Japanese people in Hong Kong

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.[6] 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.[7] To the displeasure of the Japanese government, which was concerned with protecting its image overseas, many of these early migrants were prostitutes called Karayuki-san. The early ones were often stowaways on coal ships from Nagasaki.[8]

By 1885, Japanese consul Minami Sadatsuke, had obtained some level of informal co-operation from the British colonial authorities in suppressing Japanese participation in prostitution: the number of Japanese women granted prostitution licences would be limited to fifty-two, and others who applied for licences would be referred to his office, whereupon he would arrange for their repatriation to Japan or have them confined to the lock hospital in Wan Chai.[8] Later, their geographical origins seemed to have shifted; a 1902 report by Japanese consul Noma Seiichi identified Moji in Kyushu as the most common port of origin for these young women;[9] recruiters often targeted young women coming out of the Mojikō Station near the docks.[10] However, the Japanese consulate had little co-operation from the local Japanese community in their efforts to suppress prostitution; Japanese businesspeople in the hospitality industry depended on custom from prostitutes and their johns for its profits.[8]

Following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, tensions between Japanese and ethnic Chinese residents in Hong Kong began to grow. The first report of the invasion in the Hong Kong Chinese-language press appeared in the Kung Sheung Evening News on 20 September 1931, condemning it in harsh terms and calling on Chinese people to "stand up and take action".[11] The Kuomintang government in Nanking declared 23 September 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.[12]

The worst crime of the riots was the murder of a Japanese family.[13] On 26 September, 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.[14] As a result of the murders, the colonial government called out the military that evening, and proclaimed a state of emergency the next day.[15] 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. 28 January Incident).[16]

The Japanese population did not grow much in the following decade; though Japanese schools continued to operate in Wan Chai[17] and Kennedy Town,[18] 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.[19] Japanese settlers often followed the Imperial Japanese 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.[20]

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.[19] 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).[21]

AEON (formerly JUSCO) is one of the largest Japanese retail stores operated in Hong Kong

Seibu Department Stores in Langham Place, Hong Kong

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;[22] there is also a weekly print newspaper, the Hong Kong Post, which began publication in June 1987.[23] 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.[24]

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;[25] 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.[26] However, the population would soon bounce back; in 2004, the Japanese Consulate General estimated 25,600 Japanese living in Hong Kong.[5]

The Eastern District has the highest concentration of Japanese residents of any district in Hong Kong, with 0.64% of its residents being of Japanese descent (2,878 people).[28]