Unveiling the stories of Hong Kong's early Japanese residents in Happy Valley's cemetery
One May day in 1884, a Japanese woman called Saki Kiya received a letter at her Hong Kong address. It was from her family, who said that her father was ill and asked her to return home to Japan. She did not have enough money for the voyage and soon, another letter arrived informing her that he had died. On a Sunday evening in June, she left her residence at 27 Graham Street. Some hours later, her body was found floating in the harbour with, as the China Mail put it, 'a pretty heavy stone' tied into each sleeve of her loose jacket. Her shoes had been placed neatly nearby.
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The police report described her as '
an inmate of an immoral house ' because 27 Graham Street was a brothel and Kiya was a Japanese prostitute. In this, she was not unusual. By 1886, Japanese consular records estimated that of the 146
Japanese in Hong Kong , 96 were female and at least two-thirds of them worked in what were euphemistically called 'rental rooms'. What distinguishes Kiya's life is her death: hers is the oldest known grave of a woman in the Japanese section of the Hong Kong Cemetery at Happy Valley.
Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen. Photo: CK Lee
'Saki's story is so touching, it drove the whole project,' says Georgina Challen one recent afternoon, standing by the two-metre obelisk that marks her grave. Challen and Yoshiko Nakano are the authors of Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong (2024), published by Hong Kong University Press. There are more than 470 graves connected to Hong Kong's Japanese population in what was originally the colony's Protestant cemetery (departed Catholics, Muslims, Hindus and Parsis are commemorated nearby,
Happy Valley being a British euphemism for graveyards). More than 80 per cent belong to individuals who died in the Meiji era. The oldest identifiable grave of a Japanese man from that period belongs to a student called Onsaku Yukawa, who was travelling back to Japan from France. He didn't make it home either: he died of consumption in Hong Kong in 1878, aged 22.
The grave of Yukawa Onsaku is the oldest identifiable Japanese grave in the Hong Kong Cemetery. Photo: Alexander Mak
A compact slice of Hong Kong – and Japanese – social history, scarcely known today, is told by these graves. During the Meiji period, which began in 1868, Japan permitted its people to engage with the outside world. Naturally, some of them came to Hong Kong. By the time the era ended, in 1912, cremation had become popular in Japan and, as it happened, in that same year a crematorium for Hong Kong's Japanese residents opened in So Kon Po, near Causeway Bay. But book-ended by those dates, the Hong Kong Cemetery was where Japanese citizens who'd died in the colony were, mostly, laid to rest.
The cover of Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong. Photo: Courtesy of HKU Press
The graves lie in two sections along the upper slopes of the cemetery. This wasn't deliberate – a good deal of headstone-jumbling has taken place over the years, especially when the nearby Aberdeen flyover and tunnel were constructed in the 1980s – but the division is appropriate because, as the book vividly conveys, from its earliest stages the Japanese community was bisected between company executives (always men) and the karayuki-san or prostitutes (always women). The small businesses that fell in between – kimono dealers, hairdressers, porcelain suppliers – depended on prostitution for their income. One of the more astonishing aspects, to a 21st century reader, is the role of the Japanese Benevolent Society, which had no religious connections but was set up in 1890 to help the sick and to pay for the burial of the destitute. It funded at least 48 of the identifiable Japanese graves, mostly those of the karayuki-san; and its benevolent members were those who profited, to some extent, from the sex trade.
'It's definitely odd,' agrees Nakano on a video call from Tokyo, where she is now a professor in the Department of International Digital and Design Management at Tokyo University of Science. 'Some of those people involved in trafficking enjoyed much higher status in Hong Kong than in Japan. That contradiction, that ambivalence, is very characteristic of the two halves. It was the main thing we found out and it was shocking to us. But that's how things were.'
The grave of Saki Kiya (obelisk) in the Hong Kong Cemetery. Photo: Alexander Mak
Nakano arrived in Hong Kong in 1997 and went on to teach Japanese studies at the University of Hong Kong. For a time, she was the only female board member of the Hong Kong Japanese Club. Although the club had been involved with the cemetery since 1982 and holds an annual ceremony to honour its Japanese occupants, Nakano, author of Where There are Asians, There are Rice Cookers: How 'National' Went Global via Hong Kong (2009), wasn't initially gripped. ('I'm more of a post-war person.') But in 2020, the club initiated a project to document some of the Meiji graves. Nakano was involved and asked Challen, who doesn't speak Japanese, to assist with English-language research and writing; and it was Challen who found the China Mail report about Saki Kiya. The women realised many more human-interest stories had been buried in Happy Valley and that this lost seam of history deserved a book.
