Abstract
Owing to a burgeoning body of sophisticated historical works, it has become almost a cliché to say that Manchukuo was an imperialist creation of a unique brand. By addressing the relevance and particularity of Manchukuo in various fields of imperialism as well as transnational and sovereignty studies that transcend the simple nation-state matrix, the authors of some of the most important works on Manchukuo have enhanced our understanding of this nation- and state-building (kenkoku) enterprise. To draw attention to only the illustrative few, Louise Young has put forward her seminal thesis of a “total empire” to explain the comprehensive manner of Japanese mobilization for Manchukuo. In her study, as a methodology and a description of a phenomenon in itself, the term “total empire” is proposed as a parallel term to “total war.”1 Like total war, total empire was made on the home front, entailing multidimensional mobilization of the Japanese nation in all cultural, military, political, and economic endeavors. In her view, Manchukuo signifies not only a military conquest, but also a vast socio-politico-cultural project that represented Japan’s modern efficiency expressed in the forms of Manchukuo’s cosmopolitan cities and agricultural settlements.
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Notes
Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 13.
Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Peter Duus, introduction to The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, eds. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), xviii.
“Nichiman Giteisho” [The Japanese-Manchukuo Protocol], September 15, 1932, in Rekishigaku Kenkyūkai, ed., Nihonshi Shiryō, [5] Gendai [Sources on Japanese History, Volume 5, Modern Period] (Iwanami Shoten, 1997), 16.
Matsusaka, “Managing Occupied Manchuria,” in The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945, eds. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 96–97.
Ishiwara Kanji, Manshūkoku Kenkoku to Shina Jihen [The Establishment of Manchukuo and the China Incident] (Kyoto: Tōa Renmei Kyōkai, 1940), 30–32. For the impact of Yu on Ishiwara’s Pan-Asianist sensibilities, see
Yamamuro Shin’ichi. Kimera: Manshūkoku no Shōzō [Chimera: A Portrait of Manchukuo] (Chuō Kōronsha, 1993), 83–99. On how Yu drew Japanese attention to the concept, see Mitter, 94–95, and
Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 64–65.
Joshua A. Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naito Konan (1866–1934) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
See Susan C. Townsend, “Chapter 9: The Yanaihara Incident,” in Yanaihara Tadao and Japanese Colonial Policy: Redeeming Empire (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000), 228–56.
Yanaihara Tadao, “Manshū Kenbundan” [Discussion on Manchurian Observations], Kaizō (November 1932): 107.
For the analysis of the highly charged romanticism among Youth League activists, see Matsumoto Ken’ichi, “Ozawa Kaisaku no Yume” [Ozawa Kaisaku’s Dream] in Shōwa ni Shisu: Morisaki Minato to Ozawa Kaisaku [Dying alongside Shōwa: Morisaki Minato and Ozawa Kaisaku] (Shinchosha, 1988), 117–87.
Mariko Asano Tamanoi, “Knowledge, Power, and Racial Classifications: The ‘Japanese’ in ‘Manchuria,’” The Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 2 (May 2000): 248–76.
Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 589.
See Takafusa Nakamura, “Depression, Recovery, and War, 1920–1945,” in The Cambridge History of Japan: Vol. 6, The Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Duus, trans. Jacqueline Kaminsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 475, and Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 196–97’.
For Miyazaki’s life, see Kobayashi Hideo, “Nihon Kabushiki Gaisha” wo Tsukutta Otoko — Miyazaki Masayoshi no Shōgai [The Man Who Made “Japan Corporation”—Life of Miyazaki Masayoshi] (Shōgakukan, 1995).
Taiheiyō Sensō Kenkyūkai, ed., Manshū Teikoku (Kawade Shobō, 1996), 109.
Tachibana Shiraki, “Watashi no Hokotenkan” [My Change in Direction], Manshu Hyoron, August 11, 1934, 32–33.
Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 120.
Hochi Takayuki, Harubin Gakuin to Manshūkoku [The Harbin Academy and Manchukuo] (Shinchō Sensho, 1999), 128, and Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, “Manshu Kenkoku Daigaku no Seishun” [The Youths of Manshū Kenkoku Daigaku], Marco Polo (February 2, 1994): 57.
Extrapolated from ibid. More specific data available in Manshū Rōkōkai, ed., Manshū Rōdō Nenkan [Manchurian Labor Yearbook] (Ganshōdō, 1940 edition, published in 1941), 62–65.
Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Fujiwara Sakuya, Ri Kōran, Watashi no Hansei [Li Xianglan, My Life So Far] (Shinchōsha, 1987), 109–11.
Hiroshi Saito, “My Impressions in the Far East and Japanese-American Relations,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 177 (January 1935), 247.
Aishinkakura Hiro, Ruten no ōhi no Shōwashi [Shōwa History of a Wandering Princess] (Shinchōsha, 1984), and Aishinkakura Fuketsu, Fuketsu Jiden.
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© 2007 Eri Hotta
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Hotta, E. (2007). Manchukuo and the Dream of Pan-Asia. In: Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War 1931–1945. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Transnational History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609921_5
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