Nishikawaguchi, the Japanese Town Packed With Chinese Restaurants: A Shanghai Snack-Shop Owner's Story, Part 2

Welcome to "Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round," a QDaily column by the Japanese Chinese-language writer Yoshii Shinobu. A "second round," or nijikai, is the optional second gathering office workers move on to after the drinks at the first bar — the stretch of the evening where the talk loosens up.

In the south of Saitama Prefecture there is a place called Nishikawaguchi. Once a synonym for "red-light district," it has quietly gone through a striking change in recent years, turning into a kind of new Chinatown; Japanese media now call it "Little China." To feed the Chinese people arriving from all over, the food on offer in Nishikawaguchi is no worse than what you get back in China: grilled lamb skewers, malatang, milk tea, knife-shaved noodles, Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles, duck neck, and regional Chinese dishes that keep their real flavor instead of being softened for Japanese tastes. People come here in a steady stream just to eat.

This time I interviewed four Chinese shop owners in Nishikawaguchi, all from different parts of China, and listened to what they have learned from living life "elsewhere." I hope this modest piece is of some use to readers.

The story runs in four parts. This is Part Two: an interview with Zhu Guoxin, owner of the shengjian mantou shop The Bund.

The west side of Nishikawaguchi Station really does have a lot of Chinese restaurants. What about the east side? At a glance the two look much alike, but look closely and the east has fewer Chinese restaurants than the west. Next to the station stands a branch of BOOK OFF, the well-known used-book chain, and a large supermarket two steps beyond it. Another supermarket occupies the station's ground floor — produce, fresh meat, seafood, prepared foods, everything three meals a day require, all in one convenient place. Walk east from the station and you enter a shopping street where a Xinjiang restaurant, Chinese grocery stores and other foreign-flavored shops turn up; but the street really belongs to the greengrocers, hair salons, clothing shops (aimed at middle-aged women), cafés and other small businesses serving the people who live nearby.

Chinese Students Abroad in the 1980s

In short, the east side of Nishikawaguchi looks like any ordinary Japanese street in front of a station, so finding a busy Shanghai restaurant in the middle of it really is a bit of a surprise. This is The Bund, run by a couple from Shanghai. The shop is small; customers usually eat standing at the window, or pull up on a bicycle for takeout. The owner, Zhu Guoxin, is sixty this year, which means half his life has been spent in Japan. When I asked which language he wanted to use for the interview, he said: "For anything about Japan, Japanese — it's easier to say clearly."

"I've been in Japan a long time now — about thirty years. I was twenty-eight that year. I was born in Shanghai. I finished high school in 1976 and worked a year or two at a public bus company, starting as a ticket seller and eventually making cadre. Both my parents worked at a bus company in Shanghai too — my father was a mechanic, my mother a ticket seller. That's when I met my wife; we were coworkers. We agreed I would go to Japan to study first and come back for her later. Plenty of people have asked why I chose Japan, and the answer is simple: reform and opening had just begun and I was hungry to see the outside world. That's how you are when you're young — you do what you want to do, you don't weigh this and that the way you do now. Going to Japan cost, as I remember, 12,000 yuan. That was a fortune; my monthly income then was about 36 yuan. I borrowed from relatives and scraped it together, and later paid tuition and living costs with part-time work in Japan. The paperwork before I left — the résumé and so on — was handled by a Shanghai friend who had worked for a language school, so the whole thing went smoothly."

