Manchuria occupied a peripheral position within this wider empire: it was neither the strategic focus of foreign policy nor the site where key innovations in imperial management took place. But all this changed after 1931, as Japanese focused their energies on the construction of a new kind of empire in the Northeast.
The new face of empire showed itself in three areas of activity—military conquest, economic development, and mass migration. First, under the guidance of the garrison force known as the Kwantung Army, thousands spilled their blood in a series of military campaigns from 1931 to 1933 collectively designated the Manchurian Incident. In the course of these campaigns, Japan brought all of Manchuria under military occupation, extending formal control to the Amur River and the border of Soviet Siberia in the north, and to the Great Wall, cf China in the south. Second, under a new regime of colonial management known as the controlled economy, the Japanese-run Manchukuo government conducted a bold experiment in planned economic development and state capitalism. The project involved the integration of the two economies, tying Manchurian development to domestic production goals through the creation of the Japan-Manchuria bloc economy. Third, an ambitious plan to send five million Japanese farmers to settle in the Manchurian hinterland was designed to create a new generation of “continental Japanese” who would secure a more thorough domination of colonial society. Linking social policy in the metropolis and the empire, the Japanese government sought to make the Manchurian population 10 percent Japanese through the export of impoverished tenant farmers, who were the most visible manifestation of Japan's rural crisis,
In the service of these three endeavors, over a million Japanese soldiers, entrepreneurs, and agricultural emigrants crossed the waters that separated Japan from the continent. While they invested their futures and sometimes their lives in the building of Manchukuo, at home many times their number labored over the empire in indirect, though no less essential, ways. During the military campaigns of the Manchurian Incident a wave of war hysteria swept Japanese society. War fever generated the domestic political and social support that gave the Kwantung Army freedom of action to engage in aggressive military imperialism, as Japanese fought to defend “the Manchurian lifeline” (Mansh seimeiseri). Businessmen and intellectuals, inspired by utopian visions of economic opportunity, used their social standing to sell the idea of staking Japan's future on “Manchurian development” (Mansh kaihatsu). Local elites led rural communities to endorse plans to send as many as half their villagers to colonize Manchuria and build “a new heaven on earth” (shintenchi). Although they never set foot in Manchuria, these different groups of people were empire builders nonetheless.
Together they constructed the metropolitan infrastructure of empire. Japan's empire building in Manchuria thus produced two imperial systems—one in the colony and one in the metropolis. In Manchuria, Japanese established a state apparatus, structures of economic domination, and mechanisms of social control; at home they built a parallel set of political and social structures to mobilize the resources essential to the success of the imperial project. These efforts, and the transformations they wrought, are the subject of this book.
STUDYING EMPIRE
Historians have usually examined Japanese expansion in Manchuria from the top down, studying the formation of empire almost entirely as an activity of state. Consisting of policy studies, analyses of bureaucratic politics, and monographs on key military figures, the historical record presents a portrait of the official mind of empire. Accounts of the military occupation of Manchuria in the early 1930s have focused on the question of who made the decision for war. Was it an act of subimperialism and insubordination on the part of Kwantung Army officers in Manchuria? Or was it directed by responsible government authorities in Tokyo?1
Studies of Japan's economic development of Manchuria have also concentrated on state actors. Taking up different components of economic policy, the debate in this case has revolved around the question of assessing the success or failure of the Manchurian experiment. Was the controlled economy in Manchuria a bold innovation in industrial policy that provided the foundation for the postwar “economic miracle”? Or was it a risky experiment with heavy industrialization through economic autarky, doomed to failure because of the dependence of Japan's capital- and resource-poor national economy on Western markets?2
While the subject is not much discussed in English, the considerable body of Japanese-language work on the colonization of Manchuria falls into two camps, between which lies an interpretive gap. One camp consists of academic studies of the formation and implementation of settlement policy within the framework of Japanese aggression. These works stress the exploitation of the Chinese and Korean peasants who worked the lands in Northeast China. The other camp is made up of popular accounts by former colonists, which tell the story of their own victimization. These focus on the tragic denouement of Manchurian colonization for the many Japanese colonists who died at the hands of Chinese and Russian soldiers at the end of the war. Whether, as agents of the imperial state, the colonists were victimizers of the people of Northeast China or were themselves victims remains the point of contention between the two camps. Yet despite their differences, both interpretations of colonists-as-victims and colonists-as-victimizers share the assumption that colonists were controlled by the state.3
At the root of this historiographical preoccupation with the state is the issue of responsibility: responsibility for empire and responsibility for war. Public memory in Japan avoids the question and adheres to the view, enshrined by the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, that a military cabal seized hold of government and forced the people into a reckless war. Even after fifty years, the pervasiveness of this narrative of victimization—what Carol Gluck has called “history in the passive voice”4—is striking. Despite the popular conviction that ordinary people were not the agents but the victims of their imperial past, there is an increasingly vocal call among the community of progressive scholars in Japan to investigate the “people's war responsibility” and “fascism at the grass roots.”5 This challenge suggests the need to revise the historical record on Manchukuo, for missing from the picture are the millions of people who were involved in its construction—through war support associations, business unions, colonization committees, and countless other organizations. It clearly took more than ministers and generals to make an empire, and this book examines how society—both the institutions and the individuals that comprised it—was engaged in the empire-building process. The state is not eclipsed as an object of analysis, but rather the focus is on the roles of both state and society and the ways in which they mobilized each other for the imperial project.
Since the concepts of “state” and “society” are here used to formulate the problem of agency, a brief word is in order about what is meant by these terms, I understand them, first, to signify an expression of power in relationship to one another and to the empire. The state wields power in its ordering of society, while society exercises power in its shaping of the state. As each projects its power overseas, both state and society become agents of empire. Second, such power is deployed through institutions. State power operates through bureaucratic organizations: government ministries, agencies, and committees. Social power is similarly effected through organizations such as chambers of commerce, political parties, and women's groups. In both state and society such institutions provide the vehicles through which individuals effect power by collective action. In other words, institutions mediated the relationship between the individual and the empire, whether that individual was a government official or a private citizen. To ask the question, then, Who were the agents of empire? involves looking at the roles of both private and public institutions in mobilizing support for Manchukuo. It means seeing how Manchukuo looked from the bottom up as well as from the top down, and depicting the popular, as well as the official, mind of empire.
Although the concepts of state and society are here paired as dichotomous categories to make a point about the involvement of non-government actors in the imperial project, a final caveat must be added about the problem with defining them in oppositional terms. In any specific instance the boundary line between state and society is extremely fuzzy, making it difficult to say where state ends and society begins. Are public school teachers, for instance,
