of the governor general, granting to this single authority combined executive, judicial, and legislative powers. Buttressing the power of the governors general were military garrisons which collectively constituted a sizable overseas force: two divisions in Korea, one in the Kwantung Leased Territory, and several regiments in Taiwan. These units, particularly the Korea and Kwantung Armies, evolved into seasoned imperial troops with their own distinctive esprit de corps.
In order to make colonialism pay, Japanese authorities organized financial institutions such as the Banks of Taiwan and Korea, charging them to take control of the monetary system and to finance colonial trade and investment. To facilitate the exploitation of what were, at the time of annexation, overwhelmingly agricultural economies, Japan set up semipublic companies such as Mantetsu (the South Manchurian Railway) and the Oriental Development Company. These restructured the landholding arrangements and oversaw the transfer of large blocks of land into Japanese hands. They promoted the commercialization of agriculture and steered production toward such profitable export crops as sugarcane in Taiwan, rice in Korea, and soybeans in the Kwantung Leased Territory.
Standing between the political and economic apparatus of the colonial state on one hand, and native society on the other, were the agents of enforcement—the colonial policemen. These factotums of Japanese administration performed a. wide variety of tasks. In addition to their ordinary policing duties, they collected taxes, mobilized labor for road construction, oversaw land purchases, enforced tenant agreements, and taught school. To carry out all these functions, Japan built up enormous colonial police forces. In Korea and Taiwan, for example, the police operated through four levels of administration. At the base of this structure the colonial state maintained 2,599 police substations in Korea in 1926 and 1,510 in Taiwan in 1931. The total forces numbered 18,463 (40 percent native) and 11,166 (20 percent native), respectively.10
Such were the institutions Japanese developed to rule their formal empire in the early twentieth century, and which shaped and schooled the first generation of colonial elite. Adjusting this experience colonizing Asia to fit with the imagined Asia of the past, Japanese discourse on colonialism sharpened the definition of the imperial project and its local colorations. When Japanese spoke now of “Japan and Asia” distinct images of Taiwan, Korea, China, and Manchuria leapt to mind. To the abstract notion of “empire” were now attached concrete details: a police station in Seoul, a colonial currency in Taiwan, the pyramids of soybean cake stacked on the Dalian wharves. Empire had smells and sounds; it could be touched and tasted.
In their first articulations of an imperial mission, Japanese had used various metaphors to describe their new relationship with Asia: as head of an East Asian family of nations, as victor in an international struggle for survival, as vigilant defender against the threat of a peninsular dagger that pointed at Japan. Whether expressed in Confucian, Social Darwinist, or geopolitical terms, early Meiji calls for the expansion of Japanese interests in Asia represented prescriptions for future behavior, not descriptions of existing relationships. However, colonial experience gradually transformed moralistic imperatives of Confucian tutelage into the crisp bureaucratic professionalism of the science of colonial management; older goals of enlightenment (kaika) made way for the new teleology of progress (hattatsu).
In the international jungle of the new era it was no longer Asia but the West with which Japan battled for survival. The lines of advantage that military leaders called on their countrymen to secure in the 1890s became the lines of sovereignty in subsequent decades. Soldiers first fought and won these territories; then they patrolled them against enemies within and without. In the process, experience infused geopolitical imperatives with memories of sacrifice, death, and the hates of war.
In Northeast China, as elsewhere, a distinct variation of colonial mission emerged, merging the historical specificity of this dominated territory with the broader goals of the empire as a whole. Inscribed in the slogan “managing Manchuria” (Mansh keiei), the quest for empire in the Northeast combined strategic and economic imperatives in equal measure. It is to the development of these interests in the early years of Mansh keiei that I now turn.
“MANAGING MANCHURIA”
In 1905 and 1906 the Japanese government established a Kwantung governor general to administer the Kwantung Leased Territory and created a network of consulates throughout the Northeast to act for the Foreign Ministry. Their influence, however, was quickly overshadowed by the growing prominence of the institutions created to spearhead the military and economic penetration of the new continental foothold. Indeed, the Kwantung Army and Mantetsu together defined the nature of empire in the Northeast.
In keeping with the strategic importance accorded the new acquisition, a sizable military presence was established in the Northeast. The Kwantung garrison (reorganized in 1919 under its better-known appellation, the Kwantung Army) was composed of a regular army division and a heavy siege artillery battalion, both stationed within the Kwantung Leased Territory.11 Supplementing this force were six independent garrison battalions of railway guards deployed along the railway zone, making a total troop strength of some 10,000 men. Except for a temporary loss of two railway guard battalions during military retrenchment in the late twenties, the Kwantung Army remained at this strength until the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident in 1931.
Fearing a revenge attack after the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese Army planning concentrated on countering the Russian threat by turning Manchuria into a strategic buffer zone. Staff officers believed that in order to defend Japanese interests it was imperative to expand Mantetsu's lines into a network connecting Japan, Korea, and Manchuria which could move men and materiel quickly into position in north Manchuria. Thus the Kwantung Army was assigned a two-fold strategic mission: first, to help secure concessions from the Chinese to build new rail lines deemed strategically necessary; and second, to ensure that Manchuria remained free of the political and military disturbances beginning to spread throughout China.
Over the course of the following two decades, the Kwantung Army pursued this mission with zealous determination. Acting sometimes at the behest of the army high command or with the unofficial support of civilian officials, and sometimes on independent initiative, Kwantung Army officers made the army into an agent of subimperialism. To the plotters, the revolutionary overthrow of China's imperial dynasty in 1911 and its subsequent descent into civil war provided a stream of opportunities to reshape the Chinese political situation to Japanese advantage. In the Northeast, Kwantung Army intrigues turned on nurturing the power base of the collaborationist warlord Zhang Zuolin and scheming to wrest Manchuria and Mongolia from Chinese control.12
The practice of seconding military advisers to Chinese leaders (an estimated fifty Japanese officers advised Zhang's army in 1928) provided ample opportunity for various forms of Japanese intervention.13 During the late teens and twenties these military advisers supplied influence, information, funds, weapons, and even Japanese soldiers to ensure Zhang's victory over rival warlords. None of this came free, of course, and in exchange Japanese advisers secured promises of mining, railway, lumbering, and other concessions.
At a low point in what had always been an uneasy partnership between Zhang and the Japanese, Kwantung Army plotters decided they were best rid of him. Leading the conspiracy, Colonel K