"In January 1988 I landed at Narita Airport in Tokyo. The language school had promised to send someone to meet me, so I was delighted the whole flight over, even with less than 10,000 yen in my pocket — I wasn't worried about a thing. But nobody was there. We were probably at different exits. Anyway, I waited three hours. Finally I gave up, found a coin payphone and called a friend in Tokyo. She was the girlfriend of a friend of mine in Shanghai. She had come to Tokyo a year before me and already had work at a hotel in Shinjuku. I'd kept her number in case of emergency — and I needed it on day one. She was at work when she picked up and couldn't come, so she gave me the hotel's name and address, somewhere near Shinjuku. I used English and hand gestures with a station attendant, who walked me to the ticket window, taught me how to buy a ticket, and told me which train to take. I got to Shinjuku at last, and coming out of the station I was lost again, so I found another attendant, who took me to the taxi stand. I handed the driver a piece of paper with the address on it. We arrived, I paid the fare — about 5,000 yen — and suddenly saw there was nothing around, just an ordinary residential neighborhood. Luckily the driver was a kind man. He made some calls to check, then drove me to the hotel where my friend worked, and wouldn't take any more money. It was late, and my friend said I could sleep at the hotel, but the owner came in around five or six in the morning and it would be better if he didn't see me. She said a Chinese coworker of hers could take me to the language school the next morning. So I slept a few hours, got up early, and waited outside with my two big suitcases for two hours. The school was in Otsuka, in Tokyo's Toshima Ward, a private language school run by a Japanese couple. They were astonished to see me, and delighted. I studied hard after that and did well; the principal came to trust me, and in the end we became friends."

Most people picture the Chinese students who went to Japan in the 1980s as having had a hard time of it. Mr. Zhu, too, spent plenty of hours washing dishes and cleaning just to get by — but what he felt about life in Japan doesn't quite match that picture.

His first impressions of Japan, he recalls, were of transport and food. "Japan's public transport runs exactly on time, and the network is so dense you can get anywhere on it. Having worked at a bus company, that struck me hard. And food — I found things in Japan cheap. Back when I lived in Shanghai, chicken and eggs were both luxuries I couldn't afford. In Japanese supermarkets, eggs and bread were the cheapest things there were. Chicken thigh was cheap too, and that made me so happy. For vegetables you could buy the marked-down ones at the produce shop — not very fresh, but edible. I brought a lot of sausage and instant noodles from Shanghai, and at first I ate nothing but those two things, every day. I ate so much of it that I still can't touch sausage — the sight of it kills my appetite. Later, when my wife came to Japan — she was my girlfriend then — the only food I asked her to bring was rice. Japanese rice is delicious, but expensive: a kilogram cost 800 yen back then, much more than rice in China."

Mr. Zhu adapted fast, but he still missed home and home cooking. There were not many Chinese people in Japan then, and real Chinese food was rarer still. One day he made a special trip to Yokohama's Chinatown to look for the taste of home, and the hope died almost at once. "I saw a restaurant with a sign for yaki manjū. From the way they explained it, it sounded like shengjian mantou. I kept watching how they made it: they took a few small steamed buns out of a bamboo steamer and fried them on a griddle. That settled it — you couldn't get real shengjian bao in Japan. You know how it is: shengjian bao, baozi and xiaolongbao are all made differently, filling and wrapper both."

Mr. Zhu studied at the language school for a year and a half, and in that time he kept his promise and brought his girlfriend over. "We married in Japan and filed the papers at the Chinese embassy. The next year we went back to Shanghai and booked the Seagull Hotel, and invited our parents, relatives and friends — about thirty people. At first we didn't tell them we were already married, because we didn't want to take their red envelopes; we only announced it after the meal. We ate so much good food, and kept ordering more — better, more expensive. In the end the manager came out and said there was nothing more expensive left on the menu. Guess what the whole thing cost, three tables? Only 1,500 yuan, drinks and dishes included. I had brought 20,000 yuan that day, expecting to need it. I really didn't think it would be that cheap. You can see how different the value of money was then. Twenty-eight years have gone by; if we ate like that at the Seagull today, I doubt a few hundred thousand yuan would cover it."

After language school, Mr. Zhu spent two years at a business vocational college. At graduation he had two options: he had been admitted to J. F. Oberlin University, and he had found a job. He took the job, at a Japanese company in the timber trade.

"The company imported timber from Canada and the US and resold it to customers in the Kanto region, around Tokyo. That's when I saw how much all my earlier experience was worth — the bus company in Shanghai and the part-time jobs in Japan alike. During language school I did all sorts of casual work: gas station attendant, dishwasher, hotel cleaner; I even sold computers. Everything I saw and talked about in those jobs was useful once I was a white-collar employee. If a client liked baseball or fishing, I could talk about it without effort. That ability to talk matters enormously in business — when you get along with someone, the deal goes much more easily. A single order could come to over 100 million yen, and the work had real energy in it. I also went to Canada about six times a year, a week each trip, which was interesting too."

