Yokohama's Chinatown is called "Chinese Street" in Japanese, but in size it's really a full-fledged town.

Within the confines of its four city gates--elaborately carved, brightly painted Chinese arches--lies a whole checkerboard of streets.

Entering through Shan-lin gate at the city's center and walking along the main avenue, visitors pass by swanky hotels and restaurants rising on either side. . . . Step inside, and you are surrounded by Chinese screens decorated with coiling golden dragons, sandalwood chairs inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and svelte waitresses in embroidered silk gowns attentively offering cups of jasmine tea--it all makes you wonder which imperial dynasty you have stumbled into.

If you're looking for lighter fare, then walk past Chung Shan Rd. and Hong Kong Rd., turn left into Peking Lane, and you'll find a Green Leaf restaurant selling sweet potato gruel and other dishes from Taiwan.

And after you've wined and dined, would you like to listen to some music? In the little shops along Market Rd. opposite you can find the tapes of Su Jui, Tsui Chien, Chang Kuo-jung . . . and other popular singers in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland.

Finally, don't forget to buy some Chinese tea and snacks to take home with you, which will surely leave you with a pleasant aftertaste.

Despite all that, it is very rare to hear any Chinese spoken in this Japanese Chinatown. Chinese living overseas don't often come here to relieve homesickness. The main reason, says Chen Ming-yu, who has been in Japan for seven years and is studying for a master's degree in fine arts at Musashino University in Tokyo, is that "even if you can temporarily cure your stomach of homesickness by eating there, you'll be hurting in the pocketbook for days afterward!"

Indeed, whereas Chinatowns in other countries are noted for their bargain prices, Yokohama's has gone the high-end route. Steamed buns cost 300 to 500 yen each (about NT$60 to $100), and if a little tea is thrown in to go with them, three or four people can easily run up a tab of 10,000 yen--not a cheap prescription to cure homesickness for an overseas student!

In addition, chopsticks are used in Japan as well as China, rice shops are everywhere, and cheap Chinese eateries with noodles and set dishes are widespread. So unless you're after a big fancy dinner, there's no need to go to Chinatown anyway.

The scarcity of Chinese customers in Chinatown doesn't faze the restaurant and hotel owners a bit, because 99 percent of the 120,000 or so visitors that pass through the district on weekends and holidays are Japanese, and business is booming even for merchants who can hardly speak the language.

In fact, the word "booming" best describes the development of Chinatown over the past twenty years.

Pang Kuo-chung, the second-generation owner of the Wan Chen Lou, says that during the five years since he took over the restaurant the number of workers has exploded tenfold, from 40 to 400. His annual business turnover is now 4 billion yen, and there are 90 people in the kitchen alone.

Yokohama's Chinatown is now one of the hottest tourist areas in Japan, and Chinese restaurants are its surefire moneymakers. "As long as you have a restaurant here, even if you only sell steamed buns, you're sure to turn a buck," says Lei Chao-yuan, the owner of the Kung Sheng Ho Variety Store.

Along with the price of meals, the swarms of tourists have also driven up the price of real estate, producing a major change in what was originally a tight knit residential community.

Now it's an island of gold that makes people click their tongues in awe. "The going price for real estate along the main streets is about 100million yen per ping (3.3 sq. m.) at minimum," says Lin Ching-wen, who has been president of the Chinatown Development Committee now for seven years.

Because of the lost opportunity costs if they stay, the residents have all moved out. Children are no longer seen playing in the streets or house wives visiting neighbors, and the old shops, unless there is a problem with property rights, have all been torn down and replaced by luxury high-rises.

As business boomed and storefronts became harder and harder to obtain, Chinatown begin to spread outward, expanding more than four times in area since the end of the Second World War.

The strip running toward Yamashita Park has been targeted by large hotels, with the New Impressive, Yokohama, Sun Harbor, Garden and others opening up there one after another. The Holiday Inn Hotel, built in 1981,is the largest in Kanagawa prefecture and rated five stars. It has a 2,000-person conference room with simultaneous translation facilities in four languages. All this adds to the area's appeal as a tourist attraction.

