Japanese people in Hong Kong

Ethnic group
group=Japanese people in Hong Kong
poptime=14,100
popplace=Happy Valley, Shatin, Tai Po, Tai Koo Shing
langs=Japanese, English
rels= Buddhism, Shintō
related=Japanese people

Japanese people in Hong Kong are composed primarily of expatriate businesspeople and their families, although there are also a sizable number of single women. [Sakai 2001: 32] Their numbers are smaller when compared to the sizable presence of Americans, British and Canadian expatriates. As of 2001, they composed 3.5% of the ethnic minority population of Hong Kong, or roughly 14,100 individuals.CSD 2001: 6] Hong Kong also remains a popular destination for Japanese tourists on their way to China; in 2004, the Japanese consulate reported the arrival of more than one million Japanese tourists.CG of Japan in HK]

History

Japanese migration to Hong Kong was noted as early as the latter years of the Tokugawa Shogunate. With the forced end of the sakoku policy, which prohibited Japanese people from leaving Japan, regular ship services began between Japan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai; Japanese merchants and "karayuki" slowly began to settle overseas. [Liu 2000] By 1880, 26 men and 60 women of Japanese nationality were recorded as living in Hong Kong; the total population would reach 200 by the end of the Meiji era in 1912. [Okuda 1937]

Anti-Japanese riots of 1931

Following the Japanese Invasion of Manchuria, tensions between Japanese and Chinese residents in Hong Kong began to grow. The first report of the invasion in the Hong Kong Chinese press appeared in the "Kung Sheung Evening News" on September 20, 1931, condemning it in harsh terms and calling on Chinese people to "stand up and take action". [Ma 2001: 14-15] The Kuomintang government in Nanjing declared September 23, 1931 as a day of mourning for the Mukden Incident; that evening, a disturbance arose on Johnston Road in Wan Chai, where many Japanese lived, when some Chinese youths began throwing stones at a Japanese-owned pub, ironically patronised mostly by American and British sailors at the time. The next day, a Japanese flag flying in a Japanese school in Kennedy Town was burned; attacks on individual Japanese continued on the 25th. [Ma 2001: 17-19]

The worst crime of the riots was the murder of a Japanese family. [Kuo 2006] On September 26th, the date of the Mid-Autumn Festival, five members of the Yamashita family were attacked near Kowloon City in front of more than one thousand Chinese demonstrators by a Chinese man; the parents died on the scene due to knife wounds, while the grandmother and two of three sons later died in hospital. [Ma 2001: 22-23] As a result of the murders, the colonial government called out the military that evening, and proclaimed a state of emergency the next day. [Ma 2001: 32] Tokyo would later cite these riots, and specifically the murders of the Yamashita family, as one "casus belli" when they initiated the Shanghai War of 1932 (a.k.a. "January 28th Incident"). [Jordan 2001: 22]

The Imperial Japanese Occupation and Japanese civilians

The Japanese population did not grow much in the following decade; though Japanese schools continued to operate in Wan Chai [Yu 2000: 38] and Kennedy Town, [Ma 2001: 20] by the time of the Japanese declaration of war against the British Empire and the start of the Battle of Hong Kong, the Japanese population of Hong Kong had dropped to 80. [Banham 2005: 24] Japanese settlers often followed the Imperial Army, as in the case of Manchukuo in the aftermath of the Mukden Incident; however the 1941-1945 Japanese occupation of Hong Kong was not accompanied by an influx of Japanese civilians, with the exception of a few bureaucrats and administrators. [Han 1982: 10]

The existing institutions of the Japanese civilian population in Hong Kong were co-opted by the military for their own purposes; for example, the Hong Kong News, a Japanese language newspaper, ceased publication in Japanese, but continued operations in Chinese and English versions, printing officially-approved news of the occupation government. [Banham 2005: 24] However, the Japanese civilians who remained in Hong Kong were not entirely unsympathetic to the plight of their Chinese neighbours; Patrick Yu, a celebrated trial lawyer, recalled in his memoirs the assistance his family received from the headmaster of the Japanese school in escaping from Hong Kong to Free China by way of Macau and Guangzhou Wan (then Portuguese and French colonies, respectively, and untouched by the Japanese military). [Yu 2000: 39]

