Warehouse” explained to readers that Manchuria represented a “new paradise [shintenchi] for Japanese industrial expansion” and held endless tracts of “land waiting to be cultivated.” Quantifying Manchuria's bounty, the article described a natural wonderland that was “the world's leading producer of soybeans,” and generated every year “10 million koku of wheat,” “36 million koku of sorghum,” “2.7 million head of cattle,” “3.5 million horses,” “4.6 million sheep,” and other vast amounts of produce and livestock. Manchuria was a great underground reservoir of “the builders of civilization—iron and coal”; a wealth of timber awaited the razing of Manchuria's “expansive virgin forests.” Summing it up, the author declared, “Manchuria-Mongolia is a truly boundless natural field [kbakutaru ten-nen no yokuya] now waiting to be exploited.”109
The maps, the cartoons, and the statistics brought home to readers that Manchurian resources were the key to their livelihood and their prosperity. At the same time, they popularized an embryonic notion of imperial autarky. Stressing Japan's poverty of resources and dependency on imports from Europe and the United States, the media introduced fears of economic blackmail into the language of imperialism.110 In such a world, control over Manchurian resources represented a safeguard of Japanese independence.
The “lifeline” was a metaphor with many resonances. It was appealing as a rallying cry in 1931 because it effectively tapped public memories of the imperial past and at the same time spoke to the economic insecurities of the present. Joining past to present, the construction of Manchuria as a lifeline wove new themes into the existing fabric of imperial ideology. Older notions of a blood debt and the sense that Japanese had paid dearly for their empire in the Northeast were joined to newer conceptions of the economic imperatives of empire for the survival of an industrial nation. The images of the lifeline thus bound Manchuria to Japan within an organic definition of empire: Japan could sooner lose Manchuria than a person could survive the evisceration of a vital organ. Manchuria was being culturally reshaped into the heart of the empire.
COWARDLY CHINESE AND WESTERN BULLIES
The redefinition of the ties that bound Japan to Manchuria was only one of the themes that emerged out of the imperial jingoism of the early thirties. The call to arms also invoked in Japan the idea of racial “others,” the categories of people against which Japanese constructed their own national identity. From the Meiji period, Japanese had conceived of international relations within a hierarchy of race, culture, and power. Acutely sensitive to Japan's place in the system, they looked upon their burgeoning empire as a manifestation of superiority over other Asian countries and a project of “catch-up” with the West. As Japanese imperialism entered a new phase in the 1930s, the imperial discourse on self and other became more overtly chauvinistic, expressing race hates and race fears vociferously. While their troops were overrunning Manchuria, the Japanese told themselves: we fight because we are better than the Chinese and because we are not afraid of the West. In these fictionalized battlefield encounters, Japanese projected inferior qualities onto racial others to accommodate a more aggressive and confrontational style of empire building.
Resentment that Chinese dared to snatch from Japanese hands the precious Manchurian lifeline was quickly transformed into victory euphoria as news of the fall of city after city came in over the wires. These seemingly effortless victories unleashed a wave of self-congratulatory articles about the drubbing Japan was giving China and about the ineptitude of the Chinese soldiery. The point of reference for this outpouring of abuse was the first Sino-Japanese War. As Donald Keene has shown, the war of 1894–1895 marked a turning point in Japanese views of China. Throughout most of Japanese history, China was held as an object of emulation; Chinese civilization was revered as the wellspring of Japanese culture. And although cultural reverence for China was shaken by the specter of China's humiliation during the Opium War and new competing cultural models from the West, as late as 1890 the visit of the Chinese fleet to Japan inspired fear and respect. All this changed, however, in the course of a war that engendered for China a passionate contempt and hatred.111
The ferocity of the war hates did not completely erase the centuries-old tradition of venerating China, embedded in a variety of Sinified artistic, philosophical, scholarly, and other cultural practices. Japanese attitudes toward their erstwhile model of civilization remained filled with ambivalences and contradictions. The scorn showered on the Chinese national character in 1931–1933 represented a new stage in the project of reconciling these ambivalences: producers of Japanese culture seemed determined to wipe out lingering feelings of cultural debt with a concentrated burst of vituperation.
Popular representations of the occupation labored to cast the Chinese in the worst possible light. Incessant boasting about the “200,000 Chinese against 10,000 Japanese” took no notice of Jiang Jieshi's widely advertised nonresistance policy. Transforming this statistic into an index of China's martial deficiency, popular magazines gave rise to a sense that each Japanese soldier was worth twenty of the enemy's.112 As major military targets such as Fengtian and Jilin were occupied virtually without bloodshed, magazines like Shnen kurabu transformed voluntary withdrawal, voluntary disarmament and other forms of nonresistance into cowardly and disorganized retreats. Resurrecting Sino-Japanese War images of Chinese cowardice, stories about the Incident invariably showed Chinese soldiers in the act of “bolting,” “escaping,” “running off,” “hiding,” or, as the favorite phrase had it, “fleeing pell-mell like scattering spider babies” (kumo no ko chirasu y ni nigemadotte imasu).113 Hearsay from an unidentified “eyewitness” reported the witness's surprise to see “officers creep out from under the floors” when the Japanese Army “set fire to the Chinese barracks to smoke-out hiding enemy soldiers.” Such stories provided the evidence that nurtured the legend of the Chinese coward.114
The notion that the enemy did not fight fair added another dimension to the picture. One article on “The Chinese Soldier in Manchuria” explained that “bandit soldiers” were “just like flies, no sooner do you drive them off but they come right back out again.” This construction of the enemy as outlaw did not date to the Sino-Japanese War, but drew rather on vocabularies of repression in Korea. Just as military authorities in Korea blamed “thieves and criminals” for stirring up anti-Japanese riots in 1907–1909 and “lawless elements” for the March 1 uprising of 1919, in Manchuria in 1931, the Chinese enemy was likened to “a gang of thugs.” Worse still, continued the article, were “soldiers out of uniform,” “nuisances” who disguised themselves as ordinary Chinese and sneaked about causing trouble. “Because the Chinese Army loses if it fights in an open and sportsmanlike manner,” concluded the author, “it uses this cowardly method to harass the Japanese Army.”115
Ultimate proof for this judgment was provided, according to popular wisdom, by China's appeal for League of Nations mediation in the Sino-Japanese dispute. A cartoon entitled “The Contest between the Monkey and the Crab over Manchuria” rearranged events to show that China attempted diplomacy only after it lost the war. The cartoon used a popular Japanese folktale about a farsighted crab and a greedy monkey to tell the story of the Sino-Japanese dispute. The original tale begins with a trade; the monkey talks the crab into surrendering a rice cake in exchange for the monkey's persimmon seed. The monkey eats the cake; the crab plants the seed; and the real trouble begins when the crab's carefully tended garden bears a fine, fruit-laden persimmon tree. It is at this point that the cartoon picks up the story, picturing the monkey (China) attempting to steal the fruit of the persimmon tree (South Manchuria) belonging to the crab (Japan). After knocking down several business-suited crabs, the monkey starts chopping at the tree with an ax. At this point the long-suffering crab “finally exploded” and “shoved the monkey's red behind.” The next frame showed a tearful monkey complaining of his mistreatment to the “animal conference.”116 This was the sequence of events that structured the popular narrative of the Manchurian Incident. In the words of a schoolboy the moral of the story was: “Japan is good at war. China didn't win so they brought the issue to the League of Nations.”117
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