Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young

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, state actors or social agents? If army officers are part of the state, where do conscript soldiers belong? The arbitrariness of the answers to such questions suggests that rather than posing state and society as a dichotomy, we should conceive them as reflections of one another, or alternate formulations of the same entity. Mobilized for empire all individuals become extensions of the state even as they remain members of society.

      Though fundamentally empires are social products, they are not much studied as popular enterprises. Preoccupied with identifying a theoretical model that would explain the causes of imperialism—and particularly the sudden burst of European expansionism in the late nineteenth century—literature on European and American imperialism has tended to focus on the rival merits of economic and political theories of causality. In the former instance, this meant showing how the structures of an expanding industrial capitalism sought to open and control new overseas markets. In the latter, scholars focused on the decision making of both metropolitan leaders and their on-site agents. They identified the motives for the so-called new imperialism in both the rivalrous dynamics of the international system as well as growing political instability on the borders of the European empires in Asia and Africa. For a long time divisions within the Anglo-American academy between Marxist and anti-Marxist scholars fossilized this debate into a series of revisions of the capitalist theory of imperialism on one side and debunking attacks on the other.⁶

      In recent years this has changed, as historians of imperialism have taken up the question of culture. Beginning in the early 1980s, books on empire and technology, science, ideology, propaganda, popular culture, and other topics have appeared, shifting the focus away from political and economic structures of empire.⁷ Although this conversion to culture reinvigorated the study of imperialism, cultural theories of imperialism have only begun to challenge the monocausal terms of the older debate. In much of this literature culture simply supplanted economy or politics as the sole independent variable. And yet, in the empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is impossible to reduce the roots of expansionism to a single cause. No more than Marxist theories of imperialism, power-politics models, or arguments about subimperialists and turbulent frontiers, can studies of the cultural construction of empire account for the