"Yokohama's Chinatown may not compare with San Francisco's in terms of size, but it is certainly the world's swankiest and safest, and the one most visited by local tourists," affirms Holiday Hotel owner Li Hung-tao, who has visited Chinatowns in many other countries.

Why do the Japanese flock there? How has Yokohama's Chinatown achieved the success it enjoys today? It's a matter of both luck and hard work or--to paraphrase a Chinese saying--of its being "in the right place, at the right time, with the right people."

"As for its location, Chinatown is bordered on the northeast by two popular parks, Yokohama and Yamashita; on the east by Yokohama harbor, the largest in Japan . . . and to the south by Motomachi, a shopping district known far and wide for its imports." Thus Su Chien-wen, a student at Yokohama Chinese Academy, enumerated the geographical advantages of Chinatown in an essay.

Gazing at the ocean from the harbor, shopping for imports in Motomachi, going to Chinatown to rest one's feet and savor fine Chinese cuisine, and then taking some Chinese snacks back home to share with friends and family is quite an appealing route for tourists, and Chinatown is included on the itineraries of many class trips.

Favored in its location, Chinatown still had to wrestle with heaven for its very survival. This spot of ground met with destruction much more often than elsewhere.

Over 130 years ago, Yokohama was just a little fishing village of 500or 600 families where some Chinese on ships from abroad happened to land. Since then, the city has been subjected to the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, the Kanto earthquake and the Yokohama bombardment, forcing the Chinese to come and go, without being able to settle and put down roots.

During the bombing of the city near the end of World War Two, the United States dropped more than 10,000 incendiary bombs. The fires burned for three days and devoured the entire city, reducing it to ashes. When Chang Hu-shun, who came to Yokohama before the war, recalls the situation at the time, there is still a trace of terror in his eyes: "Airplanes covered the sky like flocks of crows, bombs fell like raindrops, and fires scorched the earth." The Japanese and the Chinese there were left with nothing and had to begin again from scratch.

The difference was that China was a victor nation, and the status of the Chinese in Japan was greatly enhanced as a result. The most practical effect was that they had priority in receiving rations. "Flour, sugar, cloth, rice . . . whatever there was you could get," Chang says. "The Chinese are used to hardship, so when we got rice and flour, we'd take it to the black market, grit our teeth and eat yams and sweet potatoes instead. The money we pinched together was our capital for starting up businesses."

There were about 300 families in China town at the time, dealing in rationed goods or selling simple fare to get by and living in lean-tos made of sheets of wood or corrugated metal.

Having been devastated several times in the past, Chinatown finally managed to catch its breath and make something of itself, but most Japanese kept a wary distance because of the bars, dance halls and sake houses that cropped up to cater to U.S. troops.

Fortunately, with the resurgence of the Japanese economy, Tokyo and Yokohama were linked by railway into twin hubs of government and commerce, and the refurbishing of Yamashita Park and the opening of Ishikawa railway station infused Chinatown with additional vitality and tourist appeal.

Almost all of the big restaurants that are so celebrated now started out as just one-man operations, with the owner tripling as cook, waiter and cashier.

Li Hai-tien, founder of the Lung Men Group, which he has since handed over to his son, graduated from Meiji University with a master's degree in law before opening a little restaurant of less than 70 square meters(now the Chungking Restaurant, with four branches and two carryout shops) as a way to settle down in Japan and earn a living.

"I never went anywhere the whole year round," he recollects. "I just waited table all day from morning to night. I must have worn out four or five pairs of shoes in a year. I came down with the flu several times, but with no one to take over for me, I had to get over my aches and pains by keeping busy and sweating it out."

Pang Kuo-chung, the owner of Wan Chen Lou, recalls that his father used to leave home for work every day before dawn. They rarely had a chance to see each other, and his father eventually simply moved into the restaurant.

