Pre-modern era
A Chinese legend of uncertain provenance states that Xu Fu, a Qin Dynasty court sorcerer, was sent by Qin Shi Huang to Penglai Mountain (possibly Japan’s Mount Fuji) in 219 BC to retrieve an elixir of life. Unwilling to return without the elixir, the myth asserts that Xu instead chose to settle in Japan.[3]
However, Japan’s first verifiable Chinese visitor was the Buddhist missionary Hui Sheng, whose 499 AD visit to an island east of China known as Fusang, typically identified with modern-day Japan, was described in the 7th-century Liang Shu. Chinese people are also known to have settled in Okinawa during the Sanzan period; the people of the village of Kumemura, for example, are alleged to all be descended from Chinese immigrants.[4]
Modern era
It was estimated that in 1906, more than six thousand Chinese students lived in Japan; many of them resided in Tokyo’s Kanda district.[5]
Post-WWII
Post-World War II Chinese immigrants to Japan, typically referred to as shin-kaky?, have come to Japan from both Taiwan and mainland China.