This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Fuqing

Various descriptions of Fuqing/Gaoshan through the last century

From the memoirs of John Caldwell, who grew up in the region during the 1910s and 1920s as the son of American Methodist missionaries:

To the East of Futsing, the country is ugly indeed. There is a harbor of sorts at Haikow, six miles away. Just south of Haikow, Lungtien Peninsula, surrounded on three sides by vast tidal flats, extends eastward nearly forty miles towards Formosa. Off shore are countless islands of every size and description. The peninsula, the islands, the whole coast line is a jumble of grotesquely shaped rocks giving the impression of having been tossed there by a giant's hand. Here and there are flat spots suitable for rice paddies, but for the most part there are only tiny fields of wheat and sweet potatoes set amongst the boulders. Every village has its fleet of fishing boats— and its smugglers. For whether in peace or war, there is always something to be smuggled and a place to smuggle it to and from. In my boyhood, the smugglers brought opium and guns for the bandits; during World War II, they became rich bringing in luxury goods from Shanghai; today the agents of Chiang Kai Shek and of Mao Tse Tung vie for their favor and the use of their sea-going junks. And always among the islands off the coast there have been pirates, men of easy allegiance, willing to fight for China or for her enemies, attaching friend or foe alike without compunction. -- John C. Caldwell, China Coast Family (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953), 24-25.

From the Shanghai Mainichi shinbun, 1928-11-25:

Fuqing County is only about 4 li away from Fuzhou. It faces the coast, and behind it loom [], the topography thus making it a most difficult place from which to escape. The inhabitants all farm, but their staple food is sweet potatoes that they've cut into small strips and dried. For clothing, they wear baggy khaki trousers. They have extremely primitive customs.

Other Japanese reports:

In January 1930, Consul Tamura, summarizing the report of police Sergeant Amemiya, described a region that was sandwiched between largely treeless mountains and the coast, where the inhabitants farmed on poor soil with limited access to irrigation. The larger villages had formed self-defense associations, some of them well-armed, to defend against bandit gangs and rapacious government military units (the two, as Phil Billingsley (1988) has shown, could often exchange labels as power shifted hands). The Chinese police had only two outposts south of the town of Fuqing proper, and as they were unable to inspire any respect, gambling was rampant and every village had a secret opium den. Children received only limited education, so most people were illiterate; but because of large-scale migration to Japan, many people — in some hamlets, every man — spoke Japanese. (In a 1926 report, Foreign Affairs Police (Gaiji keisatsu) officials had noted that because “there are many who understand Japanese or dress in Japanese clothes, not a few travelers to this region get the impression that several hundred Japanese reside here” (Gaiji keisatsu hō 50 (August 1926): 165). Another writer noted the locals’ predilection for Japanese saké, song, and dance (Hatano 1929).

Fujimoto Sōbi's memoir:

Chen/Fujimoto Sōbi, who was taken to Fuqing by his stepfather during the war, later recalled the area's poverty and the hardships of the Japanese women and children he encountered there. For example:

After a week I reached my stepfather’s hometown, Houancun, in Gaoshan Town, Fuqing County. Fuqing is a peninsula; it lacks water, and the fields had nothing but sweet potatoes and peanuts. In wintertime, people could eat only dried sweet potatoes; since long ago, this place was widely known as a poor region where the peasants could only eat twice a day. Many peasants emigrated overseas. Now it is famous as a place of origin for Huaqiao/Kakyō/Overseas Chinese. In Houancun, my stepfather’s five brothers all farmed fields they had acquired through partible inheritance. But my stepfather had no fields, and because of the small population, he couldn’t open a barber shop in the village. So he left all his luggage with his step-grandmother and opened a barber shop in Gaoshan. The overseas Chinese Chen Jinyin, who had recently returned to Luoyuan County [on the coast north of Fuzhou, about 170 km from Gaoshan], was struggling to make a living, so he sold his [and his Japanese wife’s] kids (Takao and Suzumi) and went to work as an interpreter for the Japanese army. His Japanese wife was sick at the time, so my stepfather saved her and the children and brought them to our house. At that time the four of us in my house were struggling but we lived in safety. On old maps of Republican China made in Japan, Fuqing Xian [county] is written in black ink and Gaoshanzhen [today's term for town] is written as Gaoshan-shi [the older term for city or town] in red. In terms of old Chinese understandings, a shi was still bigger than a xian, and people called Gaoshan Gaoshan-shi. But in reality, there was no electricity, no running water, and no bicycles, so the place was only a morning market where the peasants brought their agricultural products and the fishers brought their marine products.

