied by Japanese police representatives: “counselor” (sanji), “superintendent” (shuji), and “secretary” (shoki) (K. Chen 2004, 229–30; Kikuchi 2011, 41).
Available evidence thus suggests that Japanese advisers instigated, often through the puppet regimes or the General Assembly, the collaborationist displays staged by Yokohama Chinese. It is difficult to sustain the conclusion that Chinese displays of support for Japan's war mission were voluntary, even though newspaper accounts present them as such. For instance, the Kanagawa-ken shinbun reported that on March 27, 1941, Yokohama's Chinese Guild celebrated the one-year anniversary of the founding of Wang Jingwei's regime. Records of Japan's Foreign Police Section indicate that it was Feng You, Yokohama consul-general of the Reorganized National Government, who had ordered community organizations to commemorate the event (Naimushō Keihōkyoku [1941] 1980, 54).
The public transcript—what James C. Scott (Reference Scott1990, 53) calls the “dramaturgy” of domination—showed the resident huaqiao as sincere, passionate, and unanimous in their endorsement of Sino-Japanese amity. Japanese authorities, by participating in this narrative, were also compelled to live up to it. They publicly praised exemplary huaqiao, as Kanagawa Prefecture did for Chen Dongting. In a January 1939 case, Japanese police also used Sino-Japanese amity to justify leniency when they arrested eighteen huaqiao for mahjong gambling. In light of the “increasingly harmonious” relations between Chinese and Japanese, the arresting officers did not deport the offenders. They simply summoned Chen Dongting and other community representatives to receive, along with the guilty parties, a lecture on Sino-Japanese cooperation and behaving as “Japan's finest huaqiao” (Naimushō Gaijika 1939; Yokohama bōeki shinpō 1939). For Japanese authorities, the appearance of cooperation between Chinese and Japanese served an important ideological purpose. As we will see, the Yokohama Chinese found uses for Japan's avowed commitment to Sino-Japanese amity as well.
Yokohama Identity and a “True” Sino-Japanese Amity
The public transcript downplayed the coercive power of the Japanese state and portrayed Chinese collaboration as voluntary and sincere. However, records of a more private nature—oral histories, police and diplomatic records, and the confidential minutes of two meetings between Chinese leaders and Japanese scholars and government representatives—reveal relations that were far less harmonious. These sources challenge the appearance of Sino-Japanese amity in three ways: first, they reveal doubts and suspicions held by both Japanese and Chinese about the actual practices of collaborationism; second, they show Chinese motivations to be blatantly economic and instrumental; finally, they reveal Chinese articulations of identity that made their role in collaborationism ambiguous.
Despite the language of friendship used by Japanese authorities, they treated the Yokohama Chinese as potential threats to security. Police sequestered the Chinese in Chinatown and forced those living in surrounding regions to relocate to the city center (C. Chen 2003, 276; Murakami 1997, 100; Yokohama Yamate Chūkagakkō Hyakunen Kōshi Henshū Iinkai 2005, 87). Huang Lixiang (1912–99) recalled that in 1943 police forced him to abandon both home and restaurant on high ground in the municipality of Honmoku (Chūkakaikan and Yokohama Kaikō Shiryōkan Reference Shiryōkan2010, 29–30). Police also restricted their right to travel without permission; Ye Xiaolin (b. 1915) recalled that her family had to apply for permission to visit the family grave at the nearby Chinese cemetery (40). Even Wang Jinzhou (b. 1925), one of the children who participated in the 1938 JOAK propaganda broadcasts, was not free from suspicion. He commuted for a time to St. Joseph's Academy on the bluff overlooking Yokohama harbor. As a result, the Special Higher Police (Tokkō) detained him several times, pointedly asking why he was both studying the enemy language of English and watching ships arriving at port (146).