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Asia Times
03-06-2025
- Asia Times
How Chinese drones could defeat America
Let me tell you a story about World War II. In 1940, before the entry of the US and the USSR into the war, Britain was fighting alone against Germany and Italy. Despite being massively outnumbered and outgunned, the British managed to pull off a spectacular naval victory, using innovative new technology. They sent the HMS Illustrious, an aircraft carrier, to attack the Italian fleet in its harbor at Taranto. The British aircraft disabled three Italian battleships and several other ships, without the Italian navy even seeing their opponents' ships, much less having a chance to fight back. But that's just the prelude to my story, which is not about a British victory, but a British defeat. Just a little over a year after the Battle of Taranto, Winston Churchill sent the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse to deter Japan from attacking Singapore. Despite their own crushing victory at Taranto, the British military leadership was skeptical that battleships moving under their own power at sea could be taken down by air attack alone. They placed their faith in the power of zigzag movement and anti-aircraft guns to deter attacking planes. This was foolish. Japanese torpedo bombers found and sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse quite easily. Here is an aerial photo of the British warships, taken from the cockpit of a Japanese plane, desperately trying to evade their doom: The great battleships — the invincible masters of the sea in previous wars — were suddenly helpless against the swarm of tiny aircraft. Winston Churchill reacted with shock and horror, and the British fleet withdrew, essentially leaving Southeast Asia to the Japanese. The world had changed, almost overnight. Air power had brought about a revolution in military affairs. Ironclad battleships went from the single most valuable piece of military hardware to being almost obsolete overnight. Yet people who had invested their countries' treasure in battleship fleets, like Churchill, were painfully slow to realize the shift — even when it was their own technological innovations that rendered their old weapons useless.1 OK, so there's your old WW2 parable, with a clear moral to the story: Don't ignore technological revolutions. Now fast-forward to 2025. We may just have witnessed something akin to a modern Battle of Taranto. For years, Russia has used its strategic bombers — which can also carry nuclear weapons — to launch cruise missiles at Ukraine from a huge distance. The Ukrainians had attacked these bombers on the ground with drones, but the Russians simply moved them farther away, well out of reach of anything the Ukrainians could launch from their own territory. So the Ukrainians got sneaky. They packed a bunch of drones — little plastic battery-powered quadcopters, not too different from a toy you would fly at the park — into trucks and (somehow) sent the trucks all the way across Russia. When the trucks got close to the air force bases where the Russians had parked their bombers, the Ukrainian drones popped out of the trucks and started blowing up the bombers — and other planes — on the ground. You can see the footage of the attack here: And you can see some pictures of the drones used in the attack here: It's not clear how many Russian bombers the Ukrainians managed to take out, but everyone agrees it was a significant chunk of Russia's bomber force. And these magnificent, enormously expensive, rare, highly prized machines of destruction were taken out battery-powered toys. Again, the world has changed, almost overnight. The American military is much better than the Russian military, but it's ultimately not that different — it's built around a bunch of big, expensive, heavy 'platforms' like aircraft carriers, jet planes, and tanks. Each F-22 stealth fighter, still widely considered the best plane in the sky, cost about US$350 million to build. A Ford-class aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion each. An M1A1 Abrams tank costs more than $4 million, and so on. That's the amount of value that will be destroyed every time a cheap plastic battery-powered Chinese drone takes out an expensive piece of American hardware in a war over Taiwan, or the South China Sea, or Xi Jinping waking up in a bad mood — not including, of course, the lives of whatever Americans happen to be inside the hardware when it gets destroyed. Except the true value lost will be much higher, since — like Japan in World War II, or Russia now — the US now has extremely limited defense manufacturing capacity, and thus won't be able to easily replace what it loses. As you read this, military planners all over the world are scrambling to come up with defenses against the kind of raid that Ukraine just carried out. Dozens of container ships arrive in American ports from China every day, each with thousands of containers. The containers on the ships then get unloaded and sent by road and rail to destinations all over the country. Imagine a hundred of those containers suddenly blossoming into swarms of drones, taking out huge chunks of America's multi-trillion-dollar Air Force and Navy in a few minutes. That's obviously a terrifying thought. How can the US defend against that sort of attack? Possible countermeasures include hardened aircraft shelters and various forms of air defenses — guns, jammers, electromagnetic pulses, laser cannons, drone interceptors — along with improved surveillance of incoming container traffic. But whatever the eventual defenses are, the advent of cheap battery-powered drones has changed the game and made essentially the entire world into a battlefield. The other question we need to be asking is: Why can't the US just do the same thing to China, in the event of a war? We have drones, right? Weren't