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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