Wang's experience was relatively mild compared to others. Zheng Huagui recalled that the Special Higher Police came to search his house on suspicion of signaling to enemy planes (Murakami 1997, 130). Speaking in Chinese did not necessarily provide safety. Liao Chaohua (1915–2007) recounted that many Chinese feared his Japanese neighbor, a man who understood both Mandarin and Cantonese and served as an informant for the Japanese police (Chūkakaikan and Yokohama Kaikō Shiryōkan Reference Shiryōkan2010, 89). A piano tuner named Zhou Rangjie was indeed arrested for praising Chiang Kaishek at his father's piano factory in the spring of 1945. Japanese police tortured and interrogated Zhou on suspicion of espionage until the end of the war (Sugawara 1991, 81–82). Other memoirs assert that Japanese police jailed at least ten other Yokohama Chinese before the end of the war for similar crimes (“Hengbin Huaqiao Funühui Wushinian Shi” Bianji Weiyuan Hui Reference Bianji Weiyuan Hui2004, 98). This surveillance and repression by police implies that they presumed many in the Chinese community continued to hold anti-Japanese, pro-GMD beliefs.
In private venues, the same Chinese leaders who received credit for steering the community toward collaborationism also deviated from the public script of Sino-Japanese amity. Under the auspices of the Society for the Promotion of Diplomacy (Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai), Chinese representatives from Tokyo and Yokohama met with Japanese China experts in November 1938 and March 1939 to discuss huaqiao contributions to Japan's war effort. The records of these meetings offer key insight into how they conceived of their relationship with Japanese authorities, and how they wished to frame their motivations. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs sealed these discussions from public view by classifying both documents as “top secret” (gokuhi). The preface to the first meeting's minutes warned that the document should be treated with care, lest the unguarded words of the speakers lead to “misunderstandings” (Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai 1938). The record of the second meeting also noted that the huaqiao representatives themselves requested that their candid impressions remain private (Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai 1939). Much of what they said would, in fact, undermine the veneer of cooperation between the huaqiao and Japan.
At these two meetings, several Chinese leaders acknowledged that exchange students and the rank-and-file did not fully accept invocations of friendship and unity between the two countries. Regarding the average huaqiao in Japan, Japan-born Zhang Chaoxiu admitted that “few actually believed in the noble ideals that justified the conflict,” but remained in Japan because they expected its quick resolution. Moreover, he predicted that huaqiao in Japan would increasingly question the pro-Japan spirit and fall into pure opportunism if the war of resistance were to drag on (Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai 1939, 44–45).
Chinese leaders themselves averred sincere support for the goal of Sino-Japanese amity. Many, however, insinuated an ambivalence toward its practice in the present by offering their opinion on “real” Sino-Japanese amity (shin Nisshi shinzen). Chen Dongting proposed that schools begin inculcating the message of Sino-Japanese amity from elementary school so that “true amity between the two countries can come into being” by the time students reach college (Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai 1938, 33). Authentic amity, it seemed, lay far in the future.
Seventy-seven-year-old Wen Bingchen (1866–1955) of Yokohama offered more direct criticism of past and present Japanese policy. His latitude to speak freely likely derived from his status as a community elder with unimpeachable Asianist credentials; in 1898 he had sheltered Sun Yatsen in Yokohama and served as his translator and bodyguard (Ogasawara 2009, 22, 42–43). Wen proclaimed that Japan was as responsible as China for the current conflict, and that neither had been living up to the principle of Asian solidarity. Japan, he argued, “claims to be a leader in Asia, but its autonomy is but a pale shadow. … If Japan continues to rely on the power of Germany and Italy … then no matter how much you repeat the slogan of Sino-Japanese amity, you will not convert the hearts of Chinese to true Sino-Japanese amity” (Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai 1938, 51–52).
Other Chinese representatives called for true Sino-Japanese amity in order to voice specific complaints. In that regard, they were admitting to “impure” economic motivations behind their cooperation. The judgment is not mine. This was a charge that Chinese often leveled at each other, and perhaps one of the reasons the representatives at these meetings wished to keep their discussions confidential (Naimushō Keihōkyoku [1938] 1980, 28).
