and Kobayashi Hideo, eds., Nihon teikokushugi no Mansh shihai: jgonen sens o chshin ni (Jich
35. Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, pp. 130-132.
36. Sometimes called the reform bureaucrats, the term new bureaucrats is loosely applied to officials who supported a variety of state-strengthening economic and social reforms which often had a fascist tinge. For more detail, see Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, pp. 116-156; Barnhart, pp. 71-76, 171-175; and William Miles Fletcher, The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 88-105.
37. For basic references, see Chapter 1, note 2.
38. Hara Akira, “1930 nendai no Mansh
39. Ishid
40. On the Manchurian settlement program, see Mansh
41. Manshikai, vol. 2, p. 84.
42. Mantetsu, ed., Mansh nenkan: Shwa 8 nen (Dalian: Mansh
43. The phrase comes from John W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954 (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1979), p. 85.
44. On the occupation of China, see Lincoln Li, The Japanese Army in North China, 1937-1941: Problems of Political and Economic Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), and John Hunter Boyle, China and Japan at War, 1937-1945: The Politics of Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972).
45. On the Co-prosperity Sphere, see E. Bruce Reynolds, “Anomaly or Model? Independent Thailand's Role in Japan's Asian Strategy, 1941-1943,” and Ken'ichi Got
46. Carter J. Eckert, “Total War, Industrialization, and Social Change in Late Colonial Korea,’ in Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 3-39.
47. Wan-yao Chou, ‘The K
PART II
THE MANCHURIAN INCIDENT
AND THE NEW
MILITARY IMPERIALISM,
1931–1933
3 War Fever
Imperial Jingoism and the Mass Media
After the story broke of the military clash at Fengtian on September 18, 1931, the news of the latest action on the China continent commanded the headlines for months. War songs set fashion in popular music and battlefield dramas filled the stage and screen. None of this was completely new, of course, for war booms had accompanied earlier imperial wars against China (1894–1895) and Russia (1904–1905). Moreover, just as those war booms had profoundly influenced cultural developments, the Manchurian Incident war fever marked a turning point from the era christened “Taish
Many currents flowed together to produce the sea change of the early thirties. Policy makers turned to military methods to contain the rise of Chinese nationalism in the Northeast. Withdrawing from the League of Nations in 1933, statesmen led the nation into an era of international isolation and on a collision course with rival imperialists. Politically, this period marked the end of party-run cabinets and the dying gasp of the organized left. The war set off a rapid military buildup and the foundation of what was called the quasi-wartime economy. War fever promoted the militarization of popular culture and encouraged the proliferation of social organizations for total war. These changes collectively constituted the formation of a new military imperialism.
Popular Japanese stereotypes of the “dark valley” of the 1930s conjure up images of a militaristic police state which exercised unlimited powers of political repression to coerce an unwilling but helpless populace into cooperating with the army's expansionist designs. One of the key subplots in the dark-valley version of the 1930s concerns the deliberate deception of the Japanese people through expurgated and even mendacious news reports of the military events on the continent. The role of the press and publishing industry in the governmental disinformation campaign is usually explained by reference to the notorious Peace Preservation Law of 1925, which gave the Home Ministry widespread powers of arrest and censorship. A closer look at the reaction of the mass media to the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident, however, reveals some inaccuracies in this picture of a press muzzled by government censors and publicizing with great reluctance the official story of Japan's military actions in Manchuria. In fact, without any urging from the government, the news media took the lead in promoting the war. Publishing and entertainment industries volunteered in cooperating with army propagandists, helping to mobilize
