Happy Valley Cemeteries: 470 Graves Tell the Story of Japanese Hong Kong

There is not a living soul in sight at the Hong Kong Cemetery on a cool March afternoon. Birdsong pierces the dull roar of traffic heading to the nearby Aberdeen Tunnel. Towards the back of the graveyard, past monuments to fallen British soldiers and seemingly countless people who died of malaria in the 1850s, there is an unusual cluster of tall, narrow tombstones: Japanese graves.

It turns out there are 470 Japanese people buried in the cemetery, nearly all of them from the first seven decades of British rule in Hong Kong, which began in 1841. And until recently, very little was known about who these people were and what they were doing here. “Many people do not realise there was a Japanese community more than 150 years ago,” says Yoshiko Nakano, former associate professor in the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Japanese Studies, and now a professor at the Tokyo University of Science. “We tend to think of Hong Kong as East and West — European and Chinese — and the Japanese community does not really fit that mould. It was an overlooked community, in a way.”

Seven years ago, Nakano set out to change that. Working with the Japanese Club of Hong Kong, she began documenting the Hong Kong Cemetery’s Japanese graves, most of which date back to the years following Japan’s 1853 reopening after more than two centuries of isolation. The initial plan was to erect a few plaques at the cemetery, but Nakano soon realised that wouldn’t do justice to the full picture of Japanese life in 19th century Hong Kong. She reached out to her colleague Georgina Challen, senior research assistant at HKU, and the two joined forces to uncover the stories behind the cemetery’s Japanese graves. 

The result is Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong, which was published by HKU Press last November as part of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies Series. The book traces the outline of Hong Kong’s Japanese population during the Meiji era, which lasted from 1868 to 1912 and marked Japan’s rapid industrialisation and modernisation as it attempted to compete with European and American imperial ambitions. 

A divided community

“It was a community of two halves,” explains Challen. “There were the elite executives from companies like Mitsubushi, the Mitsui Steamship Company and Yokohama Specie Bank, and then there were the prostitutes and people in lower class occupations. They had to contend with colonial society and its stratification where there were Europeans and Americans and then the Chinese. Where did the Japanese fit in? They occupied a very ambiguous position within colonial society.”

The very first Japanese person buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery was a man named Rikimatsu, who was born in 1821. When he was 14 years old, he was delivering sweet potatoes by boat when he encountered bad weather and sank off the coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands. He drifted at sea for 35 days, finally landing in the Philippines, from which he managed to make his way to Macau – a Portuguese-controlled port that had historic trading links with the Kyushu city of Nagasaki. But foreign travel had been banned in Japan in 1635, when the Tokugawa Shogunate — the country’s military government — had sealed the country’s borders to counter growing foreign influence. If Rikimatsu had returned home, he would have been executed for defying the ban, even if his journey overseas had been accidental. 

In Macau, Rikimatsu grew close to the Christian missionary and translator Karl Gützlaff, who convinced him to convert to Christianity. After a failed attempt to return to Japan with six other countrymen who had ended up in Macau, Rikimatsu settled in the newly-established British colony of Hong Kong, worked for one of its early newspapers, The Friend of China, and married an American woman. (Gützlaff also moved to Hong Kong, where he became an influential translator for the colonial government and helped spread Christianity among the Chinese population.) He died in 1860 and was buried in what was colloquially known as the Protestant Cemetery, to distinguish it from the adjacent Catholic cemetery.

Rikimatsu was unusual for two reasons: he was one of the only Japanese people in Hong Kong during the pre-Meiji era and he was a Christian. Most of the other Japanese people buried in the cemetery were not baptised, and their presence in a cemetery otherwise reserved for Protestants reflects what Challen and Nakano describe in their book as “the internal tensions and external pressures that explain why Hong Kong’s Meiji-era Japanese residents failed to unite on communal issues, such as a dedicated burial ground.” 