[The whole memoir is powerful and contributes to our understanding of this place.]

The Mao era:

[Content pending]

The reform era:

[Content pending]

In more recent years, it's the pace of change that has marked visitors.

But this change has also come at a significant environmental cost: "In China, Farming Fish in Toxic Waters," New York Times, 2007-12-15.

Visit via video:

This page has tags:

Contents of this tag:

This page is referenced by:

Border Controls, Migrant Networks, and People out of Place between Japan and China
In late 1928, the Shanghai Mainichi newspaper published an article on “some fifty” Japanese women being bought and sold by Chinese men in Fuqing, a remote coastal county in Fujian Province, south of the treaty port of Fuzhou. Lurid stories of Japanese women's hardships in Fuqing had circulated in government reports and in the press since the 1910s, but this particular article triggered the concern of Prime Minister and Acting Foreign Minister Tanaka in Tokyo. Tanaka's queries led to reports in June 1929 that consular officials in Fuzhou, with the assistance of Chinese forces, had rescued five Japanese women and four of their children from hellish conditions, although they were unable to reach the many other women in similar straits. As one consular official reported, such women “are dressed in wretched Chinese clothes and work at farming, so at one glance it is hard to distinguish them from Chinese women of the same class.” This phenomenon, which appeared to show no signs of abating, “cannot be ignored, as it is both a humanitarian problem and a problem of our national prestige” (Fuzhou Consul General Tamura to Foreign/Prime Minister Tanaka, June 21, 1929, in DAMFAJ K.3.4.2, no. 3).
The actual number of such women remains unclear. In a report to the Foreign Minister in December 1921, Fuzhou Consul General Hayashi Matajirō wrote, “It's hard to get a precise number of such women in the region because the husbands conceal them, but there may be around 150” (December 16, 1921, DAMFAJ 4.2.2.10, v. 4). The press, however, claimed that hundreds of women were involved, and ramped-up its sensationalized coverage in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Attention to this topic was particularly strong in colonial Taiwan, where cross-Strait information flowed readily and travelers (including women exiting the mainland) brought back stories that reporters eagerly transmitted to readers curious about development on “the other shore.” In these stories, Fuqing came to be described as “the antlion's pit,” a trap from the struggle to escape only drove the victim deeper towards its doom.
The Japanese government's operations to prevent women from traveling to Fuqing and to “rescue” so-called “abducted” women from that place, imposed on them a narrative of victimhood that deprived them of agency, reduced Chinese migrants to the image of criminal invaders of Japanese territory, and posited the Japanese state as the patriarchal protector of national honor against a rapacious China. Rescue operations, however, were confounded not only by local resistance, Chinese civil war, and the topography of Fujian's coastal hinterland, but also by the responses of women whose interests often challenged the official narratives and reflected more nuanced apprehensions of their situations.
These cases offer one example of Japan's continuing inclusion, despite its adaptation to the global order of modern imperialism, in the historical space of the Sinosphere. They also reveal how the confluence of these diverse spatial flows and structures engendered forms of intimacy that were seen as problematic, or even horrific, because they transgressed notions of territory marked by stable, defensible borders and notions of place marked by distinct identities and social roles. Yet rather than see those borders and roles as already established and thus violated, we can use such cases of transgressive intimacy to highlight the ways in which territoriality and spatial imaginaries were being articulated in the imperial era, at both the official and the popular levels. Mobile subjects in marginal locations not only destabilized official projects for the regulation of territory and the policing of populations, but also stimulated fantasies that opened new spaces for the elaboration of imperial power in its material and discursive forms.