"They may have differed in terms of their provincial origins, but the heat and the smoke they endured in the kitchens during the summer was the same," remarks Wu Hsiao-an, the president of the Yokohama Chinese Association and owner of the Junkaikaku Hotel, adding a warm footnote to the story of the first generation of Chinese entrepreneurs.

Canton, Szechwan, Taiwan, Shanghai--there are all kinds of cooking in Chinatown now, and the merchants have formed associations and get along famously. But during the five years of "special rationing" the overseas Chinese community in Japan did suffer from a "provincial complex" that other overseas Chinese communities have been free from.

During the Japanese occupation, many Taiwanese were recruited to Japanto mine coal or work in factories, and the children of some well-to-do families went there to study. They were considered imperial subjects and enjoyed greater freedom during the Second World War than Chinese from the mainland. When Taiwan was returned to China after the war they became the citizens of a victor nation, entitled to receive the same special rations as the mainland Chinese. Some of the mainlanders considered them fence-sitters and opportunists, while some of the Taiwanese were angry that China had ever ceded the island to Japan in the first place. Fortunately, the conflicts and jealousies of the time quickly vanished when business picked up and they all began to prosper together.

The Chinatown Development Commission, formed in 1972 by more than 100local merchants, worked actively with the Yokohama city government to overhaul the sewer system, making it more suitable for restaurants, and it sponsored lectures about maintaining strict sanitation and hygiene.

"There's an agreement among members to promote a Chinese style as much as possible," says president Lin Ching-wen. "When restaurants are being redecorated, they have to keep Chinese characteristics. We've also raised money to rebuild the arches. And every Western and Chinese New Year's we bring in lion dances, dragon dances, acrobats and folk performers to create an exotic atmosphere."

At the same time as the businesses formed the committee and were working at raising their standards of operation, Japan established diplomatic relations with the Communist Chinese. Prime Minister Tanaka visited the mainland, and a large surge of goods and information flooded into Japan from the mainland, setting off a China craze. Drinking Oolong tea, eating Chinese food, taking a trip to the mainland and having a Chinese friend were all part of the fad.

"Chinatown's prosperity came as the result of a fortunate coincidence," Pang Kuo chung says. "The Japanese have a strong curiosity about different cultures--there was a fad for dim sum, and then one for hamburgers, and then one for spaghetti. Well, Chinatown took off with the China craze."

"There are programs on TV everyday that teach Chinese and Chinese cooking, and Yokohama's Chinatown frequently appears in magazines and on television," says Lei Chao-yuan, the owner of Kung Sheng Ho Variety Store."Its reputation as a gourmet paradise has spread like wildfire. There'sno need to advertise at all."

As restaurants were expanded and new branches opened up, the growing demand for cooks created another batch of Yokohama Chinese. Busboys and waitresses could be recruited locally, but Chinese food cooked by a Japanese often turns out looking perfectly good but not tasting quite right. The big restaurants all hired chefs from Taiwan and Hong Kong, about four-fifths of them, in fact, from Taiwan.

This development is also reflected in the makeup of the student body at the Yokohama Chinese Academy. According to Li Chih-hui, the dean, most of the school's students before 1975 had a family background from Kwangtung, but the most recent statistics show Taiwan as number one, with 48.5 percent, twice the figure for Kwangtung. And for 60 percent of them, the parental occupation is chef.

"The large influx of students from Taiwan has made us shift our emphasis," he says. "It used to be hard to promote Mandarin, but the most pressing task now is to get kids to speak Japanese so they can adapt more quickly to life here."

With Chinese no longer living there, with 90 percent of the workers and 99 percent of the customers Japanese, and with the palatial-style architecture and the waitresses in cheongsams only there to create a Chinese mood, one begins to wonder whether this flourishing tourist site is a real flesh-and-blood Chinatown at all.

