fervor for their share of Manchurian development. The colonization movement mobilized the energies of tenants and landlords, men, women, and children. From the top down and from the bottom up, agents of empire sought to involve all segments of Japanese society in the Manchukuo project.
To mobilize popular support for Manchukuo, imperial activists used existing institutions and also created new ones. Thus much of my account will focus on schools, army regiments, political parties, mass media, and other social, cultural economic, and political institutions, showing the ways in which they were shaped and reshaped into vehicles for empire building. Whether one looks at the mass media spreading the war fever of the early thirties, academic institutions recruiting engineers to build heavy industry in the new empire, or government agencies organizing the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Japanese farmers in the Manchurian plain, a variety of organizations played a part in the ongoing process
The paper trail of these various agents of empire has led me beyond the collections of government documents and papers of leading statesmen through which historians have customarily read the imperial record on Manchukuo. Unlike the documents of government policy however, there is no established body of sources that constitute the archives of civil society. A letter from one bureaucrat to another elucidates the ideas behind a policy decision, but how do we trace the thoughts of the popular mind of empire? To gain as broad a picture as possible, this study adopts an eclectic approach to sources, exploring the idea of Manchukuo as it was represented in popular magazines, pulp fiction, chamber of commerce records, propaganda pamphlets from the Army and Colonial Ministries, and military police reports. I also read city and prefectural histories from all parts of Japan for information about the local political impact of the Manchurian Incident and war-support campaigns. Recognizing the importance of continental travel as a vehicle for disseminating images of Manchurian development, I look at travel diaries, company histories of the tourist industry, travel guides, and such miscellany as maps, postcards, and souvenirs. And I analyze the numerous village studies produced by the Imperial Agricultural Association, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and the Manchurian Emigration Council, which document with great detail the history of the Manchurian colonists and the impact of their exodus on home villages. From such an array of sources, this book tells the story of Manchukuo from the point of view of the Japanese who built the new empire.
CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM
To a large extent, Manchurian empire building took place in the realm of the imagination. The imperial project generated three distinct imaginings of Manchukuo, cultural constructions that changed as the trajectory of imperial expansion moved from military occupation to economic development to colonial settlement. Japanese first knew Manchukuo as a battlefield; later it became associated with various schemes for economic renovation. Finally, they envisioned it in terms of hardy pioneers in an expansive frontier. For those at home, this succession of imagined empires was as real as their physical embodiments across the sea. In other words, for the vast majority of Japanese, the ideas and symbols of popular culture provided the primary medium through which they would experience Manchukuo.
My attempt here to map the imaginative terrain of empire rests on a three-fold conceptualization of culture. First, since my analysis separates government from non-government initiatives concerning Manchukuo, I distinguish between official and mass cultures of imperialism, the former disseminated through government propaganda apparatuses and the latter through the mass media. Second, because I am trying to locate the idea of Manchukuo within a particular confluence of circumstances in the 1930s, I understand culture as a historical construction. That is to say, ideas, practices, and even traditions are not timeless and immutable inheritances from the past, but represent, rather, the inventions of specific historical moments. Finally, in order to place Manchukuo within the larger historical context of Japanese imperialism and understand how initiatives in Manchukuo both broke with and recapitulated the past, I look at culture as a process. The idea of Manchukuo did not suddenly appear full-blown, but evolved through a process of cultural invention and reinvention. In other words, Japanese imagined and reimagined “Manchukuo” in ways that innovated new imperial practices while drawing on the cultural accumulations of fifty years of empire building.
In all three senses, imperial culture intersected with economic, social, military, and political spheres. The Americanist Richard Slotkin put this well when he wrote: “The cultural historian tries to construct a historical account of the development of meaning and to show how the activities of symbol-making, interpretation, and imaginative projection continuously interlock with the political and material processes of social existence.”10 This means pointing out not only that social existence shapes the imagination, but also the reverse. Ideas about the economy shape its structures; political opinions are institutionalized in new programs and new bureaucracies; militarism helps direct the course of the military. In the context of Manchukuo, this dialectical relationship between ideas and institutions interwove the dreams and deeds of empire.
The pages that follow tell the story of total empire in Manchukuo from shifting vantage points. I begin in Chapter Two with an international history of Japan's advance into Northeast China, situating Manchukuo within the larger context of Japan's colonial empire. Tracing the developmental logic of Japan's expansion in East Asia, this chapter looks to the international context for the answers to the question, Why did Manchukuo become the centerpiece of the Japanese empire in the 1930s? Chapters Three through Nine comprise the heart of the study and focus on the processes of domestic mobilization for each of the three facets of the imperial project in Manchukuo: military, economic, and migratory.
Starting with the watershed events of 1931, Part Two (Chapters Three and Four) attempts to explain, in social and political terms, the domestic forces behind the new military imperialism of the 1930s. Why did the Manchurian Incident become a turning point for Japanese imperialism, and what did it signify for those at home? The answers I find relate the popularization of the new imperialism to the growth of institutions of mass culture and mass politics.
Following the turn to economic methods of imperial expansion in the mid 1930s, Part Three (Chapters Five and Six) takes up the radical experiment in colonial development. These chapters focus on the mobilization of two key segments of the middle class: business elites and intellectuals. In spite of their mistrust of army policy in the puppet state of Manchukuo, both groups were instrumental in supplying the enormous resources necessary for Manchurian development. Looking at the hopes and fears different groups of Japanese projected onto the new empire, I argue that what brought these unlikely allies together was a shared vision of the utopian potential of Manchukuo.
Part Four (Chapters Seven through Nine) formulates an explanation for why Manchurian colonization grew into a nationwide social movement and a major government initiative in the 1930s. In my answer I trace the emergence of agrarian social imperialism—the broad support for the resettlement of impoverished Japanese farmers to the Manchurian countryside in order to resolve the social crisis that industrial capitalism had produced in Japanese farm villages. The Manchurian solution to the problem of the villages was promoted with equal fervor by reformists in and out of government. Together, their participation in the colonization movement brought about a new relationship between state, society, and empire. For bureaucrats in a central government experimenting with techniques of social management, and for rural activists who were demanding greater government responsibility for
