Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young
of the Japanese, their rivals for empire in the Asia-Pacific region, and the peoples over whom they sought dominion. Both governments and communities took part in the imperial enterprise, and in each case the course of empire was directed by the institutions that shaped the possibilities for individual action, as well as the individuals themselves. To take one example, the Kwantung Army officers who played such a prominent role in the creation of Manchukuo operated within a multiplicity of frameworks. Institutionally, they occupied positions within a colonial garrison army, which itself was part of a larger military bureaucracy, and, beyond that, one branch of the Japanese government. Living in the Northeast, the officers were part of an expatriate community of Manchurian Japanese, who were themselves members of a greater colonial elite. The configuration of international power at a given moment in time prescribed the interactions of these officers with different groups of Chinese, as it did their relations with Westerners in China. In this sense, the outcome of an imperial intervention initiated by Kwantung Army officers could not be reckoned in a single equation: it required a more complicated computation, taking into account bureaucratic politics, the politics of collaboration, and the diplomacy of imperialism. These were the power grids overlaying the Manchurian situation; the calculations they engendered defined the geometry of empire.
They were not static configurations of power. The spatial dimensions of empire changed over time, and there were good reasons for—even a logic to—the transitions. The creation of Manchukuo was part of this logic and thus represented a particular phase in the chronology of Japanese imperialism. In 1931 the initiation of a new military imperialism in Northeast China marked a turning point for the Japanese empire. Thereafter Japanese made Manchukuo the centerpiece of their empire; they crafted it into the jewel in Japan's imperial crown. Why 1931 became the moment of departure for a new kind of imperialism is a complicated question to which I will come back over and again in the course of this book. The answers suggested in this chapter focus on the external pressures on Japanese policy, in particular the ways in which Japan and its imperial rivals responded to the challenge of the Chinese Nationalist movement. I rephrase the question of imperial chronology slightly: What defined the character of the new imperialism in Manchukuo? How was it set apart from earlier phases? The answers in this case look to the significance of Japanese characterizations of Manchukuo as “autonomous” of Western influence—going it alone against Western opposition—and “revolutionary” in the approach to colonial subjects—embracing the challenge of Chinese nationalism through the creation of a new kind of colonial state.
Defining the new imperialism at once in terms of Japan's relationship to the West and its relationship to Asia was a resonant dualism in the history of Japanese imperialism. Since the beginnings of Japanese expansionism in the 1870s and 1880s, the course of empire building had moved through several distinct phases, each defined by changing constructions of this same dualism. Thus the phases of empire building represented on one hand major transitions in Japan's relationship with Europe and the United States as it moved from being the object of imperial ambitions to becoming an imperial rival and enemy. On the other hand, each phase also marked an accumulation of experience with colonial subjects, the acquisition of new cultural forms of colonial capital, which were then deployed in the next phase. Knowledge garnered from this wealth of experience—both in the diplomacy of imperialism and the arts of colonial management—provided the foundation on which Manchukuo was built. For this reason, the story of the jewel in the crown demands a return to Manchukuo's imperial beginnings in order to separate out the old from the new.
IMPERIAL BEGINNINGS
The first push for influence in Northeast China gathered force at a turning point in the history of the Japanese empire. Victories in wars with China (1894–1895) and Russia (1904–1905) gained Japan entry into the ranks of the world's great military powers. During the same period, the new commercial treaties of 1894 and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 signaled Japan's admittance into the Western community of nations on terms of equality. These were momentous steps for a nation that, in 1853, had been forced by American gunboats to accept unequal treaties—the same treaties that turned China into a quasi-colony of Europe before Japanese eyes. The specter of China's humiliation provided a powerful incentive for Japan to expand in self-defense.
Yet Japan's turn to imperialism was more than a simple reaction to Western pressure. The expansionist impulse sprang as well from the social and political upheavals of the mid nineteenth century and drew on a sophisticated discourse on Asia.1 Together, internal and external forces propelled Japan into the precocious imperial activism of the 1870s and 1880s. As American and European commerce wreaked havoc on native industry, Japanese statesmen used European international law to enlarge their national territory, asserting claims to Ezo (present-day Hokkaid
Japanese empire builders first trained their guns on Korea. In the official discourse of Meiji Japan, intervention in Korean court politics and an increasingly belligerent Sino-Japanese struggle for influence represented a new approach to Asia, one fusing older Confucian ideas with newer Western conceptions of international relations. Replacing China as the head of a Confucian family of nations, Japan had the prerogative to guide younger Asian brothers down the path it had itself so recently trod—toward Western-style modernization, civilization, and enlightenment. Articulated in the language of military geopolitics, it was strategically imperative to secure the Korean peninsula, transformed metaphorically into a “dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.” In an international order where the “strong devour the weak,” Japanese concluded they could either join the West as a “guest at the table” or be served up with China and Korea as part of the feast.2 Such were the narratives of imperial mission in the formative years of empire, shaped by ambitions to dominate Korea. And it was that mission that led Japan, pursuing empire in Korea, on into Northeast China.
The desire for a foothold in Manchuria, known to the Chinese as the Three Eastern Provinces, or simply the Northeast, emerged within Japanese Army circles as early as the 1880s.3 If control over Korea was essential to defend the home islands, then Manchuria's strategically placed Liaodong Peninsula was critical to secure Korea. When the Sino-Japanese rivalry over Korea erupted into war in 1894 and Japan proved victorious, the army added a Liaodong leasehold to the terms for peace. But a new rival for domination of the region deprived Japan of the Liaodong concession and soon threatened even the influence won in Korea itself. Supported by France and Germany in the Triple Intervention of 1895, Russia forced Japan to retrocede the Liaodong Peninsula to China. Quickly concluding its own agreement for a leasehold in 1898, Russia then invested heavily in its new sphere of influence in Manchuria and began to push into Korea as well. Tensions escalated and war soon broke out, Japan's seco
With a new diplomatic status, a new military reputation, and a new collection of colonial possessions, Japan turned a fresh page in its imperial history. During this second, developmental, phase of empire, Japan's sphere of influence in Northeast China took shape. An admixture of formal and informal elements, Manchuria represented the two