Lin Jinci, trustee of the Tokyo huaqiao association, appealed for greater freedom to conduct business and travel in Japan, which he argued was “a matter of life or death for the huaqiao.” A positive response from the Japanese government would thus be “the most direct path toward true Sino-Japanese amity” (Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai 1938, 62–64). Lin was reflecting on the formidable economic difficulties that Chinese in Tokyo and Yokohama were experiencing since 1937. The outbreak of hostilities led to a lasting decline in Japanese commerce and consumption in Yokohama's Chinatown (Naimushō Gaijika 1939, 36; Naimushō Keihōkyoku [1937] 1980, 77–78). Traders also found their activities constrained by increasingly onerous regulations. Even though Japanese planners attempted to expand trade into occupied China and Southeast Asia with the help of huaqiao in Japan, these efforts did not provide much benefit for the Yokohama community since the port primarily handled exports to Europe and America (Iriyama 1941, 196; Kagotani Reference Kagotani and Sugihara2005, 50; Kikuchi 2011, 112–13). In this context, Zhang Chaoxiu argued that “huaqiao are economic warriors” who can promote Japan's message better than their “clumsy propaganda”: “Show [the huaqiao around Asia that] they will profit more than they would under Western control. Our economic success will show [them] Japan's good intentions. So use us. Economic results will dispel Western propaganda like snow at sunrise” (Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai 1939, 40–44).
This type of economic instrumentalism marked Chinese collaborationism more broadly. Donations and expressions of support that Chinese offered Japanese authorities during the war often arrived with similar appeals for assistance (Kikuchi 2011, 64). In June 1939, the Tokyo and Yokohama organizations jointly transmitted a petition to Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The leaders, Chen Dongting of Yokohama and Zhang Zesheng of Tokyo, promised their communities' cooperation, proposing even to send representatives to aid in pacification work in occupied China. In return they requested that Japan loosen import and export restrictions and issue permits for travel to and from China. Japanese police rejected these requests, noting in their records that they should investigate huaqiao organizations more closely to forestall further appeals of this sort (Kikuchi 2011, 109).
Chinese representatives also subverted the discourse of Sino-Japanese amity by asserting identity positions that were, in a national sense, impure. Zhang Jilai, a clothing merchant from Tokyo, similarly argued that: “Viewed from the perspective of Japanese-Sino-Manchurian cooperation, we do not want to be considered Chinese, but rather treated as Japanese, broadly defined (hiroi imi ni okeru Nihonjin). Without this, there can be no true amity” (Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai 1938, 13–16).
Chen Dongting also challenged the fundamental distinction between Chinese and Japanese, offering a statement in the 1938 meeting that was nearly identical in substance to his subsequent newspaper interview in 1940. Intending perhaps to flatter his Japanese counterparts and establish the loyalty of Yokohama Chinese, he inadvertently blurred the boundary between the two.
Most of us who remain [in Japan] have the same feelings and lifestyles as our Japanese brothers. Most of us were born in Japan. My wife is Japanese and our children are practically the same as Japanese; there is no way that we could harbor any ill feelings toward Japan. On the contrary, we feel extreme gratitude toward Japan. . . . The very thought of having to go back to China makes us feel grateful to be allowed to stay in Japan. (Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai 1938, 31)
Bao Qikang, in turn, argued that he “no longer considers himself Chinese” because he has lived in Yokohama for thirty-one years. He then turned his personal identification with Yokohama into a challenge to the political and diplomatic terms in which Japanese authorities construed Sino-Japanese amity. “If we interact with each other sincerely in our daily lives, we can overcome differences in customs, naturally harmonize our feelings, and achieve true Sino-Japanese amity. . . . This would be far better than a Sino-Japanese amity imposed from above” (Nihon Gaikō Kyōkai 1938, 59–61).
Clearly, neither Chen nor Bao Qikang intended to deny a role for the Yokohama Chinese in promoting friendship between China and Japan. But by evoking their integration into Yokohama, they subverted the fabric of Sino-Japanese amity, not on the issue of friendship, but at the hyphen. This was because the discourse and its intellectual foundations in wartime pan-Asianism depended on the coherence of separate Chinese and Japanese nations. Identifying with Yokohama harmed their standing as representative Chinese in Japanese eyes. Their local and national identifications thus both enabled and undercut their exploitation as propaganda tools by the Japanese government. Living as hamakko, as the journalist called Chen in the 1940 article, aligned their interests with Yokohama society and, like it or not, Japan as a whole. Yet, this local integration separated them from Chinese in China and other huaqiao around the world.
Hamakko to the Bitter End
For the Yokohama Chinese, there were ample social and cultural underpinnings for a strong sense of Yokohama identity, even during wartime. Many Chinese memoirs describe friendships among neighbors. Liu Xinglan recalled that her family was helped during the lean years of the war by a Japanese friend who worked at a noodle factory and could procure a little extra on the side (“Hengbin Huaqiao Funühui Wushinian Shi” Bianji Weiyuan Hui Reference Bianji Weiyuan Hui2004, 98). Another elderly Chinese recalled that during the war Japanese and Chinese children continued to play together in the streets.
