Japanese get cautious welcome back to Dalian

Japanese get cautious welcome back to Dalian

By Mark O'Neill

DALIAN, China (Reuter): A magnificent wooden Japanese Shinto temple looks out over the Chinese port city of Dalian, still in nearly perfect condition 81 years after it was built.

Just 27 km (17 miles) away, 200 Japanese firms have set up factories in a booming special economic zone partially funded by the Tokyo government -- Japan's only such economic-zone investment in the world.

Dalian, which grew into the major port and industrial center of Port Arthur during 40 years of Japanese rule early in the century, has once again become a prime target for Japanese investment and developers.

"This investment shows how strategically important Tokyo considers Dalian, today as 90 years ago," Y.C. Hwang, president of the Artex Corporation of South Korea, said during a visit to Dalian to sell Korean textiles and garments.

As of the end of June, contracted Japanese investment in all of Dalian was $2.301 billion in 825 projects, most of it in manufacturing. Japan ranked second to Hong Kong and Macau, which had $4.51 billion, mostly in property and services.

More than 2,000 Japanese live in Dalian, the second-largest Japanese community in China after Beijing.

But they have received a cautious reception, with some city officials preferring to remember the Japanese as brutal occupiers rather than civic boosters.

In 1904 Japan went to war with Tsarist Russia in Luxun, a naval base just south of Dalian. Its crushing victory forced Russia to hand over control in 1905 of the Liaotung peninsula, including Dalian, which had been a small fishing village.

During the next 40 years, Japan developed Dalian into a major industrial and commercial center, laying out the wide streets and urban plan that survive today, including city hall, the law court, police headquarters and three tramlines.

But official China has little good to say about the 40 years of Japanese rule.

"Japanese made no historic contribution to Dalian," said one city official angrily. "If they had not been here, we would have built up the city ourselves. They developed railways and factories only to provide goods for Japan."

"During the Russo-Japanese war, they massacred almost the entire civilian population of Luxun, leaving less than 50 alive," he added. A monument there recalls the event.

Chinese media and textbooks waste no opportunity to speak of atrocities committed by Japan during the occupation of the northeast and other parts of China between 1904 and 1945.

But, despite this, Japanese residents say they find it easier to live here than anywhere else in China.

"Compared to other parts of China, Dalian was peaceful during the war," said a resident Japanese banker. "That means memories are not so bitter. Many people speak Japanese, understand Japan and like Japanese food."

The city boasts many Japanese restaurants, a Japanese primary and secondary school. A golf course is due for completion next year.

Residents of the area near the former Shinto temple, now a storehouse for the city's Beijing opera troupe, speak more favorably of the Japanese contribution.

"They built factories, roads, sewers, a fine railway station and other infrastructure," said one man in his 50s. "Without them, Dalian would not be the city it is today."

"The temple is a fine building. It used to be in an area of grass and trees, very solemn. You cannot imagine that now, with all these apartment blocks close by," he said.

Japanese have offered to buy and repaint the temple, but nobody expects the city government to approve the idea.

Other buildings of the Japanese era remain, including the former offices of the Bank of Korea, South Manchurian Railway, Yamato Hotel, Natural History Museum and the Yokohama Specie Bank, which later became the Bank of Tokyo.

Many former Japanese residents are members of the Dalian Club and come back to visit their former homes.

"When I was a student in Japan in the 1940s, I used to visit my parents in Dalian," recalled one elderly man. "I took a ferry to Pusan (South Korea) and a through train from there to Dalian. You cannot dream of such a journey now."

"We loved living in Dalian, with a large house, servants, a driver and a large German shepherd. There was no sense of a war. Relations with local people were good," he said.

A building boom over the last four years means that many of the homes and offices built during the 1905-45 period are disappearing below the developer's hammer, replacing the European-style villas with multi-storey blocks.