Recruiting in China

BEIJING — Li Jun is typical of China’s new middle class. Educated at university, he worked as a financial manager with a multinational firm in Shanghai. He recently bought a digital camera at one of the city’s ubiquitous electronics stores. The make? Kodak, an American brand. Li says he didn’t want to give his hard-earned money to Sony, Olympus, or any other Japanese company. It’s a sentiment shared by Zhang Yong, a deputy general manager at one of China’s leading securities companies. On the mention of Japan, he tenses up with hackles raised.

The fractious relationship between Asia’s economic giants — Japan, the world’s second biggest economy; China its fourth — has come to the fore again as Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Sept 22 chooses a new leader to succeed Junichiro Koizumi as prime minister.

On Aug 15, Koizumi fulfilled his long-standing pledge to visit Yasukuni Shrine on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. The shrine honors soldiers who have died fighting for their country, including 14 convicted Class-A war criminals whose names were added by the shrine in a secretive ceremony in 1978. Koizumi has visited Yasukuni every year since taking office in 2001, each time saying he went to pray for peace. Each time, China and South Korea condemned him for trampling on the feelings of the victims of Japanese military aggression.

Chinese “hatred” of Japan is balanced by a fair amount of materialistic love, too, as a visit to any modernizing Chinese city reveals. The fashions of Shibuya influence the denizens of Shanghai and Shenzhen as much as those of any other city in Asia. Hello Kitty is everywhere. Order a beer in a restaurant and you’re more likely to get Suntory than Tsingtao. Hondas, Toyotas and Nissans fight for space on the crowded streets.

More than 100,000 Japanese living in Shanghai

There are more than 100,000 Japanese living in and around Shanghai, according to the Japanese consulate, making it the third-biggest Japanese expat community in the world, after New York and Los Angeles. More than a million Japanese visit the city each year for holidays and business trips. There were more than 5,085 registered Japanese companies operating there at the end of 2005, from small restaurants to multi-national corporations. These days, they’re not only building factories to make cheap goods for rapid export, they’re opening local headquarters and selling to China’s increasingly wealthy consumers, too.

Among those entrepreneurs is restaurant owner Teruo Katayama. He predicts Shanghai will one day be like New York, so he wanted to get in on the action early. Similarly, Yuzo Sajiki and his business partner chose Shanghai as the first location for what they hope will be an international chain of hair salons. They settled on the city — after also considering Taipei, Hong Kong and Singapore — because the beauty industry is still developing. Sajiki, who trained in London and worked in New York, also felt an affinity with Chinese people. Others, like Akiko Mitani, a human resources consultant, went to learn the language to improve their career prospects. Mitani found love with a Chinese man and stayed.

For many Japanese in China, the dream turned sour in April 2005 when anti-Japanese protests started in Shenzen and spread across the country. On April 16, protests in Shanghai turned violent. Initially there was a festive atmosphere, according to witnesses such as journalist Dan Washburn, who also writes the Shanghai Diaries blog (www.shanghaidiaries.com). Things got ugly, though, as three different marches converged on the Japanese Consulate on Wanshan Road. Lines of paramilitary police protected the building, but stood by as protestors lobbed bottles, bricks and stones. Nearby, 20 Japanese restaurants and businesses were attacked.

There was no single trigger for the demonstrations, although at that time there was anger about a new Japanese history textbook that glossed over wartime atrocities. Japan was also bidding for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, and there was posturing over the ownership of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands — and, of course, the festering issue of Yasukuni.

“The scale of violence was on a level we never imagined,” says Shigeru Toyama of the Japanese consulate in Shanghai. The police told the consulate that they had not given a permit for the demonstration. Under international law, it is up to the Chinese to compensate for the damage. Over a year later, the repairs have not been paid for, but negotiations continue. Initially, when the consul general visited the local government, they claimed that Japan was responsible for what had happened.

The Shanghai government said it tried to stop the protests, but independent reports indicate that the demonstrations had at least tacit support from the authorities. One blogger reported of a Red Cross Station set up near the consulate on the request of the local government. Later, the authorities — mindful of events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 — evidently became worried that the protests might trigger domestic upheaval. University students were required to watch videos about the demonstrations and told not to protest again. According to Toyama, many protestors were in fact dissatisfied with social conditions, and the violence was “not actually targeted at Japan,” he says.