Mr. Zhu was a white-collar employee for about fifteen years, and he and his wife had two children in that time. Just as he was ready to work himself hard for his family, Japan fell into a long economic slump and he lost his job. During the one-year cushion the company gave him, he started a company of his own doing what his employer had done: reselling imported logs to Japanese construction firms. "But it didn't go well. My company closed before long."

When the future looks murkiest, hope tends to come in from a direction you never expected. Right around then, a shop selling nothing but shengjian bao opened in Machida, in the southwest of Tokyo — no seats, takeout only. A decade and more ago, most Japanese people had never met shengjian bao (in Japan they called it "yaki manjū" or "yaki xiaolongbao"), and the shop drew long lines every day and did excellent business. Mr. Zhu decided the business could work, and since his wife had relatives running a restaurant in Shanghai, he could ask them about the practical side. He was forty-nine the year he decided to start again.

"A relative introduced us to a shop in Fengcheng, in Shanghai's Yangpu District. My wife and I stayed there a month and a half learning to make shengjian bao. We started at half past two in the morning kneading twenty-five kilos of dough, then rolled out the wrappers, filled them and pleated them shut, and did the cleaning too — the day went fast. The master only agreed to teach me the filling in the last two weeks. I owe all of it to my wife; without her relative's introduction there would have been no way in, or it would have cost a fortune. I once called one of Shanghai's famous shengjian bao shops myself to ask. They said I could learn there, but it would cost 900,000 yuan. Forget ten years ago — I couldn't afford that now."

With the technique learned, the next problem was a shop. Mr. Zhu spent eight months walking Tokyo's commercial districts looking for the right place, but cost and other problems kept him from settling on one.

"I looked at a lot of places in Tokyo — Shinjuku (the city's most famous commercial district), Ikebukuro (in Toshima Ward, with its own Chinatown), Shimbashi (in Minato Ward, near a lot of office buildings and small bars), Jiyugaoka (a popular residential area in Meguro Ward). Two problems kept coming up. One was rent. Back then even a tiny storefront in Tokyo cost at least 400,000 yen a month; in Shinjuku, even a slightly out-of-the-way spot came to 600,000 — 120,000 yen per tsubo, about 3.3 square meters. Some were more absurd. A shop near Nakano Broadway, by the north exit of JR Nakano Station, small but on two floors, wanted a shikikin — a deposit, usually one or two months' rent — of 30 million yen, plus 600,000 a month. Besides rent there was a second problem: landlords didn't want to rent to Chinese restaurants, worried the grease would dirty the property. Finally I came to Nishikawaguchi and looked at the storefront we're in now. It used to sell knife-shaved noodles. The first time I went alone, and it felt right: the location was good, the rent was cheaper than Tokyo, and there were customers for certain, because you could already hear Chinese being spoken on the train out to Nishikawaguchi — there had to be a lot of Chinese people nearby. The second time I brought my wife, and the two of us stood across the road watching the shop for a while. Just then the free shuttle from the Kawaguchi Auto Race motorcycle track, in Kawaguchi, Saitama, pulled up and a crowd got off. Seeing that, we judged there really were customers here. So we took the place. The rent then was a little over 200,000 yen, I think, and we started selling shengjian bao in August 2010."

Because Mr. Zhu's shengjian bao tasted right, the shop pulled in Chinese customers from the surrounding area from the first day, with lines every day. What the Zhus never imagined was that seven months after opening they would meet something enormous: the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011.

"It was around two in the afternoon when the first shock came. Earthquakes are common in Japan and we're used to them; we thought it would pass in a moment. Then came the second wave, and it was huge. We felt our lives were in danger, so the two of us ran out to the middle of the intersection in front, held onto each other and watched the buildings sway. We weren't the only ones — a lot of people were out in the road, standing, crouching, some sitting on the ground with their heads in their hands. Chaos followed, but the shengjian bao were already prepped, so we kept the shop running. Then, sometime after five, our chef came in and said he had to take his family back to China for a while. We had three Chinese employees at the time: my wife and I made the shengjian bao and the dumplings ourselves; the chef, who was from Fujian, handled the other side dishes; and two assistants helped wrap the buns and so on. The chef had already packed the whole family's luggage, so there was nothing I could do. I only told him to call me once he reached China, because there was still a lot about the shop I needed to learn from him. The two assistants didn't even say goodbye — after the day of the earthquake they simply vanished."