Unlike the Parsi, Jewish or Hindu communities that came to Hong Kong in the 19th, the Japanese population had little sense of commonality. For many decades they failed to band together to convince the Hong Kong government to give them their own cemetery in Happy Valley, which had become the colony’s de facto burial ground after a malaria outbreak in the 1840s. Class divisions were to blame. Part of the Japanese community was made up of diplomats, bankers and shipping executives who helped facilitate trade with Japan, especially in coal, which was mined in Kyushu and fuelled Asia’s booming steamship business. But most Japanese people in Hong Kong were karayuki-san: poor young women from coal towns who came to Hong Kong to work as prostitutes around Lyndhurst Terrace, which at the time was lined by brothels. 

The grave of Yukawa Onsaku, the first Meiji-era Japanese buried in the cemetery – Photo by Miyuki Kume

“They came from very poor villages, they didn’t have enough food and desperately needed to work,” says Nakano. “And when they were thinking about places to work, the shipping companies were there to take them to Hong Kong. There were regular shipping lines between Hong Kong and Nagasaki, and before the railways, it was almost closer and more convenient to come to Hong Kong than to go work in Osaka or Tokyo.”

A tragic story

One of the most remarkable Japanese graves in the Hong Kong Cemetery is a two-metre-tall obelisk honouring a woman named Kiya Saki, who died in 1884 at the age of 30. The oldest known grave of a Japanese woman in the cemetery, the tombstone notes that Kiya was a commoner, and it includes an English-language inscription that the monument was erected by her friends, whose names — 62 in all — are inscribed on the side of the pillar. Unusually, they are written in katakana, a Japanese syllabary, rather than in the more formal kanji derived from Chinese characters.

English-language inscription on Kiya Saki’s grave. Her memorial also features a two-metre-tall obelisk with inscriptions in Japanese – Photo by Miyuki Kume

Kiya’s story was tragic. In the spring of 1881, she had received a letter from her family in Nagasaki breaking the news that her father was seriously ill. But she wasn’t able to afford the voyage home, and soon after, she received another letter informing her that her father had died. Devastated, she left her brothel on Graham Street, filled the pockets of her kimono with heavy stones, and walked into Victoria Harbour. Her body was spotted by a Chinese sailor and pulled from the water by a British police sergeant. Her slippers were later found on the Kowloon shore. 

Graveyard detectives

“It’s really strange to call somebody a muse in this context, but Kiya Saki was our muse,” says Nakano. And it hints at the detective work that her and Challen’s research entailed. Although Kiya’s suicide had been reported in the newspapers — there was even a coroner’s inquest into her death — her name had been misreported and nobody had been able to make a clear connection to the woman in the cemetery, until Nakano and Challen cleaned her gravestone and recorded the names of her 62 fellow sex workers and noticed the English inscription. 

The graves of Japanese company executives, sailors, and a boarding house owner stand in the upper reaches of the Hong Kong Cemetery. Photo by Miyuki Kume

Their research took them into the Hong Kong Government Records Service as well as the archives of the Japanese Diet, and it included historic newspapers, government correspondence, official reports, death registers and Japanese-language memoirs and travel diaries. Until their work, notes Nakano, “there had not been an attempt to coordinate materials in English, French and other languages with what’s available in Japanese.”
The Japanese community unites

Japan’s power grew in the early 20th century, especially after winning a war against China in 1895 (which gave it control over Taiwan) and Russia in 1905 (expanding Japan’s control over Manchuria and other parts of northeast Asia). Hong Kong’s Japanese population grew in size and influence, too. In 1909, the Hong Kong government banned the use of incense sticks in the Protestant Cemetery – a clear slight against the relatives of the Japanese people buried there, who represented the largest non-European group in the cemetery. (Like in many other Asian cultures, Japanese people burn incense to honour the dead.) After years of class division, the Japanese community finally came together to object, and the government built them a crematorium, while reserving a small section of the Protestant Cemetery for non-Christian use. 

The early history of the Japanese community in Hong Kong has long been overshadowed by Japanese occupation during World War II and the Japanese economic and cultural ties between Hong Kong and Japanese that emerged during the postwar boom years that transformed both places. But the weatherworn graves on the edge of the Hong Kong Cemetery are a testament to a part of the Hong Kong story that is no longer as overlooked as it once was.