[/floatr]LAT: Chinese city of Dalian woos former Japanese colonizers to return
Looking back, Japanese businessman Tomatsu Ito says, he might as well have moved to Mars rather than a few hours' flight away to China. Unlike in his publicly polite homeland, drivers in Dalian were chaotic, often careening through crowded crosswalks. Worse, he couldn't muster even the most basic Chinese. Often desperate, he would phone JianHua Yang, his second in charge at the branch office of an Osaka, Japan-based software company. Yang is a Dalian native who, like many here, speaks Japanese. "I'd call him out of nowhere," Ito recalled. "I'd say, 'I'm lost again. I have no idea how to get home.' " Their budding bicultural friendship symbolizes a trend here: Ito is among thousands of Japanese flocking to this bustling port on China's eastern seaboard. Resentment still runs deep in China over Japan's 40 years of often brutal colonial rule in this region in the early 1900s, but Dalian has become a singularly welcoming oasis. Seeking to establish a regional high-tech hub, Dalian officials are courting Japanese investors, offering tax breaks and talking up the city's weather, infrastructure, friendliness and proximity to Japan...Yet Dalian remains conflicted. Although Japanese business provides jobs and development capital, many of Dalian's 6 million residents still carry the scars of a war with Japan's Imperial Army...Sitting on the stoop of her Nanshan apartment building, Li Pingwei said the Japanese revival has been good for her family's jade business. She even has learned to speak the language. But she's bitter. "The Japanese were so cruel to the Chinese," she said. "They may be creating jobs in Dalian, but I will hate them forever"...more...
