For many Chinese people, Sino-Japanese relations in the early twentieth century have often been characterized by China's struggle with Japanese imperialism, which culminated in 1937 with the start of the Sino-Japanese War. In this respect, Chinese immigrants in twentieth-century Japan are perhaps a group of people who were exposed to tumultuous times between the two countries. Eric Han's exploration of the history of the Chinese people in Yokohama, however, challenges this conventional understanding of Sino-Japanese relations.
Han begins his story by posing a grand thesis, namely, that identity formation for the Chinese in Yokohama was not dominated by intrinsic and blood-oriented “Chineseness,” nor by modern Chinese nationalism. Here, readers will be impressed by the ways in which Han effectively describes the asymmetric conditions to which the Chinese people in Yokohama were exposed. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Japanese had already internalized their collective belongingness to the modern Japanese state and began projecting their images of China, mostly negative, onto the Chinese in Yokohama. This Japanese hostility reached an apex during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 (pp. 43–47). Nevertheless, the response from the Yokohama Chinese was not simply to accept a single Chinese identity forced upon them. Instead, Han argues that the collective identity for the Chinese in Yokohama was a “defensive sense of ethnic identity” (p. 54).
Han concedes that there was a time of development in the political awareness of Chinese immigrants in Japan in relation to the rise of modern Chinese nationalism during the Qing–Republic of China transitory period. Intellectuals and politicians from mainland China such as Liang Chi Chao played a pivotal role in instilling a new concept of modern Chinese identity into the Yokohama Chinese. However, the Chinese in the Yokohama area had already had transnational patterns in their lives through friendship, intermarriage, and mixed residence. This hybridity, Han stresses, explains why “the sense of nation was in no way predetermined” (p. 87) during these years.
Han's convincing narration of life in Yokohama at the turn of the twentieth century enables readers to understand how the city became an ideological melting pot between the 1910s and the 1920s. Chinese nationalism, pan-Asianism, and modernism were ubiquitously absorbed by the Chinese in Yokohama. China's emergence as a strong, modern nation-state certainly stimulated their sense of belongingness to their home country and gave rise to various educational campaigns in Yokohama. According to Han, this steady solidification of a Chinese identity was overdetermined by political mobilization and ethnic stereotypes (p. 119). However, this norm of Chineseness, Han asserts, was mainly accepted as part of their organizational activities, and Yokohama Chinese maintained a strong attachment to local identity (p. 119).
In this way, Han problematizes the conventional notions of the Chinese response to Japanese wartime imperialism that adhere to a binary framework of collaboration and resistance. He makes a strong point that tracing the wartime experience of the Yokohama Chinese through the degree of resistance, either passive or active, does not disclose their multi-layered responses to the Sino-Japanese conflict. Han argues that the “Yokohama Chinese could anticipate few gains” from Japan's war (p. 155), and the meaning of this statement is well ingrained into Han's compelling thesis of the “ambivalent” responses to Japan's invasion of China on the part of the Yokohama Chinese. The term “ambivalence,” for Han, does not contain any negative connotations or indicate that the Yokohama Chinese unduly collaborated with the Japanese. Instead, Han's study shows that Yokohama Chinese prioritized their local interests over Japan's war, which, they believed, would not greatly affect their localized life (pp. 153–56).
Rise of a Japanese Chinatown, nevertheless, stresses that the Chinese communities in Yokohama were constantly exposed to victimization. Imperial Japan incessantly attempted to mobilize and monitor them. Tragically, Yokohama Chinatown was severely destroyed by Allied bombardment. Han argues that internal divisions during the Chinese Civil War period and after the creation of the PRC and Taiwan continued to haunt the Yokohama Chinese in their efforts to rehabilitate their local life.
Paradoxically, Han pays special attention to how Chinese food has culturally mediated political and economic differences between the Chinese community and the Japanese in Yokohama. On the one hand, Chinese restaurants in Yokohama Chinatown were, for Han, the material basis for maintaining the social and economic presence of the Chinese community in Yokohama. More interestingly, Chinese food is used to symbolize an idealized transcendence from grand nation-state narratives throughout this book. Even during periods of the total confrontation between Communist China and the “free world,” including Japan, Han argues that these Chinese restaurants in the Yokohama area were highly popular (p. 177).
In sum, Rise of a Japanese Chinatown takes a well-known topic, the existence of a Chinese community in Yokohama, and uses it to engage powerfully with readers by posing an important set of wider questions: What does it mean to be living as a minority Chinese person in Japan? Can a culturally shaped localized identity overcome the specter of a national identity?