Post-World War II

As the Japanese economy recovered from the effects of World War II and began its boom, Japanese investment overseas grew, resulting in an increase in the Japanese population living in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Japanese School, an international school aimed at Japanese students, was established in the 1960s; [HKJS: [http://www.hkjs.edu.hk/index2.html 理事長メッセージ] ] there is also a weekly print newspaper, the Hong Kong Post, which began publication in June 1987. [HK Post: [http://hkpost.pasona.com.hk/aboutus.asp 香港ポストについて] ] Between 1981 and 1999, the population of Japanese in Hong Kong nearly tripled from 7,802 to 23,480, making the Japanese community similar in size to those in cities such as London and New York; in line with this increase, the number of Japanese companies also grew rapidly, almost doubling from 1,088 to 2,197 from 1988 to 1994. [Sakai 2001: 132] The reform and opening up of China and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 spurred increasing economic integration with the mainland, and, following this trend, many Japanese-managed companies moved their operations across the border into Shenzhen and Guangzhou; [Wong 1999: 182] as a result, the Japanese population of Hong Kong declined from its 1999 peak; the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department recorded only 14,100 Japanese people in 2001, a 33% decrease. However, the population would soon bounce back; in 2004, the Japanese Consulate General estimated 25,600 Japanese living in Hong Kong.

Attitude towards integration

Japanese communities abroad have been described as "Japanese villages abroad ... whose residents make maintenance of cultural, economic, and political ties with Tokyo their foremost concern"; however, Wong's 2001 study of Yaohan employees refuted this notion in the case of businesswomen working in Hong Kong. [Wong 2001: 52-56] Though the majority of Japanese coming to Hong Kong continued to be businessmen and their families, during the 1990s, there was a "boom" of single Japanese women emigrating to escape the male-oriented environment of Japanese domestic workplaces; unlike previous migration, which had often been targeted towards Anglophone countries, many of these women went to Hong Kong and other Asian cities in an effort to further their careers. Notably, in one survey, a third of the single or divorced women coming to Hong Kong during this period reported previous study abroad experience. Not only were single women more willing to emigrate, but Japanese companies in Hong Kong proved more willing to hire and promote women than those in Japan, partially due to the costs of employing male staff, which typically included allowances for children's education and other such expatriate benefits. [Sakai 2001: 136-138]

Within Japanese-managed companies, local Chinese employees sensed a definite power differential between Japanese managers and local managers of the same rank. [Wong 1999: 166] Though many Japanese women came to Hong Kong intending to learn to speak Chinese (either Cantonese or Mandarin), upon arrival they found that communicating in English was not only sufficient for everyday life, but placed them in a privileged position vis-a-vis the local population. [Sakai 2001: 142]

Notes

Bibliography

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* cite paper|author=Lam Wing Sze|title=嫁雞隨雞，嫁狗隨狗?: 隨丈夫來港的日本婦 (The Adventures of Japanese Housewives in Hong Kong)|publisher=Hong Kong Anthropological Society|date=16 June 2005
* cite paper|author=Liu Jianhui|title=大陸アジアに開かれた日本 (Japan, Opened to Continental Asia)|date=November 2000|publisher=Nichibunken|url=http://www.nichibun.ac.jp/~shoji/archives/ircjs-nl43.pdf|format=PDF; only abstract freely available
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* cite paper|author=Okuda Otojiro|title=明治初年に於ける香港日本人 (Japanese in Hong Kong in the Early Meiji Period)|publisher=台灣省熱帶產業調查會|location=Taipei|date=1937
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* cite web|title=日港關係 (Japan-Hong Kong Relations)|url=http://www.hk.emb-japan.go.jp/chi/news.html|publisher=Consulate General of Japan in Hong Kong|date=2005|accessdate=2006-12-21

ee also

*Japanese Hongkongers

External links

* [http://hkpost.pasona.com.hk/ Hong Kong Post] , a Japanese-language newspaper
* [http://www.hkjs.edu.hk/index3.html Hong Kong Japanese School] , an international school for Japanese students