Japanese people in China are Japanese expatriates and emigrants and their descendants residing in China. There were 127,282 Japanese nationals living in China in 2009. 105,764 Japanese nationals resided in Mainland China, and 21,518 in Hong Kong and Macau.
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History
Tang dynasty China received 11 Japanese girl dancers as tribute from Balhae in 777.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese government introduced a plan to settle 5 million Japanese in Manchukuo. Following the end of the war, approximately 2,800 Japanese orphans in China were left behind by families repatriating back to Japan. The majority of Japanese left behind in China were women, and these Japanese women mostly married Chinese men and became known as "stranded war wives" (残留婦人, zanryū fujin). Because they had children fathered by Chinese men, the Japanese women were not allowed to bring their Chinese families back with them to Japan so most of them stayed. Japanese law only allowed children fathered by Japanese fathers to become Japanese citizens.
As of October 2009, the number of Japanese nationals living in China is 127,282 (including 21,518 in Hong Kong and Macau) according to a report by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the third largest group of Japanese people outside Japan after Brazil and United States. However, the 2010 Census of the People's Republic of China recorded 66,159 foreign nationals from Japan residing in Mainland China (figure excluding Hong Kong and Macau), representing nearly half of the Japanese Foreign Affairs Ministry figure. The number of Japanese emigrants to China and their descendants are unknown.
In these ten years, Japanese nationals living in China increased roughly three times from 46,000 to 127,000 in proportion to the growth in trade volume between the two countries. Gubei, Shanghai has the largest concentration of Japanese nationals in Mainland China.
Education
Mainland China has several Japanese international schools:
Supplementary Japanese language education programs for Japanese children in Mainland China include those in those in Nanjing, Ningbo, Shenyang, Shenzhen, Wuxi, and Zhuhai.