its international context, the story of Manchukuo focuses on the interactions of states and societies across space and time. On the global stage, Japanese empire builders acted and reacted within a specific configuration of power, the logic of which both expanded and delimited the available choices. The crumbling of the great power alliance in China in the face of the Chinese Nationalist challenge and the shockwave of global depression cleared a path for Japanese unilateral action in the late 1920s, even while it closed off possibilities for cooperative diplomacy. The considerable growth of Japan's military and industrial power relative to other regional powers—particularly China—opened up possibilities for aggression on the continent. At the same time, the gathering strength of the Guomindang closed off the option of conciliation toward China, and created a time limit in which the Japanese would have to act to expand before the Chinese Nationalists grew too strong. Similarly, the escalation of the arms race between Japan, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain weighted the scales toward precipitous and preemptive action on Japan's part, in order to capture territory before a military deterrent emerged to block such a move. The assembling and disassembling of alliances, the continually changing balances of power, and the dynamics of cooperation and competition that these produced all figured into the geometry of Japanese imperialism.
This same geometry of empire placed Manchuria among a number of interrelated imperial projects. What happened in central China affected Manchuria, just as events in Manchuria influenced Taiwan. Practices developed in Korea were applied in Manchuria, while Manchuria, in other aspects, became a model for Korea. While Manchuria became the dynamic centerpiece of the empire in the 1930s, the bulwark of autonomous diplomacy and the vanguard of revolutionary imperialism, the imperial strategies innovated in Northeast China were applied elsewhere in the empire as well, often more boldly and with greater consequence. The chapters that follow concentrate almost exclusively on the metropolitan response to Manchukuo. This focus on Manchukuo necessarily eclipses the domestic connections to Taiwan and Korea as well as the mobilization of popular support for the new imperial frontier in Southeast Asia. Yet, even though my narrative places it out of sight, the empire in its entirety was very much a part of the social and cultural context of the 1930s.
Manchukuo did occupy the central space of the Japanese empire of the 1930s, though this special position only developed over time. The stages of this development were intrinsic to the chronology of the Japanese empire. In the first phase, interest in continental expansion and the formation of an imperial mission in Northeast China took shape during the emergence of an imperial Japan in the late 1800s. At that point, Korea rested atop the pinnacle of imperial ambition; Manchuria represented merely a strategic buffer to keep Japan's rivals out of Korea. Acquisition of a foothold in the Northeast, however, coincided with the beginnings of a second phase of empire building, when Japan began to construct and develop institutions of domination in its burgeoning colonial empire. In the process of institution building in the Manchurian leasehold in the teens and twenties, Japanese turned the strategic buffer into an empire famed for the modernizing activities of Mantetsu and the martial spirit of the Kwantung Army. And yet, until Japanese felt their claim to the “rights and interests” in the Northeast challenged by an increasingly importunate Chinese Nationalist movement, these Manchurian holdings were merely in the second string of their colonial possessions. But when boycotts, strikes, demands for rights recovery, and the steady progress toward political unification seemed to imperil all that Japanese empire builders had worked to produce, the Manchurian empire suddenly took on new importance and new commitment. Primed for action, when the old rules for collaboration with local warlord interests broke down, Japan quickly elected a course of military confrontation. In the process, Manchuria became the testing ground for a host of experimental colonial institutions, including the puppet state, the command economy, and state-managed colonization. As the Manchurian experiment took hold and was deemed a success, it became the model for a new imperialism. In the third phase of empire, Japanese unleashed their colonial armies on Asia. The armies proceeded to engage in risky (and ultimately catastrophic) games of brinksmanship with other regional powers, even while they created institutions that were highly successful in mobilizing indigenous support for Japanese rule. Thus, inscribed in the course of expansion in the Northeast—from its beginnings at the turn of the century through the era of autonomous imperialism in the 1930s—was the developmental logic of Japanese imperialism.
These reflections on the large spatial and temporal structures of empire provide the international context for the chapters that follow. Such a context is important because the metropolitan aspect of Manchukuo with which this book is primarily concerned represents only one dimension in the wide spaces of total empire. It is important, moreover, because this book concentrates on the period between 1931 and 1945, a small, though critical, slice of time in the larger history of Japan in Manchuria. Narrowing the field of study, we now move into this different world, focusing on Japan in 1931—a nation swept up in war fever.
1. For Japanese relations with Asia during the Tokugawa period, see Ronald Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), and Marius Jansen, China in the Tokugawa World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
2. For a useful essay summarizing the Meiji discourse on Asia, see Marlene J. Mayo, ‘Attitudes toward Asia and the Beginnings of Japanese Empire,’ in Grant K. Goodman, comp., Imperial Japan and Asia: A Reassessment (New York: East Asian Institute, Columbia University, 1967), pp. 6-30. For a compilation of different accounts of the origins of Meiji imperialism see Marlene J. Mayo, comp., The Emergence of Imperial Japan: Self-defense or Calculated Aggression? (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1970).
3. The strategic concerns of late Meiji imperialism are discussed in James B. Crowley, “From Closed Door to Empire: The Formation of the Meiji Military Establishment,” in Bernard S. Silberman and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Modern Japanese Leadership (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966), pp. 261–285.
4. On Meiji imperialism in Korea, see Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of Korea, 1868–1910: A Study of Realism and Idealism in International Relations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), and Duus, Abacus and Sword.
5. On Japanese imperialism in Manchuria before 1931, see Ken'ichiro Hirano, “The Japanese in Manchuria, 1906–1931: A Study of the Historical Background of Manchukuo,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1983; Herbert P. Bix, “Japanese Imperialism and Manchuria, 1890–1931,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1972; and Herbert P. Bix, “Japanese Imperialism and the Manchurian Economy, 1900–1931,” China Quarterly 51 (July-September 1972), pp. 425–443.
6. For a definitive treatment of the treaty port system, see John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1954, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953).
7. For economic concerns see Peter Duus, “Economic Dimensions of Meiji Imperialism: The Case of Korea, 1895-1910,” in Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 128-171; and William D. Wray, “Japan's Big-Three Service Enterprises in China, 1896-1936” in Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 31-64.
8. On Great Power rivalries in China in the first two decades of the twentieth century, see Ian H. Nish, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance: The Diplomacy of Two Island Empires 1894–1907 (London; Athlone Press, 1966); Ian H. Nish, Alliance in Decline: A Study in Anglo-Japanese Relations 1908–23 (London: Athlone Press, 1972); Peter Lowe, Great Britain and Japan, 1911–1915: A Study of British Far Eastern Policy (London: Macmillan, 1969); and Madeleine Chi, China Diplomacy, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1970).
9. The best summary treatment of Japanese colonialism is found in three essays by Mark R. Peattie: ‘The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945”