we the inventors of drone technology? Don't we have innovative startups like Anduril, and Skydio, and lots of others racing to arm our military with the world's best drones? Well, OK. The US did invent drone technology. But most of what we currently use are lumbering, expensive systems like the MQ-9 Reaper: Each one of these giant drone planes costs $33 million. During the recent US conflict with the Houthis — a conflict in which the US was essentially defeated — the ragtag Yemeni militia shot down at least seven of these Reaper drones, and possibly as many as 20. America in total has only a few hundred. The kind of drones used in the Ukrainian raid, on the other hand, are 'FPV' drones — that stands for 'first person view.' These are small battery-powered plastic copters equipped with explosives. There are many types, but here's one example: Photo by Arminform via Wikimedia Commons These drones cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each, depending on the type. Ukraine is currently producing thousands of these drones per day, and says it expects to be able to produce over 10,000, although either the base drone (before weapons and other military hardware are added) or the parts used to make the drone typically come from China. Why so many? FPV drones aren't just useful for the kind of long-range surprise attack that Ukraine just carried out. In fact, they're steadily replacing every other type of weapon on the battlefield. FPV drones can take out tanks, including America's best tanks. They are now estimated to cause 70% of the casualties on the battlefield — more than artillery, the traditional 'god of war.' Here are some excerpts from a Bloomberg explainer: Tens of thousands of the relatively cheap and expendable machines are now buzzing back and forth over the front lines, pinpointing Russian positions, gathering intelligence to anticipate impending assaults, colliding with enemy targets or dropping bombs on them. By early 2025, drones were accounting for 60% to 70% of the damage and destruction caused to Russian equipment in the war, according to UK-based think tank the Royal United Services Institute… Military commanders around the world are taking note. Taiwan is investing in mass-produced drones in anticipation of a possible conflict with China. Israel has recalibrated the Iron Dome air defense system in the war in Gaza to account for maneuverable drones — one of its biggest blind spots. European governments embarking on their largest rearmament since the Cold War have identified drones and counter-drone systems as an investment priority. The US Pentagon, which pioneered sophisticated and expensive drones sourced from big arms contractors, is looking to buy cheaper ones designed by startups and deployed en masse… Small, light drones with multiple rotors have become the defining innovation of the war. Known as first-person view drones, they are typically controlled in real time via a video feed by an operator who can 'see' through an onboard camera using electronic goggles so they can fly beyond the line of sight. Social media is full of videos showing the machines closing in on troops, armored personnel carriers, missile batteries and command posts until the moment of impact, when the picture turns to static…Other rotor drones are used to drop grenade-sized explosives on targets and can be reused if they make it back safely. Bloomberg says that the parts used to make Ukraine's drone fleet are bought 'online', but that is a euphemism. They are made in China. An FPV drone is basically: some injection-molded plastic parts some trailing edge computer chips (microcontrollers, sensors, etc.) an electric motor made of rare earth permanent magnets a lithium-ion battery The US can still make plenty of trailing-edge computer chips, but the rest of these items are all China, China, China. China does most of the injection molding in the world — about 82%, according to one 2024 estimate. Currently, I know of no government plan to restore America's lost capacity in injection molding. In fact, Trump's tariffs — if they ever go into effect — are expected to severely damage the US injection molding industry, by cutting American injection molding companies off from imports of the specialized equipment they need. China also makes most of the electric motors in the world. This is because China makes most of the magnets, and an electric motor is basically just made out of magnets. The rest of the world is scrambling to add magnet production capacity, but for the rest of this decade, China will dominate: Source: IEA But this will be hard to accomplish. The magnets for electric motors are made out of materials called 'rare earths', which are almost entirely mined and processed in China. Source: IEA In fact, China recently slapped export controls on its sales of rare earths to the US, causing chaos in a number of US industries, and probably contributing to Trump's decision to pause his tariffs. So far, US efforts to mine and refine rare earths have fallen short (which itself is a topic for another full post). Finally, and most importantly, we have batteries. A battery is the essential component of an FPV drone — it holds the energy that makes the thing go. Larger drones can use combustion engines, but to get something as small and cheap as an FPV drone, you need a battery.2 China makes most of the batteries in the world. In 2022, it had 77% of global manufacturing capacity. Here's a projection out to 2030: Source: Visual Capitalist Even this projection, which shows America catching up just a little bit, is probably way too rosy. It was made at a time when Joe Biden's industrial policy — specifically, the Inflation Reduction Act — was dishing out huge subsidies for American battery factories. Here's what that looked like: Source: Clean Investment Monitor This wouldn't have put American battery-making capacity on par with