Japan's first recognised Chinatown was in Nagasaki, developing in the 1680s when economic prerogatives meant that the shogunate needed to restrict and control trade to a greater extent than previously.

Before this, there had been a large number of Chinese communities in the west of the country, made up of pirates, merchants, and people who fitted into both categories.

[10][11] The Yayoi people who introduced wet rice cultivation to Japan may have come from Jiangnan near the Yangtze River Delta in ancient China.

[10] According to several Japanese historians, the Yayoi and their ancestors, the Wajin, originated in the today Yunnan province in southern China.

[16][17] Mitsuru Sakitani suggests that haplogroup O1b2, which is common in today Koreans, Japanese and some Manchu, and O1 are one of the carriers of Yangtze civilization.

[18] It is suggested that the linguistic homeland of Japonic is located somewhere in south-eastern or eastern China before the proto-Japanese migrated to the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago.

[30][31] In 499 CE, a Chinese Buddhist missionary Hui Shen, paid visit to an island east of China known as Fusang, typically identified with modern-day Japan, which was described in the 7th-century Liang Shu.

[32] According to the Shinsen Shōjiroku (815), 176 Chinese aristocratic families lived in the Kinai area of Honshu, around the modern-day Kansai region.

[33] Sakanoue no Tamuramaro (坂上 田村麻呂, 758 – June 17, 811) was a court noble, general and shōgun of the early Heian period of Japan.

According to the Shoku Nihongi, an official historical record, the Sakanoue clan is descended from Emperor Ling of Han China.

[39] During the Ming dynasty, Japan became decentralized without a central government and with many local daimyo reigning the country, in what would be called the Sengoku Period.

Many of these daimyo encouraged Chinese immigration to Japan due to their skills and boost to the local economy.

[40] Many Chinese pirates would set up their bases in Japan in order to launch raid and attacks on mainland China as part of the wokou.

For example, the powerful Chinese pirate, Wang Zhi, who became known as the "king of the wokou", established his base of operation in Japanese islands, in order to launch raids against the Ming government.

Zhu remains the best remembered of the Ming political refugees in Tokugawa Japan and the one who contributed most to Japanese education and intellectual history.

[42] One of the most well-known Chinese folk heroes was the Ming loyalist Koxinga, who conquered the island of Taiwan from the hands of the Dutch, in order to establish the Tungning Kingdom, the last remnant of the fallen Ming dynasty, where he could continue to fight against the Manchu invaders of China.

[45] The term shin-kakyō (新華僑) refers to people of Chinese descent who immigrated to Japan from Taiwan and mainland China.

The industrial "training scheme" used to bring Chinese workers to Japan has been criticized by lawyers as exploitation, after several deaths.

In addition the Kansai Kabun Jihō, published in Chinese and Japanese, is based in the Osaka area.

[48] During his time in office, former Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara publicly used controversial terms such as sangokujin to refer to Taiwanese Benshengren staying illegally in Japan, and implied that they might engage in rioting and looting in the aftermath of a disaster.

... After World War II, when Japan lost, the Chinese of Taiwanese origin and people from the Korean Peninsula persecuted, robbed and sometimes beat up Japanese.