The Hong Kong Cemetery in Happy Valley is home to over 470 graves connected to the city’s Japanese population. Most of these graves belong to individuals who died during the Meiji era (1868–1912), a remarkable period of modernisation and opening up of Japan that saw thousands of its inhabitants travel to other parts of the world to study, work, and settle. Who were these people? What were they doing in Hong Kong? And why were unbaptised Japanese buried in what was called at one time the ‘Protestant Cemetery’?Hong Kong’s Meiji-era Japanese community was one of two halves. Company executives sat atop the social ladder and karayuki-san, or prostitutes, occupied the lower echelons, with tradespeople and professionals somewhere in between. By revealing the personal journeys of these mostly forgotten Japanese, the authors aim to add to transnational perspectives on Hong Kong and Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as increase recognition of this fragm
In Man in a Hurry: Murray MacLehose and Colonial Autonomy in Hong Kong, Ray Yep explores the latest available archival materials and re-examines MacLehose’s pivotal governorship in Hong Kong (1971–1982). MacLehose arrived in the challenging 1970s, when there were expectations for social reforms, uneasiness in the relationship between Hong Kong and London, and the 1997 factor looming large. The governor successfully carried out various social reforms and he also handled various major issues, including the anti-corruption campaign, the Vietnamese refugee crisis, and the granting of land lease of the New Territories beyond 1997. Yep unveils the tension and bargaining between the British government and explains how interest of the colony could be asserted, defended, and negotiated. This book is an important study of Hong Kong’s ‘golden years’ when the city’s economy took off. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of how local autonomy was defined.
