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 the social health of farm villages, Manchurian colonization represented a new level of state involvement with rural society on one hand, and a new level of rural involvement in the empire on the other.
Collectively, these chapters describe the efforts of rich and poor, of officials and private citizens, of urban and rural residents to build an empire in Manchukuo. Although this is overwhelmingly a domestic story, it begins in the empire itself. It was international pressures that drove Kwan-tung Army conspirators to undertake the Manchurian Incident in 1931, and it was in the arena of foreign policy that the event demarcated the sharpest break with the past.
1. Dated, but still useful historiographical essays dealing with the debate over Japanese military expansionism are Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr., “1931–1937,” and Louis Morton, “1937–1941,” both in Ernest R. May and James C. Thomson, Jr., eds., American-East Asian Relations: A Survey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 243–290. The key works on the military history of the Manchurian Incident in English include: Robert J. C. Butow, Tojo and the Coming of the War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), pp. 28–47; Alvin D. Coox, “The Kwantung Army Dimension,” in Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peat-tie, eds., The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 395–428; James B. Crowley, japan's Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930–1938 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 82–186; Sadako N. Ogata, Defiance in Manchuria: The Making of Japanese Foreign Policy, 1931–1932 (1964; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984); Mark R. Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Japan's Confrontation with the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 87–181; and Takehiko Yoshihashi, Conspiracy at Mukden: The Rise of the Japanese Military (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). For analysis of the Japanese debate that divides scholarly linterpretations into Marxist and non-Marxist camps, see Hatano Sumio, “Japanese Foreign Policy, 1931–1945: Historiography,' in Sadao Asada, ed., japan and the World, 1853–1952: A Bibliographic Guide to Japanese Scholarship in Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 217–240. The Japanese literature on the subject is voluminous, but successive revisions of the Marxist interpretation of the Manchurian Incident can be traced in Rekishigaku kenky
