The existing literature has examined the Chinese nationalism of Chinese overseas merchants, detailing their financial contributions to the anti-Japanese war and their participation in boycott movements of Japanese goods. This paper uses Japanese consular reports, prewar Japanese publications, as well as Chinese and Japanese newspapers from Taiwan, Fujian, Japan, Singapore, and the United States to study the adoption of multiple nationalities, including Japanese nationality, by overseas Chinese merchants to reduce commercial risk and seek out economic opportunity. The phenomenon suggests that overseas Chinese merchants were not simply agents of Chinese nationalism.