This module presents a set of spatial stories that play out along four interrelated paths, each of which is organized to focus on a particular figure. One centers on Japanese women in motion; another, on Chinese men in motion; and a third, on Japanese men moving into Fuqing and its environs in search of Japanese women. A fourth path follows stories and tropes of Sino-Japanese intimacy from the Meiji era onward. These paths, and the pages they contain or to which they refer, may be explored in any order. At the end of each path, you will be redirected to this landing page, ready to try a different approach.
The spatial stories also play out in two broad temporal frames: the era of imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the era of renewed, intensive Sino-Japanese relations since the inauguration of reforms in the People's Republic of China in the 1980s. How to map these two temporalities in Scalar presents challenges. Here, I have opted for three approaches. First, on each path dealing with developments in the imperial era, I have included pages that deal with the second temporality, selected for thematic parallelism or for specific direct connections (these paths occasionally include “transwar” pages, which don't necessarily forge direct lines to the developments in the second temporality). Second, I have arranged all of the pages dealing with the second temporality into their own path, so that one can follow only those elements if one so desires. The locator mark at the upper right of each page will indicate how each page fits not only into that path but into the other paths of the module. And third, as part of the overall Bodies and Structures method, I have used tags to extract meanings that can not only offer a layer of analytical organization to the present module, but also enable crossing among the various modules of the larger project.
A note regarding the text
The text in this module is based on sections of David R. Ambaras, Japan's Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), with other content added. This text cannot be reproduced, shared, altered, or exploited commercially in any way without the permission of Cambridge University Press. It is copyrighted material and therefore not subject to the allowances permitted by a CC-BY-NC-ND license.
Click here for a list of references for this module, which is also available from the module's Conclusion page.
Abduction-captivity narratives centered on Fuqing
The public discourse on “abducted women in Fuqing,” told in the pages of newspapers and magazines in the metropole, in colonial Taiwan, and on the Chinese mainland, offered sensationalized accounts of women’s victimization and the barbaric places where it occurred. Among these reports, a handful of first-person accounts, which passed through the hands of male editors or interviewers before appearing in print, resonated with the lurid accounts (or “cautionary tales”) of vain, gullible young women being deceived and sold into prostitution that circulated widely in metropolitan papers and popular literature in the early twentieth century. Yet the tales of Fuqing also incorporated motifs that highlighted the vulnerabilities of Japanese subjects to foreign predators and the inversions of power relations that might, by implication, jeopardize Japan’s imperial position itself. They may thus be compared to captivity narratives produced by subjects of the British empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which have been studied by Linda Colley and others. “Scrutinized closely and in detail,” writes Colley, “captivity narratives are often ambivalent, even subversive documents, because by definition they are about Britons or other Europeans being defeated, captured, and rendered vulnerable by those not white, or Christian, or European” (Colley 2000, 176). In early-twentieth-century East Asia, Japanese ideologues of empire often touted the ethnic, racial, and civilizational affinities among Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans, but implicit in, or running alongside, such expressions was the notion that these affinities could be perfected only under Japanese guidance. In captivity stories, this project broke down at the margins.