"Everyone was on edge after the quake. Here is how frantic it got: Japanese customers came running for shengjian. We were selling four for 330 yen, and a customer would hand me a 1,000-yen note, tell me to keep the change, grab the buns and run. By evening a lot of shops had closed. We closed early too, took a taxi to the elementary school to collect the kids and went home. My second child was still in elementary school then; Japanese elementary schoolers usually walk to and from school on their own, but in an emergency like that the parents have to fetch them. When I came in the next day, a lot of customers said what a shame it was for us — after the quake many people couldn't get home, transport was down, and they could only eat near the station, so any shop that stayed open did roaring business. Looking back, though, I still think we judged it right: half an hour later and we'd never have got a taxi, and we'd have had a long walk home."

Before long the news of the nuclear plant accident spread and frightened people began leaving Japan. A ticket to a Chinese city, normally about 50,000 yen, went to 300,000 after the quake. There were reports, too, of restaurants closing because so many foreigners had left that they couldn't find staff. Mr. Zhu stayed calm through all of it and didn't rush to buy a ticket. "I thought hard about my family's future. Our children grew up in Japan; sending them back to Shanghai wasn't realistic. So I accepted it — dying in Japan would be all right, as long as the family stayed together. My wife has relatives doing business in Tokyo, and they didn't go back either."

It took a month before they could reach the chef who had gone home the day of the earthquake. The episode taught Mr. Zhu that doing things yourself is steadier. From then on he worked out the side dishes the chef used to handle, and today every side dish at The Bund is cooked by his own hands.

Developing Dishes Runs in the Family

Going from an ordinary white-collar worker to the owner of a well-known snack shop took effort, but family background may have had something to do with it too. Mr. Zhu says his father worked as a private cook when he was young, making French food for foreign families in the French Concession. "Not the kind of chef who works in a restaurant. When foreigners held dinner parties at home, my father bought the ingredients and did the cooking — French food. So growing up, what we ate at home was both Shanghai dishes and French ones. My mother did the local Shanghai home cooking and my father did the French food, quite refined stuff." As for how his father learned French technique, Mr. Zhu shook his head: "For as long as I can remember, my father was a bus mechanic. I never asked him about what came before, while he was alive." Then he laughed and added: "Anyway, I figure the talent for cooking is in my genes."

"We have two menus at the shop now. One is the teiban — the classics — posted outside: shengjian bao, pan-fried dumplings, glutinous rice shaomai, tofu pudding and so on. Then there are the side dishes we put up temporarily, like cold-tossed chicken liver, pickled-vegetable and yellow croaker soup, or oil-drizzled chicken. Those rotate out after a while; if customers like one, it stays. Sometimes I give customers a new dish I've worked out and watch how they react, listen to what they suggest. Cooking is my living, so of course I put the work in, but what really drives me is that I love it — that's how I can work this hard at it. That feeling about cooking comes from my childhood, I think, and from my father's side too."

Before the Great East Japan Earthquake, most of The Bund's customers were Chinese, so through the stretch when Chinese people were leaving Japan, Mr. Zhu's income couldn't get back to what it had been. It was then that a customer from Shanghai suggested he find some way to put seats in the shop.

"My wife and I both like talking with customers, Chinese and Japanese alike — we just enjoy a few words. But back then we only did takeout, so customers ate standing beside the shop, then came up to the front window to talk to us, standing again. Later I took out the shop's glass panel and put in a plain wooden board to make a small counter. Only once we had it did I understand how much that little space could do. Some Japanese customers glance at the menu and don't really understand what the dishes are, and they aren't sure whether we speak Japanese. With the counter we can walk them through the Shanghai dishes properly, and talk. Quite a few customers love these seats, because the small space actually puts people at ease."

Hoping Nishikawaguchi Keeps Its "Original Flavor"

The Bund opened in Nishikawaguchi earlier than the other Chinese restaurants and is better known, Mr. Zhu says, and eighty percent of its customers now are Japanese. The ones who come in the early afternoon have usually traveled some distance, having read about the shop on social media or elsewhere online and made a special trip for the shengjian bao. The later arrivals live nearby — stopping in with friends after work to buy food to take home, or for a drink at the counter.

