three projects involved more money, more resources, and more people with each passing month. Each step grew bolder and each decision more brash, as Manchukuo increasingly defined the cutting edge of imperial policy. By the late 1930s Manchukuo had become synonymous with the Kwantung garrison, pride of the Imperial Army, with the command economy and the yen bloc, and with the noble labors of the settlers who tilled the rich earth of Manchuria. What had been developed in the Northeast to meet the challenge of nationalism in China created a model for the construction of a new kind of empire. Japanese applied this model to an Asia where the rise of anti-imperialist nationalisms threatened the old formulas for imperialist cooperation and colonial management. In this way, the creation of Manchukuo ushered in an era of autonomous imperialism for Japan in Asia.
AUTONOMOUS IMPERIALISM
This third phase of imperialism lasted until the end of World War II. What Japanese officials called “autonomous diplomacy” signified two departures from past practice. First, it meant liberating imperial interests in Asia from a consideration of relations with the West. In the past, fearing diplomatic isolation, Japanese policy makers took careful stock of how a potential move in Asia was likely to be received in the West. Interventions were preceded by judicious multilateral negotiations. After 1931, however, the “Manchurian problem,” the “China question,” and the “advance south” all were decided unilaterally and in the face of Western opposition. The standoff between Japan and the great powers in the League of Nations in 1932-1933 signaled this change in direction. In the spring of 1933, failing to gain Western endorsement for its actions in Northeast China, Japan left the League and isolated itself diplomatically. Of their own volition, Japanese statesmen withdrew from the great power club into which they had labored so long to gain entry.
Second, autonomy betokened a new independence for the colonial armies. In this sense the origin of the new phase of imperialism in a Kwantung Army conspiracy was of more than passing importance. Indeed, military faits accomplis followed one upon the other, as aggressive field officers took their lead from the success of the Manchurian Incident. Since Meiji times, imperial expansion began with military conquest. But by the 1930s, the imperial garrisons had multiplied and the institutional complexity of the armed services opened new possibilities for subimperialists. The trigger-happy proclivity of the garrison armies turned the boundaries of the empire into a rolling frontier. And as the army gained influence over political institutions both at home and in the empire, the tendency to resort to force when negotiations stalled only grew stronger.
This “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to empire building drew Japan into a series of military conflicts. At first, China and the Soviet Union responded to Japan's go-fast imperialism with concessions.43 In the early 1930s, the Nationalists were too busy fighting the Communists to resist the takeover of Manchuria. Stalin, preoccupied with agricultural collectivization, the five-year plans, and purging the party, decided to sell off the Chinese Eastern Railway in 1935 and retreat before Japan's advance into north Manchuria. But after the formation of a united Chinese Communist-Nationalist front in 1936 and the Soviet fortifications of the Manchurian-Soviet border, both China and the Soviet Union began to stand their ground. War broke out with China in 1937; and with the Soviet Union in 1938 and 1939.
Similarly, American and European interests in Asia were initially consumed with domestic economic problems and the dissolution of the international financial system. The day before the Manchurian Incident, Great Britain went off the gold standard; there was little attention to spare for the Far East. Although after 1937 the United States opposed Japan indirectly by supplying Jiang Jieshi with war materiel, only in 1940, after the outbreak of war in Europe and the Japanese advance into Indochina, did the United States begin embargoes on strategic materials to Japan. The tightening of the economic screws led to the decision, once again, to attack; from December 1941, Japan was fighting a war against Britain and the United States, and the boundaries of the empire became an endless war front. In the process, the empire and the war grew indistinguishable. The hallmark of the new imperialism was a perpetual state of war. From the creation of Manchukuo to the occupation of Southeast Asia, policy makers and foot soldiers alike were propelled by a sense of crisis and the extraordinary needs of a nation at war.
Following the model pioneered in Manchukuo, the autonomous phase of empire also denoted a new kind of colonial rule. This was signaled first in official rhetoric, which sought to depict the Japanese colonial state as the ally of anti-colonial nationalism. First, Manchuria was “liberated” from China by a movement for independence; later, Japanese set up an administration in Southeast Asia under the slogan “Asia for the Asiatics.” As vacuous and self-serving as these declarations seem in retrospect, at the time they were initially effective in mobilizing support both among Japanese at home and among the Asians who helped Japan create the new colonial institutions.
The organizational structure of the puppet state which was developed in the Northeast subsequently became the prototype for the creation of a string of collaborationist regimes in occupied China.44 In Southeast Asia, the picture was more complex. With the support of local nationalist movements, Japan drove out Western colonial rulers, establishing two types of administration. In Thailand (the sole independent country at the time of Japanese occupation), and after January 1943 in Burma and the Philippines, alliances gave Japan the power of indirect rule. In Indonesia and Malaya, the occupying forces governed through a military administration. With the exception of French Indochina, where Japan ruled in collaboration with the French authorities and was opposed by Ho Chi Minh's newly organized Vietminh, Southeast Asian nationalists cooperated with Japanese colonial rule, especially in its initial phase.45
Strategies of mobilization were part of the Manchuria formula. Military, political, economic, and cultural institutions were created or reshaped to organize new communities of support for Japanese rule. Ambitious young Chinese found the Manchukuo Army and military academy a route of advancement, as did their counterparts throughout the empire. Military institutions formed in the late colonial period in Burma, Korea, and elsewhere became the training ground for postcolonial elites. Similarly, Japanese established mass parties such as the Putera in Indonesia and the Kalibapi in the Philippines, patterned on Manchukuo's Ky
It was not just colonial state institutions, but also the experiment with economic autarky in Manchukuo that became the guiding spirit of the wartime Japanese empire. The integrated industrial and trading unit formed with the Japan-Manchuria bloc economy was extended first to include north China, then the rest of China, and finally Southeast Asia in a self-sufficient yen bloc. In Korea, Taiwan, and north China this involved industrialization and heavy investment, as it did in Manchukuo. The lessons of economic management learned in Manchukuo, including currency unification, production targets, semipublic development companies, and other tools of state control, were also applied in these new economies.
In all these ways the experiment in Manchukuo marked the beginning of a new imperialism, made necessary by the upsurge of revolutionary nationalist movements throughout the empires of Asia. European powers responded to the rise of Asian nationalism with a policy of appeasement, attempting to shore up the crumbling colonial edifice through political concessions in the Middle East and India. Japanese dealt with the same challenge by claiming a unity with Asian nationalism. They tried to coopt the anti-colonial movement by declaring the Japanese colonial state to be the agent of nationalist
