From ethnic ghetto to “gourmet republic”

Among the minorities of modern Japan (from c.1860), Chinese ¹ are without a doubt underrepresented in the English scholarly literature. While many volumes have been written about the Burakumin (“outcastes”), the Ainu, and the Koreans, only a small number of articles exist on the Chinese (Hoare 1977; Kamachi 1980; Vasishth 1997). The story of the Chinese deserves greater attention, however, for it adds a different dimension to conventional accounts of majority–minority relations in Japan that focus on victimization and resistance.