"There really are far more Chinese restaurants around here than there used to be. They got by serving Chinese customers, and that was fine, but with all the recent press and the Japanese customers Nishikawaguchi has drawn, these Chinese owners have suddenly found themselves rushing to learn Japanese. Japanese people do like to follow a crowd. Take a knife-shaved noodle shop near here. Business wasn't good at first, then they started selling lamb skewers and took off, because people from northeast China love lamb skewers, there are a lot of them around here, and the real thing is hard to find in Tokyo. They queue up for the skewers, and Japanese people see the line, have no idea what it's for, and join it first and find out what's being sold afterwards. I think Nishikawaguchi becoming known for Chinese food is a good thing. Look at Yokohama's Chinatown: the restaurants there are mostly Cantonese, and the few that serve Beijing or Sichuan food have adjusted the flavors to Japanese tastes. A lot of restaurants in Nishikawaguchi don't care what Japanese people like — the owner serves whatever he himself thinks tastes good. That is what makes Nishikawaguchi worth coming to. I hope that as it takes in more Japanese customers, it holds onto that."

Between Shanghai and Tokyo

Interviewing people in Nishikawaguchi, I found that many Chinese owners feel that after years away they can no longer keep up with the pace of their own country. Mr. Zhu has now been away from Shanghai for thirty years. What does that hometown mean to him, and what does he make of Shanghai today?

"Let me start from when I first arrived. I didn't go back to Shanghai until two or three years after coming to Japan, and I was so happy — especially about my mother's cooking, things like youtiao and dabing, flatbread. I had missed those tastes badly in Japan, where you simply couldn't get them. Then some time later, on my second trip back, I noticed something had shifted in me. A shop clerk tossing the change at you, or an oil stain on a restaurant table — things I would never have thought twice about before started to bother me. But the last few visits have felt different again. This January (2019) we went back to Shanghai and walked along the Bund and Nanjing Road, and I saw everyone lining up neatly at restaurants and the streets much cleaner. It left a very good impression on me, and it made me happy. Getting around Shanghai is easy now, too — the subway is extremely developed and the taxis are much cleaner. There's clear change and progress. Prices, though, I find high; measured against local incomes, a lot of things cost far more than in Tokyo."

Finally, Mr. Zhu's daily routine. It doesn't look like an office worker's, but it has its own regularity: he gets up at eleven in the morning, smokes, drinks coffee. He picks up a few things on the way, reaches the shop around noon, and opens once everything is ready. The shop stays open until one in the morning, which adds up to an enormous amount of time there — but between prepping dishes and talking with customers, "the time goes fast." His social circle has widened a lot since WeChat, too: old classmates have found him again, and whenever they get the chance to visit Tokyo they come to the shop. Sometimes several of them gather at The Bund at once, and it gets loud.

Sundays the shop is closed, and Mr. Zhu and his wife usually go together to a nearby super sentō — a public bathhouse with a sauna, a jacuzzi, sometimes exercise equipment — to relax. "After a soak we find somewhere nearby for a drink. That's the happiest stretch of our week." They have been through several crises, and each time the two of them got through side by side and kept their little family shop going. I know that running a business in another country is never simple, but every time I left The Bund and they smiled and saw me off, I felt a thread of envy.

Shengjian Mantou · The Bund

Saikyo Building 1F, 2-19-1 Namiki, Kawaguchi, Saitama (100 meters from the east exit of Nishikawaguchi Station)

Hours: 15:00–01:00 (closed Sundays)

About the Author

Yoshii Shinobu is a Japanese writer who writes in Chinese and currently lives in Beijing. She graduated in international relations from International Christian University in Japan. She has studied in Chengdu, farmed in southern France, and worked as an economic news editor in Taipei, Manila, Shanghai and elsewhere. She now writes full time; her books include Four Seasons of Bento (《四季便当》) and Tokyo Bookstore (《东京本屋》), and she has served as editorial reviewer for the "MUJI Light Meals" book series, among others.

Cover image and all photographs by the author.