Examples of cultural integration also abound. The children at the Chinese school spoke a mixture of Cantonese and Japanese, the languages used at home (X. Chen 2005, 143). The school song, sung in Cantonese, invoked the local specificity of their community: “Faint Mt. Fuji in the distance, the expansive water of Yokohama harbor, let our Chinese Public School live forever” (Li 2005, 142). Chinese restaurants continued to play a significant role in the city's wartime economy. They primarily served a Japanese clientele, and some of the larger establishments specialized in farewell banquets for Japanese soldiers bound for the Chinese front (Naimushō Gaijika 1939). Under straitened circumstances, Chinese restaurants relied on black-market procurements, and when these failed, debased their sweet-and-sour pork with whale or horse meat (Fukushima Reference Fukushima1973, 17; Yokohama Chinatown Official Website, n.d.). They were hardly prospering, but upwards of 54 percent of employed Chinese worked in restaurants by the end of the war because of the collapse of all other lines of business (Kanagawa-ken 1945; Naimushō Gaijika 1939; Yokohama-shi Sōmukyoku Shishi Henshū-shitsu 1993a, 35).Footnote 13
At war's end, the Yokohama Chinese shared the same fate as their city. On the morning of May 29, 1945, more than 500 B-29 bombers dropped 2,570 tons of incendiary bombs on Yokohama (Yokohama Yamate Chūkagakkō Hyakunen Kōshi Henshū Iinkai 2005, 88; Yokohama-shi Sōmukyoku Shishi Henshū-shitsu 1993b, 1024–26). Japan's Home Ministry had integrated the Yokohama Chinese into the wartime neighborhood association system—popularly known as tonarigumi. As members of these teams, Chinese and Japanese served as firefighters in a futile effort to save the city (Chūkakaikan and Yokohama Kaikō Shiryōkan Reference Shiryōkan2010, 89–90). Afterwards, the city ward office sent a truck to distribute food and blankets to both Chinese and Japanese (90). The bombing destroyed Chinatown completely, including Zhou Rangjie's piano factory, all its restaurants, and the Chinese school. Wu Bokang, who had been living at the school, was severely injured when bombs struck the building. His wife, daughter, and son all perished in the collapsed structure (Yokohama Yamate Chūkagakkō Hyakunen Kōshi Henshū Iinkai 2005, 90). These were the costs of living as hamakko in wartime.
Conclusions
Even in Japan, where the Japanese government exercised near total control, Chinese collaborationism was not a one-sided affair. The leaders of the Chinese community in Yokohama who affirmed Japan's wartime ideology were not simply Japanese puppets. This is consistent with scholarship on collaborationist regimes in China, which also complicate the portrait of pure Japanese domination (Barrett Reference Barrett, Barrett and Shyu2001). Despite the steep asymmetry in power, Chinese in Japan and Japanese authorities negotiated the purpose and practices of collaborationism. Chinese leaders countered Japanese demands for cooperation with appeals for “true” Sino-Japanese amity, which they linked to issues important to their welfare and economic interests.
Available records fail to justify a conclusion of Japanese hegemony over the Yokohama Chinese. Although there is no direct evidence of resistance, we can perceive hidden transcripts of opposition by inference. Japanese police behaved as if Yokohama Chinese continued to harbor sympathy for Chiang Kaishek's regime, even after the police had prosecuted and deported GMD agents. Police surveillance of the Yokohama Chinese community, including its children, and arrest of some of its members for political speech bear out the seriousness with which they took this possibility. Police coercion was sufficient to compel the appearance of compliance but not necessarily to produce hegemony.
