Still Abroad in Yokohama's Chinatown

This week, I've explored three very different places in the Yokohama area. Wednesday night, I met my friend Saori in Yokohama's Chinatown. Saori and I were friends back in ninth grade, when her family was living in the states for a few years. I thought I'd never see her again, so it's fun to be just a few trainstops away after eight years. She's in her last year of vet school, the exact job she wanted when she was fifteen.

When the Yokohama seaport opened for international trade in the mid-19th century, there were special designated areas in which foreigners could live. Although those laws have long since been abolished, there are still high concentrations of foreigners in these zones, such as Yokohama's Chinatown and Motomachi, which I'll write about later. Yokohama has the largest Chinatown in Asia and one of the largest in the world. It had several wide pedestrian streets with gates arching over each entrance, and then a plethora of winding side alleys. I think of Chinatown as having red gate-arches, like the Chinatowns in Philadelphia and New York, but Yokohama's Chinatown had arches in silvery green and purple as well as the traditional red.

I was surprised by how somehow very Japanese Yokohama's Chinatown felt. I don't think I could have purchased bootleg DVDs there or a small turtle that might give me samonella. I am sure I couldn't have found a slightly sketchy but very efficient bus service that could take me to Kyoto for under a thousand yen. The food reflected this difference too-- Chinese food in Japan seems to contain less spice, sauce, and grease and more seafood than American Chinese food. There are foods I thought of as "things available in Chinatown"-- ie mochi with red bean paste--that are available everywhere but Chinatown in Japan. My Japanese friend told me that Chinatown in New York frightened her because you could see plucked chickens hanging to be cooked.

My experience in American Chinatowns has been limited to semesterly trips on the Chinatown bus and dim sum for the most part, and I never had the illusion that I was anywhere but a cool part of New York/Philly/DC. But going to Chinatown in Yokohama brought home the perhaps obvious point that Chinatown in every city reflects back its setting, both because of market demands in the city, and because of the adaption and diffusion of culture. (There's probably an interesting book on how each Chinatown has been shaped based on which era and part of China most of its inhabitants came from, too.) I guess on some level, I expected a universal "Chinatownness" and instead found an interesting hybrid of what the Japanese would like in a Chinatown and what Chinatown's inhabitants have adopted from Japan.

I'm going to stretch this a little into a somewhat related thought on hybridization and authenticity. When I think of Indian food, I think of chicken tikka massala, although I learned earlier this fall that that dish is in fact a hybrid invented because the British balked at the spiciness of Indian food. Now it's one of the most popular dish in Britian. While this makes me feel kind of dumb for thinking of it as Indian food, I think labeling it as "inauthentic" food makes Indian and British culture static and ignores the possibility of Indo-British culture.

I'm going to go to bed, but tomorrow I'll write about seeing a historic village and garden and Minoto Mirai.