[7] By 1880, 26 men and 60 women of Japanese nationality were recorded as living in Hong Kong; the total population would reach 200 by the end of the Meiji era in 1912.

[8] To the displeasure of the Japanese government, which was concerned with protecting its image overseas, many of these early migrants were prostitutes called Karayuki-san.

The first report of the invasion in the Hong Kong Chinese-language press appeared in the Kung Sheung Evening News on 20 September 1931, condemning it in harsh terms and calling on Chinese people to "stand up and take action".

[12] The Kuomintang government in Nanking declared 23 September 1931 as a day of mourning for the Mukden Incident; that evening, a disturbance arose on Johnston Road in Wan Chai, where many Japanese lived, when some Chinese youths began throwing stones at a Japanese-owned pub, ironically patronised mostly by American and British sailors at the time.

[14] On 26 September, the date of the Mid-Autumn Festival, five members of the Yamashita family were attacked near Kowloon City in front of more than one thousand Chinese demonstrators by a Chinese man; the parents died on the scene due to knife wounds, while the grandmother and two of three sons later died in hospital.

[15] As a result of the murders, the colonial government called out the military that evening, and proclaimed a state of emergency the next day.

[16] Tokyo would later cite these riots, and specifically the murders of the Yamashita family, as one casus belli when they initiated the Shanghai War of 1932 (a.k.a.

[29] Japanese communities abroad have been described as "Japanese villages abroad ... whose residents make maintenance of cultural, economic, and political ties with Tokyo their foremost concern"; however, Wong's 2001 study of Yaohan employees refuted this notion in the case of businesswomen working in Hong Kong.

Notably, in one survey, a third of the single or divorced women coming to Hong Kong during this period reported previous study abroad experience.

[32] Though many Japanese women came to Hong Kong intending to learn to speak Chinese (either Cantonese or Mandarin), upon arrival they found that communicating in English was not only sufficient for everyday life, but placed them in a privileged position vis-a-vis the local population.

[37] The club, previously in the Hennessy Centre [zh] (興利中心), initially catered only to Japanese people and a hand-picked group of non-Japanese, numbering around 200.