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 the nation behind the military occupation of Northeast China. They did so, in large part, for a very simple reason: imperial warfare offered producers of mass culture irresistible opportunities for commercial expansion and profit.
Such a phenomenon was certainly not unique to Japan. As John MacKenzie has documented for the case of Britain, and others for the United States and France, the mass media throughout the industrial world played key roles in stimulating military imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 This literature raises many important and knotty theoretical issues concerning the relationship between imperialism and popular culture, three of which have particular bearing on Japan's war fever. First, what did it mean for the politics of empire that the mass media began, in increasingly sophisticated ways, to mediate the relationship between government and public? The mass media provided a key channel for the dissemination of government propaganda to the public. At the same time, it became a means for the government to gauge public reaction to events and policies, and hence, a conduit for the expression of what was being defined as “public opinion.” Inserting itself between government and people, the media's treatment of current events often changed the political significance of those events for both sides.
A second issue that arises in these media studies is how we understand the cultural construction of empire when our analysis of newspapers, movies, and other organs of the mass media limits us to the production rather than the consumption of mass culture. Historians of imperial popular culture speak of “the popular image of empire” and “national myths,” phrases that imply a unity in the public perception. Their studies persuasively demonstrate that the myths of the American frontier or British Christian militarism were imperial constructions produced for and consumed by a mass audience. And yet, what does “popular” mean when we cannot know how stories were read or movies interpreted by the consumers of imperial culture? Moreover, given that newspapers and film companies tailored their products to a consumer market, how much of the popular vision of empire was determined by the media itself and how much was shaped by consumer demand?
Third, this literature on mass media is concerned with how to fit media representations of a particular instance of military imperialism into a broader interpretation of imperial ideology. Whether in the heroic narrative, the stirring speech, or some other form, representations of empire building appealed to audiences in terms of morality and of necessity, for such are the conceptual categories through which societies justify military aggression. And since imperial ideologies are constantly evolving, the question becomes: What was new and what was not-so-new in the imperatives articulated in the moment? In other words, how much did the call to action in Japan's war fever of the early 1930s owe to the accumulations of a venerable imperial tradition, and how much was the product of the historical moment itself?
This chapter makes no claims to resolve these questions in all their complexity. They do, nevertheless, inform an attempt to draw out the broader significance of the imperial jingoism that animated Japanese popular culture during the Manchurian Incident. Like imperial war fevers in Europe and the United States, Japan's war fever of the 1930s revealed the relationship between an expanding marketplace for cultural manufactures and the rise of jingoism as a key force behind military imperialism.
THE NEWS WAR
In 1931 the news of war in Northeast China first spread through the press. On the morning of September 19, just hours after the Kwantung Army secretly detonated the railway track and led the assault on the Chinese military base in Fengtian, early editions throughout the country reported that Zhang Xueliang's soldiers had attacked the Japanese Army. On the front page of the nation's leading daily, the Osaka Asahi, Japanese read that “in an act of outrageous violence [bgyaku], Chinese soldiers blew up a section of Mantetsu track located to the northwest of Beitaying [Military Base] and attacked our railway guards. Our guards immediately returned fire and mobilized artillery to shell Beitaying. Our forces now occupy a section of the base.”
In the following days and months the reports continued, with different news organs striving to be the first to greet their audiences with the army movements of the previous day. Newspapers vied to scoop the daily progress of the Kwantung Army as they tracked its course in September step by step, recording the occupation of Fengtian, Jilin, and other cities along the South Manchurian Railway as well as the removal of Zhang Xueliang's forces to the city of Jinzhou in southwestern Manchuria. Papers battled to break the news of the aerial bombing of Jinzhou in October, the occupation of the northern city of Qiqihar in November, and the ground assault on Jinzhou in December. Headlines competed to announce most dramatically the occupation of Harbin in January, which gave Japan command of all the key Manchurian cities. In February audiences read rival accounts of the marines landing in Shanghai to quell anti-Japanese demonstrations in the Japanese concession; and in March they learned from contending sources that an independence movement had culminated in the founding of the new state of Manchukuo. For six months, the news war over Manchuria consumed the media and their reports gripped the nation.
Why did war fever break out in 1931? Why did it start with a news war? Part of the answer lies in the state of Japan's highly developed and very competitive commercial news media. Because of its level of development, the rise in demand for news from the Manchurian front spurred competition for the expanding news market. This in turn stimulated technological innovation in newspaper production as well as the diffusion of a new medium of communications, radio. Competition, technological innovation, and market expansion became key forces behind the imperial jingoism that suddenly engulfed Japan.
The press provided an excellent conduit for disseminating news of war to what was, by 1931, a highly literate and overwhelmingly newspaper-reading public.2 The middle and upper classes had long provided the core readership for an expanding newspaper