The first, basic, message running through these accounts was that Fujianese peddlers and others like them could not be trusted, since they all claimed, despite their current lower-class appearances, to be from wealthy families who could guarantee their brides lives of opulence and ease in places more fabulous than anywhere in Japan. A six-part exposé on the experiences of recently-rescued Ōyama Chiyoko, in the Taiwan nichinichi shinpō in June 1933, indicated that she was working at a caterer’s in Nagasaki in 1926 when a Japanese woman, whom she didn’t know but who presented herself as the mistress of a Chinese man, began pressing her to marry a Chinese cook named Zai Shuoyuan, who had apparently taken one look at Chiyoko and fallen in love with her. Chiyoko, who came from a poor rural family and whose parents were long deceased, at first refused the proposition but eventually yielded to the woman’s persistent arguments and promises that Zai’s family were wealthy landlords and that their hometown was so opulent that it made Nagasaki look insignificant. Chiyoko thus “entered a new life dreaming of being queen of an unknown country.” The couple’s life was at first peaceful, but Zai soon demanded that they have a child, in order to to “bind her with invisible chains” (part 2). In late 1927, Zai quit his job and the family moved north, drifting between Nagasaki and Tokyo while Zai worked as a salesman or in other odd jobs. Chiyoko’s account spoke of a “pitiable mother and child, despite being in their own country, having to follow around a weak foreigner like stray dogs.” During this time, Zai had occasionally forced her to use opium as “part of his method of turning her into a complete Chinese” (part 4). Eventually, Zai left with their son, and she subsequently learned that they had traveled to China. Distaught, Chiyoko moved in with Zai’s cousin, a peddler, who then led her to China to rejoin Zai and her son. (Once in China, this cousin would, according to the story, participate in her abuse.)
The trip to the Chinese interior was depicted as a critical moment of transition, as the Chinese men’s attitudes changed, women became increasingly anxious and disoriented, and their bodies registered the effects. When Chiyoko met Zai on the dock in Fuqing, he didn’t speak to her, breaking his silence only when they had arrived in his home village. Kondō Aki, whose tale of her twenty-year captivity appeared in the December 1931 issue of the empire-oriented magazine Tōyō (The Orient), described running away from Japan with the peddler who had raped her in her aunt’s home when she was a student in a girls’ school and with whom she subsequently fell in love. (This man had also seduced her with gifts of cloth and tales of his family’s wealth.) When they arrived in Shanghai, they stayed in a Chinese inn, where she changed into Chinese clothing, before heading to Fuzhou and from there to the interior, a “weeklong journey in a sad countryside, where it is impossible to gain a sense of location or direction.” As her lover’s attitude toward her began to harden, and the money she had brought from Japan was taken from her, she “teetered along in uncomfortable Chinese shoes…being stared at suspiciously by people,” crying at the lack of toilets and despondent over the absence of even a single Japanese (Kondō 1931).
The shock of arrival at their partners’ homes exacerbated the corporeal impact of the journey, and accounts emphasize the blurring of the boundaries between human and animal that characterized women’s new situations. Chiyoko, realizing that nothing was as promised (no trains, no automobiles, no large estate, and no electricity), collapsed on the dirt floor of Zai’s hut and confronted “the stink of mud, fertilizer, and pigs.” One unidentified woman whose story was included in a 1927 article in Tōyō recounted entering "something so terrible that it could not even be called a place of normal human life, but something more like the life of dogs and cats": people lived in utter squalor, wearing "one filthy kimono, with no change and no washing; when they ran out of food, they ate [insects and lizards]. The place was infested with lice and fleas” (Ikeda 1927, 78). Kondō Aki recalled encountering “malnourished, sinister-faced old people (I couldn’t tell if they were men or women), with nervous eyes like monkeys or squirrels.…They looked at me and sneered coldly. Please imagine my feeling at having been placed in this condition. Even now, I am amazed that I did not lose my sanity.”
If the women had not already changed into Chinese clothes (many did so before embarking on their journeys in order to evade harbor police inspections), they were now compelled to abandon their Japanese kimono, recoiff their hair in Chinese style, and enter new lives as rural slaves, under the surveillance of abusive family members. Even worse was the discovery that their partners already had wives or lovers, a shock compounded by the fact that they were still required to be the passive objects of these Chinese men’s insatiable sexual appetites, even when they were sick, exhausted, or had recently given birth. Escapes, all writers noted, were few, and failure could lead to horrific abuse.