China, but it would have given us a fighting chance. Now, though, Donald Trump and the Republicans are canceling the policies that were promoting American battery manufacturing: A tax and policy bill passed by House Republicans…would gut subsidies for battery manufacturing, incentives for purchases of electric vehicles by individuals and businesses, and money for charging stations that Congress passed during the Biden administration. And it would impose a new annual fee on owners of electric cars and trucks. Electric vehicles are crucial for battery manufacturing capacity, because in peacetime, they're the main source of demand for batteries. Pump up the EV industry, and you pump up the battery industry too — just as the chart above shows Biden doing. Kill the EV industry and you kill the battery industry too, just as Republicans now want to do. Harming the solar industry will also harm the battery industry, because some types of batteries are used to store solar energy for when the sun isn't shining. GOP policies are already mauling the American battery industry: [M]ore [battery] projects were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 than in the previous two years combined. Those cancellations include a $1 billion factory in Georgia that would have made thermal barriers for batteries and a $1.2 billion lithium-ion battery factory in Arizona… 'It's hard at the moment to be a manufacturer in the U.S. given uncertainties on tariffs, tax credits and regulations,' said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas Public Policy. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional investments appear to be stalled, he added, but haven't been formally canceled yet. In fact, the whole boom in American factory construction that happened under Biden appears to be halting and going into reverse under Trump, thanks to a combination of tariffs and the expected cancellation of industrial policies: Source: Joseph Politano The Ukrainian attack on Russia's nuclear bombers shows how insane and self-defeating the GOP's attack on the battery industry is. Batteries were what powered the Ukrainian drones that destroyed the pride of Russia's air fleet; if the US refuses to make batteries, it will be unable to make similar drones in case of a war against China. Bereft of battery-powered FPV drones, America would be at a severe disadvantage in the new kind of war that Ukraine and Russia have pioneered. Unfortunately, Trump and the GOP have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they're attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they're actually doing is unilaterally disarming America's future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China. In any case, unless America's leaders wake up very quickly to the military importance of batteries, magnets, injection molding, and drones themselves, the US may end up looking like the British Navy in 1941 — or the Italian Navy in 1940. A revolution in military affairs is in process, and America is willfully missing the boat. 1 Ironically, Japan made a similar mistake, directing far too many of its scarce resources toward battleship production instead of aircraft carriers. 2 Incidentally, this is why everyone who confidently tells you that batteries can't replace fossil fuels because they have 'lower energy density' doesn't know what they're talking about. Yes, if you measure just the gasoline or kerosene or diesel in a combustion engine, its energy density is higher than that of any battery. But open up a car hood, and you'll see a huge array of heavy, bulky tanks and tubes and machinery — that's the engine required for turning gasoline into kinetic energy. Batteries don't need an engine to covert their energy into kinetic energy — they just need some magnets. This means that the true energy density of batteries, counting the extraction machinery , compares pretty favorably with combustion engines in many applications. This article was first published on Noah Smith's Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.
South China Morning Post
20-05-2025
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong must care for its teachers before it's too late
When a tragedy happens, we look up from our phones, shake our heads and wonder how it came to this. Then, often too quickly, we scroll on. However, some events refuse to be dismissed so easily. The recent incident in which a teacher died after falling from the rooftop at a primary school in Sai Kung has sent a wave of sorrow and discomfort through Hong Kong's education community . It's a wake-up call we can't afford to ignore. Teaching has always been more than a job. It's the unseen engine of society, shaping the future, one child at a time. But what happens when the engine begins to break down? We expect teachers to be counsellors , content creators, administrators, career advisers, event planners and, occasionally, referees. And yet, for all the roles they juggle, who is really looking out for them? It's tempting to see such tragedies as isolated or unexplainable, but that would be a mistake. The pressures our teachers face are very real and mounting. The job insecurity brought on by declining student enrolment and potential school closures is no longer just a bureaucratic issue; it's a source of daily anxiety. In schools under pressure to 'perform' and recruit students, educators – especially in under-enrolled schools – are expected to wear many hats. Teachers have described it as being asked to teach all day, then spend your evenings marketing the school as if your livelihood depends on it. In many cases, it does. 03:10 Overworked to death: Japanese teachers battle for change as several die from exhaustion Overworked to death: Japanese teachers battle for change as several die from exhaustion
HKFP
10-05-2025
- HKFP
A row over Buddhist relics: Who owns them, where they should belong?