After Japan's surrender, the Allied Occupation and representatives from the ROC also behaved as if the collaborationism of the Yokohama Chinese was involuntary, coerced, or insincere. They neither purged nor arrested Chinese leaders in Yokohama. The exception is Bao Qikang, whom Allied Occupation officials arrested in August 1946 for working in the Wang Jingwei regime's central bank (Luckman Reference Luckman1947). In April 1947, the Occupation repatriated him to Shanghai where the ROC tried him for war crimes. The Shanghai Higher Court, however, acknowledged that his role in the collaborationist regime was subordinate and his duties mundane; on August 19, 1947, it passed the relatively light sentence of sixteen months' imprisonment, minus time already served (Waijiaobu 1949, 174–75). Neither the ROC nor the Occupation prosecuted community leaders who were not directly affiliated with the Chinese collaborationist regimes. These leaders, moreover, emerged from the war with their standing in the Chinese community intact. Bao Bogong was elected the first president of the Yokohama Chinese Association, serving from March 1946 to March 1947. Chen Dongting was elected president in June 1950, a post he held until March 1952 (Sugawara 1991, 61; L. Wang 2002, 101–8). Wu Bokang presided over the newly reconstructed Chinese school's board of trustees (Yokohama Yamate Chūkagakkō Hyakunen Kōshi Henshū Iinkai 2005, 93). The presumption of hidden resistance among Chinese in Japan, both in wartime and after the war, has thus helped substantiate the myth of pervasive wartime resistance.
The nationalist assumptions inherent in the myth, however, oversimplify the relationship between these individuals and China. Japanese demands for support forced the Yokohama Chinese to confront and reconcile their multiple identifications. On the one hand, they lived their diasporic relations with China through collaborationism. That is, they could not publicly express their Chinese identity without first accepting Japan's collaborationist allies in China and the goal of Sino-Japanese amity. On the other hand, their identification with the local site undermined their status as representative Chinese, both diminishing their propaganda value for Japan and calling into question whether their actions should be seen as Chinese collaborationism in the first place. The wartime experiences of the Yokohama Chinese suggest a complex interplay between expressions of identity and the meanings of collaborationism.
Those who elected to stay in Japan at the start of the war were socially invested in Yokohama. Contrary to the typical characterization of wartime collaborators as motivated by greed or political opportunism, the Yokohama Chinese could anticipate few economic gains from Japan's invasion of China and Southeast Asia.Footnote 14 Their niches in the city's economy collapsed with the outbreak of hostilities in 1937, and the only line of work that recovered to any major extent was restaurants. Their community leaders articulated economic appeals to the Japanese authorities to ameliorate their desperate straits while they waited for the return of peace. Moreover, these leaders were not mercenary interlopers or marginal elites, as often seen in Japanese-occupied China (Brook Reference Brook2005, 48–49, 75); rather, they were the same men who guided community associations prior to the war— second-generation Chinese in Japan like Chen Dongting, Bao Bogong, and Wu Bokang.
It is telling that the first public acknowledgment of their Yokohama identity as hamakko came during these war years. It seems that the pressures of collaborationism led to a concerted and documented effort to explain their social position—as Chinese nationals as well as Yokohama residents. After the war, this tension between national and local modalities of identity has continued to define the relationship between the Yokohama Chinese and their host society. To this day, Yokohama Chinese maintain a Chinese identity while describing themselves as hamakko (Hirota 2003, 230–40). Yokohama Chinese have apparently accepted the term as the most felicitous shorthand to express their place-based identity without either claiming Japaneseness or denying their Chineseness.Footnote 15 Moreover, they are not the only ones to self-describe in this way. Other foreigners have adopted similar idioms of local identity in the face of exclusion from the Japanese national community but acceptance into their local communities. The pattern of diasporic identity that the Yokohama Chinese forged during wartime was a precursor to a general formula for the integration of non-Japanese into postwar Japan.
Finally, this study of Chinese collaborationism demonstrates the incommensurability of friendship between nations and between individuals. Yokohama Chinese reflections on the discourse of Sino-Japanese amity during wartime highlighted the gap between its rhetorical uses by the Japanese government and its local understandings. This situation is particularly relevant to Sino-Japanese relations today; since the 1972 Joint Communiqué, there has been a steadily widening discrepancy between diplomatic declarations of friendship and the actual distrust and hostility between Chinese and Japanese peoples. The experiences of the Yokohama Chinese during wartime illustrate how readily bromides of friendship can be used as rhetorical cover for brute national interest. It also raises the question of whether any such invocation in diplomacy is inevitably instrumental and subject to cynical manipulation. After all, for the Yokohama Chinese, the only true Sino-Japanese amity was lived, local, and personal.
