抄録
Chinese men in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Japan often maintained amorous liaisons with Japanese women. This experience has rarely attracted scholarly attention. The present study recovers this elided past while pointing out its implications for better understanding the history of Chinese migrants in Japan. Developments in global history and imperial history since WWII have exposed the frequency and problematic nature of the interaction between “foreign” men and “local” women (this being the usual pattern) on imperial and migratory frontiers. However, such research tends to assume a white/non-white dichotomy as the basis of analysis, ignoring similar relations between non-white male migrants and local women. The present study is an attempt to fill this a gap by focusing on Chinese men in late nineteenth-century Japan. It reveals them to be—as is generally the case the world over—socially and sexually active in the land of their overseas sojourn. Specifically, this study will (1) reinsert Chinese into the discussion of the liaison between Japanese women and foreigner men where the latter is almost always assumed to be Western men, (2) highlight the phenomenon of Japanese-Chinese marriages in the history of Chinese migration to Japan, a topic that is also largely missing from the literature, and (3) bring gender/sexual politics/dynamic back into the narrative of Japanese treaty-port society, which like other imperial/colonial frontiers was mired in sexual liaisons of various nature.