That was initially hard to swallow for Katayama, who dreamed of becoming China's first Japanese restaurant chain to sell “okonomiyaki” and curry rice. Conveniently located on the route to the consulate, his business was ransacked, its screens, tables and chairs hauled outside and set ablaze. Emi Nakao, a translator and writer, says she was too scared to go outside and became wary of speaking Japanese in public. One girl was hit by a man on the subway because she was speaking Japanese on her mobile phone, according to Mitani.

Even so, “the aftermath was not so serious,” says Toyama. Some Japanese-owned businesses actually experienced a boost from the problems. Sajiki’s hair salon, Matinee, which was not damaged, saw customers increase as more Chinese came by with words of encouragement. It was a similar story at Katayama’s restaurant, Ajikura, when it reopened. He also got valuable publicity when his story was reported in media around the world. “Now 70% of our customers are Japanese, the other 30% Chinese and other nationalities, whereas before they were mainly Japanese,” he says.

Expats trying to help the relationship

By working in China, many Japanese feel that they are helping the relationship between the two countries, as well as making a living. Toshie Nakai decided to move to Shanghai 10 years ago after learning of the hotel boom in China. Now in charge of training at a five-star American hotel, she works with a team of Chinese and deals with cultural differences on a day-to-day basis. On the Chinese side, she had to instill among the workforce an ethos of customer service and hospitality; among her Japanese guests, she had problems with older men getting drunk in public wearing only yukata, behavior that seemed arrogant to Chinese. “I had to educate them,” she says. “They came here thinking they were visiting somewhere like a local Japanese hot springs.”

Japanese-language magazines, such as Hu-ism and Shanghai and Beijing Whenever, are doing their bit to close the gap. Akiko Hagiwara is a former editor of Hu-ism. “I wanted the magazine to focus on art and human interest stories,” she says, to communicate the culture of China to Japanese readers.

Carina Chen is an active advocate of better Sino-Japanese relations and formed the KIM cultural exchange group four years ago. (KIM comes from the Japanese words kako, ima and mirai, or past, present and future). KIM meetings attract up to 100 participants, about a 50-50 mix of Japanese and Chinese along with some other speakers of Japanese. On the day of the demonstrations, Chen arranged for Japanese scholar Tone Morimoto to talk to the Shanghai YMCA about the two countries’ relationship.

Chen went to Tokyo for a two-month exchange program when she was a high school student and expected Japanese people to be severe and unfriendly. Instead she found them to be kind. Lou Ning, a computer programmer, tells a similar story about his 16 years living in Tokyo, and agrees that mutual mistrust is a product of ignorance. Interestingly, they both feel that Japanese people often don’t like Chinese culture. “If I was Japanese and came to China, I would see so many things that I would find unacceptable,” Lou says.

Mixed Japanese-Chinese couples sometimes have more problems with Japanese relatives than Chinese ones. Akihiro Sawano, a deputy sales manager who lives in Shanghai, met his wife, Wang Min, when he came to China to work for a Japanese electronics company. His wife’s family had no problem with their marriage in 1999, but his own mother wasn’t happy and still hasn’t visited them. Sawano and his family mostly speak Chinese at home, although his young son, Ryo, is bilingual and goes to a Japanese school. Mitani also had problems with her family when she married her husband, Zhou Yunbo. “When we met, he couldn’t speak any Japanese, and they were worried that I’d be living in a Communist country,” she recalls.

Human-to-human contact between Chinese and Japanese invariably helps mutual understanding, Chen says. Conversely, misunderstandings are exacerbated and perpetuated by schools (although the irony of Chinese protesting about inaccurate textbooks was lost on demonstrators), and the media, which in China is tightly controlled by the state.

Recently, questions have surfaced about freedom of expression in Japan, too. A right-winger was recently arrested for burning down the house of Koichi Kato, a once-powerful politician who publicly criticized Koizumi for visiting Yasukuni shrine. The alleged arsonist later tried to kill himself in Kato’s garden in the traditional hara-kiri manner.

Koizumi protege Abe also reportedly worshipped at the shrine in secret earlier this year. If Abe is elected and again follows in Koizumi’s footsteps into the hallowed courtyards of Yasukuni as Japan’s leader, it won’t help thaw the icy state of Northeast Asian politics, whatever he prays for. Instead, it’s left to individuals — expats and locals, in Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere — to maintain the bonds of friendship.

“Sixty years ago Japan was dark, like this 60-year-old kimono,” KIM founder Chen says in her fluent Japanese, pointing at a fabric in the antique shop she manages. “Now the culture is light. People change.”

The hope of Chen and others with a vested interest in Japan and China being friends is that politicians change too.