Not all was lost in these accounts, though, because they were told by people who had successfully escaped, and for whom escape meant the resumption of Japanese cultural attributes. When Ōyama Chiyoko finally departed, she had to abandon the son who, while bullied by the other villagers, would raise his fist and shout, “I’m a Japanese!…I’ll take on anyone who mistreats my mother!” But during her escape, Chiyoko reclothed herself in a Japanese kimono, the fabric imbued with memories of Japan. (Official sources, however, suggest a less sensational, more complex set of experiences.) Kondō Aki also abandoned her six children, but as she ran off, she recalled feeling sorry for the demon-like people who had abused her for the last two decades, thus reestablishing her position as that of a sympathetic, superior commentator reflecting on the ways of a more primitive, uncivilized tribe.
Nonetheless, these stories offered little in the way of happy endings; the matrix of conditions they described prompted one commentator to declare, “One cannot suppress feelings of horror at the thought of compatriot women in a foreign land, being dragged out in front of Chinese to be evaluated like animals” (Hatano 1929, 63). Indeed, Prime/Foreign Minster Tanaka Giichi had himself asked Fuzhou consular officials in 1929 to ascertain that the women had not been compelled to engage in any behaviors that sullied the reputation of the Japanese. The journalist, novelist, and China hand Andō Sakan, writing from Fujian in the daily Yomiuri shimbun in early 1932, admitted that “the Chinese are not to blame [for the women’s plight]; one could well deem the Japanese women themselves entirely responsible for having been seduced by their sweet talk” (Andō 1932a, 214). But Andō also published “true story” fiction about this topic, and warned of the threat from groups of Chinese attempting to enter Japan illegally in order to abduct women for marriage (Andō 1932b). These accounts, by inciting outrage and appealing to male anxieties, prompted enhanced efforts to reassert patriarchal national control over both Japanese women—weak and frivolous by nature as well as often by their lower-class position—and over Chinese migrants.
See also: "Photograph of the Chinese abductor of a [Japanese] woman" | Descriptions of Fuqing
Returns in the Late 1990s
Kondō Izumi, age 78, appears to have been the first person repatriated from Fuqing at state expense under the 1994 Law Promoting Smooth Repatriation for Japanese Remaining in China and the Assistance for Self-Sufficiency Following their Permanent Repatriation. Kondō had previously traveled to Japan at her own expense to seek assistance (Yamamoto 1996, 92). She does not appear to have been in contact with Kaneko Takakazu's NGO.
Kaneko's NGO helped 92-year-old Yamakawa Tokumi to return to Japan and gain Japanese nationality. Yamakawa had embarked in 1938 from Kobe with her husband and his family on what she expected to be a temporary evacuation, only to wind up unable to return for six decades due to a lack of proof of Japanese nationality. Born into a desperately poor family, she had never been entered into a household register. A family court in Japan heard testimony from her relatives that she was in fact Japanese, and permitted her to be added to one of their registers.
Kaneko's group also helped 85-year-old Matsuikawa Tamako (Yang Yusong) to visit Japan and obtain Japanese nationality. The adopted daughter of a Chinese man, she was taken with her mother Kichi to Fuqing in the wake of 1923 Kantō earthquake. The family lived in extreme poverty. After her adoptive father died, she was sold into a marriage and her mother returned to Japan, and contact between the two ceased. She had never been entered into her mother’s household registration. (Kichi died in 1963—Asahi shinbun, September 26, 1997.) According to Kaneko’s report, Kichi couldn’t stand life in China, and after her husband died, she sold Tamako and used the money for boat fare back to Japan (Kaneko, n.d.). The 1934 consular police report, which listed Matsuikawa Kichi as among those “newly discovered” to be in Fuqing, provides a somewhat different account: Kichi had come to Fuqing in 1920 and had made two return trips to Japan in the years since; her husband was in Japan at the time of the report. She had three children, but had given away two (Tamako would have been 21 years old at this time; her status is not clear). Engaged in farming, she indicated that she had no intention of returning to Japan. But like Ogura Nobu and other women, she no doubt made tactical decisions based on changing circumstances.