With all due respect for what seems to be an unusually charming and harmless religion, it is surprising, for me at least, to see a public row over Buddhist relics. I thought that was a Christian thing. I recall when I was still a student, enjoying Albert Finney playing Martin Luther in the play of the same name, lamenting that 'Jesus Christ had 12 disciples and 15 of them are buried in Germany.' John Calvin, the most austere of Protestant reformers, was similarly baffled by the numbers, writing that if all the relics were catalogued, it would be found that 'every apostle has four or more bodies and every saint two or three.' Erasmus was also suspicious. 'What would Jerome say,' he wrote, 'could he see the Virgin's milk exhibited for money; the miraculous oils; the portions of the true cross, enough, if collected, to freight a large ship?' And indeed, the field does seem to attract the unscrupulous, like the man who claimed to have found the coffin of Jesus' brother (he allegedly had four brothers and a sister). This manifest forgery was at least surfaced plausibly in the Holy Land. What can we say for the enterprising individual who claimed he had found part of Noah's diary … in Michigan? Anyway, the story that sent me scurrying down all these historical byways concerned a stash unearthed in India by a colonial official called William Claxton Peppé in 1898. This included a pot inscribed with the claim that it contained some of the bones of the Buddha, which, according to the usual unreliable sources, were distributed to various pious monarchs after his cremation. There were also other boxes and a variety of small jewels. The finder was not the keeper. Colonial attitudes to such matters had improved by this time, and the finder passed the lot to the Imperial Museum in what was then called Calcutta. The bones were then passed to the nearest Buddhist monarch, the King of Siam. Some of them have since been exported to various Buddhist centres, where they are venerated. The finder, though, was allowed to keep some of the jewels on the grounds that they were straight duplicates of other items in the collection. These were then passed down his family until last week, when it was announced that they would be auctioned in Hong Kong. Cue bitter complaints from India's (aggressively Hindu) government, after which the auction was postponed for negotiations. The jewels are, according to the Indian government's complaint, 'inalienable religious and cultural heritage of India and the global Buddhist community.' Well, I am not sure about the cultural heritage. Most of the pieces appear to be very small and not much worked. It may be, of course, that like the profusion of gold bees found in the tomb of the early Frankish King Childeric I, the jewels were attached to a garment that has since rotted away. The religious claim rests on two questionable pedestals: that the interred bones were in fact those of the Buddha, who had died at least 200 years before the burial (estimates of the date vary) and that the jewels are 'relics' because of their entirely posthumous physical proximity to the remains. Inevitably, these two questions have been rather overshadowed by two other issues. Should items that found their way out of colonies while they were colonies be the property of the liberated former colonies? Is it appropriate that items of sacred significance to some people should be offered in the marketplace as cultural commodities for purchase by non-believers? The would-be vendor, Chris Peppé – a descendant of William Claxton Peppé, says he has done some research and in Buddhist circles these items are not regarded as sacred relics. It appears that Buddhists are not as keen on the whole relics idea as Catholics used to be. This may be so. But I fear few readers will have been impressed by Mr P's claim that the family looked into donating the jewels to a temple or museum but decided that an auction was 'the fairest and most transparent way to transfer these artefacts to Buddhists.' Too convenient. Also, I must say that historically, the idea of 'relics' was by no means confined to remains of the body of the holy individual concerned. Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, for example, had a famous collection of more than 5,000 relics. This included a piece of the Saviour's beard, the inevitable particle of the Virgin Mary's milk, St Anne's thumb, and 76 pieces of 'bones from holy places which, on account of faded writing, can no longer be read and identified.' But there was also a twig from the burning bush, 'one piece of the diaper in which He was wrapped, one piece of the straw on which the Lord lay when he was born,' one sample each of the gold and myrrh presented by the three kings, and no less than 32 fragments of the Holy Cross. The collection was shown to the public for the last time in 1522, but the souvenir catalogue, with illustrations by German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, can be seen in museums. Which is perhaps where this whole story belongs. HKFP is an impartial platform & does not necessarily share the views of opinion writers or advertisers. HKFP presents a diversity of views & regularly invites figures across the political spectrum to write for us. Press freedom is guaranteed under the Basic Law, security law, Bill of Rights and Chinese constitution. Opinion pieces aim to point out errors or defects in the government, law or policies, or aim to suggest ideas or alterations via legal means without an intention of hatred, discontent or hostility against the authorities or other communities.