Born in Chinatown but not living there any more, Pang Kuo-chung expresses his feelings this way: "I have Chinese blood in my veins, but I grew up eating Japanese rice; China is like my father and Japan is like my mother. The only thing that really belongs to me is Chinatown. That's where my business is and my friends are. I've never been to China, but whenever I see an old person burning incense at Kuan-ti Temple or a Chinese couple getting married in Chinatown, I smell a thick Chinese fragrance."

[Picture Caption]

(Left) In the early days, Chinatown was called "Shina Street," using a Japanese word for China with disparaging overtones. There was no sign of the prosperity to come. (photo courtesy of the Yokohama Kaiko Information Center)

(Right) Stepping through Shan-lin gate is like entering a gourmet's paradise. A complete array of famous dishes from all parts of China welcomes the visitor.

Spiffing up the front door: the customers are about to arrive.

Restaurants in Chinatown aren't easy to come by. The real estate prices are higher than those along Taipei's Tun Hua South Rd.

A trip to Chinatown isn't complete without buying some moon cakes and other snacks for friends and family at home.

Having passed most of his life in hardship, Li Hai-tien, owner of the Chungking Restaurant, smiles and plays with his grandchild in the chapel he had built in his home.

On Market Rd. you can buy water convolvulus, a common vegetable in Taiwan but rare in Japan.

The last traditional haircutting shears left in Chinatown are the pair owned by Mao Tao-teh, 78.

"Do you have any shrimp paste?" "We sure do." More and more Japanese are knowledgeable about Chinese cuisine these days.

(Left) Chinese sausage, roast duck, lobster, and sculpted fruits and vegetables combine flavor, aroma and visual appeal. Throw in a lucky get-rich- quick cat, and the Japanese gourmand is hooked. (Right) Chinese restaurants are packed in late December, when the Japanese hold year-end parties.

feeding the customers. Wan Chen Lou employs more than 90 cooks.

"In Chinatown you can make big bucks just selling steamed buns!" From the looks of it, that would seem to be absolutely true.

Thanks to luck and hard work, Yokohama's Chinatown has become one of the most renowned tourist attractions in Japan.

Chinatown is the place to go for Chinese food, and for buying the equipment to cook it. Steamers, woks, Chinese-style rice bowls and chopsticks -- it's got them all.

（Right） Stepping through Shan-lin gate is like entering a gourmet's paradise. A complete array of famous dishes from all parts of China welcomes the visitor.

Spiffing up the front door: the customers are about to arrive.

Restaurants in Chinatown aren't easy to come by. The real estate prices are higher than those along Taipei's Tun Hua South Rd.

A trip to Chinatown isn't complete without buying some moon cakes and other snacks for friends and family at home.

The last traditional haircutting shears left in Chinatown are the pair owned by Mao Tao-teh, 78.

On Market Rd. you can buy water convolvulus, a common vegetable in Taiwan but rare in Japan.

Having passed most of his life in hardship, Li Hai-tien, owner of the Chungking Restaurant, smiles and plays with his grandchild in the chapel he had built in his home.

"Do you have any shrimp paste?" "We sure do." More and more Japanese are knowledgeable about Chinese cuisine these days.

（Left） Chinese sausage, roast duck, lobster, and sculpted fruits and vegetables combine flavor, aroma and visual appeal. Throw in a lucky get-rich- quick cat, and the Japanese gourmand is hooked.

（Right） Chinese restaurants are packed in late December, when the Japanese hold year-end parties.

feeding the customers. Wan Chen Lou employs more than 90 cooks.

"In Chinatown you can make big bucks just selling steamed buns!" From the looks of it, that would seem to be absolutely true.

Thanks to luck and hard work, Yokohama's Chinatown has become one of the most renowned tourist attractions in Japan.

Chinatown is the place to go for Chinese food, and for buying the equipment to cook it. Steamers, woks, Chinese-style rice bowls and chopsticks -- it's got them all.