In addition to women married to men in Fuqing, Kaneko's group also helped with the repatriation of four men who had been adopted as children and taken to China during the war (Ambaras 2018, 218-19). For powerful accounts of these experiences, see the memoir of Fujimoto/Chen Sōbi (partially translated here), and Chen Youxiong/Tomoo's account in Kaneko's reportage (Kaneko 1995).
Tied as they are to the longer history of women's movements between Japan and Fuqing, these mobile stories must be situated within the larger context of Fuqingese/Fujianese/Chinese migration to Japan in the post-Mao Zedong reform era.
This page belongs to more than one path.
Fuqing peddlers in Japan
In 1899, the Japanese state, fearing the influx of low-wage Chinese workers, enacted specific measures to control Chinese migration, which had first grown dramatically after the establishment of the treaty ports and foreign concessions in the mid-nineteenth century. Following the revision of the Ansei (unequal) treaties and abolition of extraterritoriality (as well as Japan’s 1895 victory over the Qing), the government issued Imperial Ordinance 352 and Home Ministry Ordinance 42, which prevented most Chinese laborers from moving beyond the former treaty ports and concessions. These orders did permit the entry of itinerant peddlers, provided that they registered with the police in their various destinations (Ōsato 1998; Yamawaki 1994).
Peddlers from Fuqing constituted one of the most important groups who entered under these conditions. Their routes extended across the archipelago, and were part of a far larger network of Fuqing migration routes in the Qing and Republican eras.
According to historian Shiba Yoshinobu, the peddling of medicinal products, silk, cotton cloth, and sundry goods was in particular the specialized operation of groups centered on Fuqing's Gaoshan area and on southern Zhejiang. This Sino-Japanese trade in medicinal products, woven cloth, and sundry goods dated back to the Nagasaki era, and the extent of Japanese demand for Chinese goods led many Chinese to migrate to Japan in the Meiji era with the intention of opening up hinterland markets. The Japanese colloquially called these peddlers “furoshiki Nankin” (China bundlers), supposedly because of the bundles of cloth they carried on their routes (Shiba 1983, esp. 86-87).
See also: Descriptions of Fuqing.
Consular police missions, to 1930
The Japanese Consul General in Fuzhou frequently dispatched consular police officers to investigate conditions in Fuqing and its environs. In 1927 and 1928, police were unable to enter the area due to turbulent conditions following the collapse of the United Front and the establishment of Jiang Jieshi’s Nanjing government. While they regained access by 1929, they had to contend on each visit with villagers who believed that they had come to remove the Japanese women, and who concealed the women and/or prevented the officers and their Chinese escorts from entering the villages. In June 1929, a Japanese consular police officer, disguised as a Chinese and accompanied by an interpreter and twenty Chinese soldiers, succeeded in extricating five women and four children; this was deemed a successful mission. Later that year, consular police dispatched a Chinese informant, disguised as a peddler, to identify Japanese women in each village; that December, they launched a ten-day expedition to make use of his findings, but succeeded in recovering only four people.
The situation was even more challenging when women were believed to be confined in nearby Pingtan County, a cluster of islands that was a known haven for pirates who plied the local waters. In February 1928, Japanese navy ships had fired on local fishers/pirates who were scavenging a Japanese vessel that had run aground, reportedly killing several locals and creating bad blood that lingered for years.
See also: Descriptions of Fuqing

Various descriptions of Fuqing/Gaoshan through the last century

Visit via video:

This page has tags:

Contents of this tag:

This page is referenced by:

This page references: