Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young
build one total empire at a time. Before the emergence of Manchukuo in the 1930s, only Korea in the 1890s and early 1900s ever involved domestic society to a degree that approached my sense of total.9
Understood in these terms, Manchukuo was a total empire. This book tells the story of its construction: a process of empire building that was multicausal and multidimensional, all-encompassing and, by the end, all-consuming.
MANCHUKUO IN JAPAN
This is a story, first of all, about an imperial relationship. Imperialism wove an increasingly intricate web of connections between empire and metropolis. Military occupation set in place one network of ties; economic development engendered another. Both of these were intertwined with the associations generated by Japanese settlement. Each soldier who fought to defend the Manchurian lifeline, each shipment of cement used for the development of Manchukuo, and each tenant farmer who settled in the new heaven on earth added to the whole. This expanding web of connections locked Japan and Manchukuo into an intimate embrace, and meant, increasingly, that when Manchukuo caught a cold, Japan sneezed. Whether it was the infectious inflation of the late 1930s and 1940s or the spreading arrests of alleged Japanese Communists that began with Mantetsu (the South Manchurian Railway) in 1942–1943, such sneezes revealed the often unforeseen transformations that imperialism wrought on metropolitan society. For total empire building was a dialectical process in this sense as well, and with the passage of time this process deposited more of Japan in Manchukuo and more of Manchukuo in Japan.
This book concentrates on the latter dimension of this dialectic—the story of Manchukuo in Japan. It is an account of empire building at home, focusing on the proliferating intersections between Manchukuo and the course of daily life—Japanese encounters with Manchukuo in local politics, in schools, or in the morning news. The increasing frequency of such encounters naturalized the new empire. Over the course of the 1930s Manchukuo became ordinary and unexceptional—just another feature of the everyday landscape. The empire that began as a war devolved into a way of life.
My account of this process looks at imperialism through Japanese eyes. Like the ideas of other empire builders, Japanese views of Manchukuo were essentially solipsistic. Chinese and Korean residents of Northeast China had their own perceptions of the Japanese occupation, but these rarely penetrated the Japanese consciousness. Instead, Japanese interpreted Chinese actions to fit their own ideology of imperialism, painting military resistance as banditry or the mass immigration by southern Chinese as signaling a desire for Japanese-style order and justice. But even more striking than such intrusions of Asian others into Japanese imperial narratives was their frequent absence from these accounts. In Japanese dramatizations of the Manchurian Incident, the Chinese enemy was usually a faceless threat that hovered just off stage. Depictions of the hygienic new cities of Manchukuo kept the Chinese urban masses out of sight. Rural Manchuria, for its part, was imagined as empty, flat space—a vast frontier awaiting Japanese settlement. This depopulation of the imaginary landscapes of Manchukuo was an expression of the imbalance of power between Japanese and their others. Neither Chinese nor Koreans in Manchuria had a channel through which they could project their power back to metropolitan Japan, no means by which they could write themselves fully into the narratives of Japanese imperialism. This did not mean that Asian subjects of the Japanese empire had no agency in their own history. In their choices to collaborate or resist, Chinese and Koreans helped determine the shape of Japan's total empire. Their stories are every bit as complicated and contradictory as those of the Japanese. But for the most part colonial subjects were not agents of the history with which this book is primarily concerned, for they did not participate in the building of Manchukuo within Japan.
AGENTS OF EMPIRE
The builders of Manchukuo were a motley crew. Visions of empire fired the imaginations of a mixed collection of right-wing officers, reform bureaucrats, and revolutionaries of left and right, making bedfellows of erstwhile opponents. One could hardly imagine a more unlikely set of coim-perialists than the right-wing pan-Asianist
This did not mean that they held the same vision of Manchukuo's future. Far from it: their ideas were frequently at odds with one another. Where intellectuals saw in Manchukuo's new colonial cities an urban utopia, rural reformers dreamt of agrarian paradise; where businessmen looked upon Manchukuo as the remedy to a faltering capitalist economy, radical army officers saw it as the means to overturn capitalism itself. These contending visions and the political and social conflict that they represented are very much a part of the story of empire in Manchukuo. Although opposition to the imperial project was sometimes forcibly silenced or drowned out, more often it was coopted. Persuaded that the new empire had something to offer them, groups that had been indifferent or even hostile to expanding Japan's position in Northeast China in the 1920s joined together to build Manchukuo in the 1930s. Mobilized for empire, their particular and often contradictory agendas became incorporated into the increasingly complex and unwieldy plans for Manchukuo.
Empire was thus a collaborative project. As Manchukuo grew more elaborate, the mobilization of domestic resources intensified and drew in an increasingly inclusive sweep of Japanese society. During the military occupation, Manchurian policy commanded the attention of both national cabinet officials and local party politicians. Chambers of commerce and labor unions lobbied with equal fervor for their share of Manchurian development. The colonization movement mobilized the energies of tenants and landlords, men, women, and children. From the top down and from the bottom up, agents of empire sought to involve all segments of Japanese society in the Manchukuo project.
To mobilize popular support for Manchukuo, imperial activists used existing institutions and also created new ones. Thus much of my account will focus on schools, army regiments, political parties, mass media, and other social, cultural economic, and political institutions, showing the ways in which they were shaped and reshaped into vehicles for empire building. Whether one looks at the mass media spreading the war fever of the early thirties, academic institutions recruiting engineers to build heavy industry in the new empire, or government agencies organizing the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Japanese farmers in the Manchurian plain, a variety of organizations played a part in the ongoing process
The paper trail of these various agents of empire has led me beyond the collections of government documents and papers of leading statesmen through which historians have customarily read the imperial record on Manchukuo. Unlike the documents of government policy however, there is no established body of sources that constitute the archives of civil society. A letter from one bureaucrat to another elucidates the ideas behind a policy decision, but how do we trace the thoughts of the popular mind of empire? To gain as broad a picture as possible, this study adopts an eclectic approach to sources, exploring the idea of Manchukuo as it was represented in popular magazines, pulp fiction, chamber of commerce records, propaganda pamphlets from the Army and Colonial Ministries, and military police reports. I also read city and prefectural histories from all parts of Japan for information about the local political impact of the Manchurian Incident and war-support campaigns. Recognizing the importance of continental travel as a vehicle for disseminating images of Manchurian development, I look at travel diaries, company histories of the tourist industry, travel guides, and such miscellany as maps, postcards, and souvenirs. And I analyze the numerous village studies produced by the Imperial Agricultural Association, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and the Manchurian Emigration Council, which document with great detail the history of the Manchurian colonists and the impact of their exodus on home villages. From such an array of sources, this book tells the story of Manchukuo from the point of view of the Japanese who built the new empire.
CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM
To a large extent, Manchurian empire building took place in the realm of the imagination. The imperial project generated three distinct imaginings of Manchukuo, cultural constructions that changed as the