Japanese Mothers and Rural Settlement in Wartime Manchukuo

Abstract

Japan’s involvement in what would become World War II began as early as 1931, when Japanese Kantô Army troops invaded Manchuria, or northeast China, and helped engineer the 1932 creation of the nominally independent state of Manchukuo after occupying the area. Beginning in the thirties, Manchukuo’s Japanese handlers and its Chinese collaborators intended for the nation to serve as a model utopia for Japanese developmental aims. Following the 1937 Japanese invasion of China south of the Great Wall, the wartime goals of the imperial Japanese government began to suffuse all aspects of public and private spheres as propaganda efforts intensified both domestically and throughout Japan’s empire during a time of total war—including in Manchukuo. Women, and especially mothers, became the targets of these endeavors as well as serving as active participants in the war effort, through their labor as both workers and child bearers. Propaganda media such as magazines and pictorials linked domestic Japan with its empire and touted desirable behaviors for all Japanese subjects where women raised future soldiers, supported their men as they went to war, and took their places at work in both urban and rural locales.

Portions of this text are reprinted with permission of the publisher from Glorify the Empire by Annika Culver © University of British Colombia Press 2013. All rights reserved by the publisher.