2016年12月7日 星期三

Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894-1972

Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:

Book title: Eric Han. Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894-1972. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014

Main points:
- Introduction - Japan was not often thought of as an immigrant-receiving country. Its barriers to foreigner were well recognized: citizenship law based on bloodline and restrictive naturalization procedure. (2) Yokohama was only 17 miles away from the capital; it had been cultivated as a thriving tourism industry. (4)

- the book narrates the development of a Chinese community in Yokohama, from the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 to the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations in 1972 and beyond. (5) Han seeks to show how an awareness of national difference emerged through interactions between Chinese and Japanese. Such national conscious was an outcome of historical interactions that also yielded non-national collective identities. (5)  The public acceptance of Chinese hamakko challenges the Japanese myth of ethic homogeneity. (6)

- before we can speak of the local integration of these Chinese, we need to investigate the category of Chinese and how a collective identity as such emerged in Yokohama in the first place. (6) Yokohama Chinatown was an important state for the nation-building process at the end of the Qing dynasty. This book addresses the contributions of non-elites who over time acquired a Chinese political consciousness. (7) This consciousness signified a diasporic identity for these Chinese. The diasporic Chinese identity was denoted by the term hauqiao.

- according to Wang Gungwu, hauqiao was a militant commitment to remaining Chinese. This diasporic conceptualization of Chinese identity emphases homeland patriotism and downplay attachment to place of settlement. (7) The diasporic condition was instructive for understanding the process by which individual come to accept national identities. The imagination of a nation self was never uncontested. (7)

- as  Prasenjit Duara had argued, nationalist ideologies south to “fix and privileged a single identity form among the contesting multiplicity of identifications”.  Outside the homeland, nationalist ideology had to assert a vertical relation with the nation while denying other collective identities that linked the immigrant to her host society. (8)

- there were multiple and overlapping version of Chinese-ness, including the elite civilizational conception of China, political allegiance to Qing. This book tells the story of how a modern Chinese nationalism was reconciled within existing affiliation and interpreted. (8) Conversely, this study examines the institutional, social economic and legal mechanism by which individuals developed linkage to both China and Yokohama (8)

- the marker of Chinese self-identity were not static; the meaning of being Chinese in Yokohama shifted along with changing relations with Japanese society and their Chinese homeland. (12) A major theme of this book was the ongoing “social construction” of Yokohama Chinatown as a place and the Chinese as a community. (12)

- several Japanese detective fiction could help us probe the cultural meanings of the site of Yokohama Chinatown as an enclave with both threatening and alluring dimensions. (13) Akutagawa prize-winning author Okamatsu Kazuo’s 1988 novel narrates the two decades friendship between Akigawa and Arima, two men born in Yokohama but of different ethnic heritage. The half-Chinese, half Japanese Arima struggled to construct his life in local term – according to an ideal of Yokohama. (14)
- Arima’s psychological predicament, as both imperfect Chinese and Japanese, spoke to the exclusivity and narrowness of Chinese and Japanese identities, there was no Chinese Japanese identity analogous to Chinese American. Arima chose to self-identify as diasporic and as Yokohama-ite (hamakko)’ (15)

- since the 19th century, political modernizers in both Japan and China had sought to inculcate national and ethnic consciousness. Government policy policies institutionalized national identity as an individual’s ‘terminal’ community. As Rupert Emerson explains, such a community was expected to override “the claim of lesser communities within it.”(16) Han’s study rejects the assumptions and priorities inherent in such terminal identities. It offers a critical examination of collective identities Yokohama to show both their historicity and multiplicity. Collective identity was relational categories that structured social life, defining friends and foes. They were distinguishable from self-identity, which was defined as the “absolute uniqueness” of an individual. (17)

- collective and individual identities were easily confused in everyday language, the  multiplicity of group affiliation that made up a unique pattern of personality were not always apparent.(17) When an individual reduced his or her multiple social affiliation to terminal one-dimensionality, the result was the annihilation of true identity. (17)

- For some scholars, the concept of diaspora had offered a way to counter one-dimensional identification with a territorial nation-stare. (17) In their work, the diaspora subject could function as “a figure for double and multiple consciousness … that crisscrossed boundaries.”  Identification with a diaspora is thus a mode of resistance. (17)

- the wider aim of this book was to consider how people attempted to reconcile a cosmopolitan and inclusive local identity with national ethnic identities that were exclusive and conflictual. (18)
- the first chapter opens with a discussion of Chinese migration to Japan form the premodern period. (19) Chapter 2 examines how, in the years before the Chinese revolution of 1911, Chinese expatriate leaders attempted to turn a sense of ethnic unity into active Chinese citizenship. Chapter 3 traces the institutionalization of Chinese identify in Yokohama from the founding of the ROC in 1912 to the Manchurian incident of 1931-32. The new Chinese state extended its power into the lives of its overseas citizen by registering them to be patriotic huaqiao.

- chapter 4 narrates the effect of these wartime developments on Chinese community cohesion in Yokohama. For this part, the Yokohama Chinese attempted to resolve the competing imperatives of local attachment and national patriotism. (21) Chapter 5 traces the development of Yokohama Chinatown into a cohesive enclave and economic niche against the backdrop of the Cold War and Japan’s economic rise, culminating in the normalization of diplomatic ties between Japan and the PRC in 1972.(21) The book conclusion examines Chinatown from the 1980s and the district’s rising commercial fortune and further institutionalization as a key pillar of Yokohama local identity. (21) Chinese gained public acceptance as local resident, a status that conferred certain citizenship right. (21)

(to be continued)

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