Rationale for paternalism: “Semi-feudalistic” tenancy contracts in imperial Japan

This article sheds light on a series of Xinjiang maps created by order of imperial Japan’s General Staff Headquarters in 1943. These maps, seventeen in all, offered panoramic views on Xinjiang’s topography, geological and meteorological conditions, ethnic composition, major cities, riverine systems, aviation ports, roads for motorized vehicles, wireless and postal systems, and various resources. Those maps invite the heretofore little-studied question of how Xinjiang figured in imperial Japan’s geostrategy. This article contextualizes imperial Japan’s heightened strategic interest in Xinjiang during World War II, particularly after the closure of the Burma Road, which paradoxically revitalized Chongqing’s Republican regime. These sources inform the argument that the place of Xinjiang in imperial Japan’s geostrategic thinking must be understood beyond the narrow lens of Sino-Japanese enmity. It warrants a world historical perspective. The article examines said maps and uncovers the multiplicity of Xinjiang’s toponyms and ethnonyms that encapsulated parallel and oftentimes contested temporalities. Tokyo’s attentiveness to ethnological understandings of the region’s indigenous populations reflects an aspiration to construct a political demography that tethered indigenous sovereignty to the authority of the colonial state, bypassing the domination of the Chinese Republic in Chongqing.

The purpose this study is to examine the establishment process of Daejeong- Gwonbeon in the Imperial Japan's forced occupation period and Gwonbeon's Sijo based on Daejeong-Gwonbeon, and analyze its content and meaning. First, by exploring the change process of the Gisaeng (female entertainers) system, this study attempted to examine the characteristics of the Gisaeng system and changes in perception of Gisaeng in the Imperial Japan's forced occupation period. Next, this study tried to understand the process of Daejeong- Gwonbeon's establishment and its meaning through Sijo works based on Daejeong-Gwonbeon.
 In the Imperial Japan's forced occupation period, Gisaeng's role and perception changed after the abolition of the government-gisaeng system. Gisaeng, who was recognized as an artist with expertise, participating in Joseon dynasty national events and various banquets, was perceived as a professional woman who made her living from the craft since the Imperial Japan's forced occupation period. In this way, the change in the Gisaeng system and perception of Gisaeng was due to social changes at the time and had a great impact on Gisaeng themselves.
 In this situation of the times, Daejeong-Gwonbeon's Gisaeng tried to prove their own value as artists. Daejeong-Gwonbeon's Gisaengs tried to emphasize their aspect as artists through dance and song within the changed system. Especially as well as traditional dancing and singing, they tried to differentiate themselves from other Gwonbeons by showing their own unique performances by utilizing their various fortes.
 These characteristics of Daejeong-Gwonbeon are also clearly visible in the Sijo works included in the 『Joseon Beauty Bogam』. Sijo, created in the form of a question-and-answer dialogue, expresses the characteristics and prosperity of Daejeong-Gwonbeon through chrysanthemums and nature. The metaphors and symbols that appear in the works, as well as the question-and-answer form in parallel form, are a typical feature of Sijo, which was often used in the Joseon dynasty, which confirms that the Sijo works created based on Daejeong- Gwonbeon follow the traditional Sijo style.

The purpose of this study is to examine the establishment process of Hanseong Gwonbeon (government female entertainers guild) and Gwonbeon Sijo in the Imperial Japan’s forced occupation period, and to understand its contents and meaning. First, this study looked at the establishment background of Gwonbeon through the process of change in the Gisaeng (government female entertainers) system. Next, this study looked into the establishment process of Hanseong Gwonbeon, Korea’s first Gwonbeon, and looked at Sijo works that introduced Hanseong Gwonbeon.
 In the Imperial Japan’s forced occupation period, Gisaeng changed along with the era and system. Joseon’s Gisaeng, who played an important role in the country as official-government-gisaeng, changed their role and meaning with the change of era. Gisaeng, who was recognized as a professional entertainer, had a sexual image emphasized through the Imperial Japan’s forced occupation period. This is because the distinction between Gisaeng, who practiced skills and arts, and Changgi (prostitute-gisaeng), who engaged in prostitution, gradually became blurred. This change in perception of Gisaeng distorted and made the image of Gisaeng negative.
 However, in the Imperial Japan’s forced occupation period, Gisaeng sought to discover their own meaning and value within the changed society and system. The Gisaeng of Hanseong Gwonbeon honed their skill-art and engaged in various social activities within the guild and system of Gwonbeon. As their activities can be confirmed through newspapers at the time, through the contents, it can be found that the Gisaeng of Hanseong Gwonbeon attempted to inherit the tradition as art entertainment professionals. It can be seen that Gisaeng clearly distinguish themselves from Changgi (prostitute-gisaeng).
 The works of Sijo express Hanseong Gwonbeon through metaphors and symbols, and take the form of a question and answer in the form of a couplet. This method is a frequently used feature in the works of Sijo in the Joseon era, and it was confirmed that these works follow the style of Sijo in the Joseon era.

The purpose of this study is to examine the establishment process of Hannam-Gwonbeon during the imperial Japan’s forced occupation period and Sijo (formal poetry) works that introduced Hannam-Gwonbeon, and to analyze their content and meaning. The main characteristic of Gisaeng (female entertainers) during the imperial Japan’s forced occupation period is that they escaped from the status of government-gisaeng. As these changes had a significant impact on the Gisaeng system and Gisaeng activities, before analyzing their works, this study attempted to explore the change process of the Gisaeng system. Based on this, this study attempted to grasp the meaning of Hannam-Gwonbeon by examining Hannam-Gwonbeon’s establishment process and the Sijo’s works that introduced Hannam-Gwonbeon.
 During the imperial Japan’s forced occupation period, after the abolition of the government-gisaeng system, as the Gisaeng crackdown decree was implemented, the Gisaeng guild was established to manage these people of Gisaeng. Gisaeng was recognized as one of the occupations that make a living from dancing and singing. In a capitalist society, Gisaeng’s various activities became a means of making money.
 Hannam-Gwonbeon were a Gwonbeon, the majority of whom were from Namdo (southern Jeolla province). Although its size was smaller than other Gwonbeon guilds, their Namdo Sori gained popularity as a special talent, and they used that advantage as a competitive advantage. These characteristics of Hannam-Gwonbeon also appear in their Sijo works. ‘Wolgyehwa (laurel flowers; 月桂花)’ and ‘Nambangjigang (南方之强)’ would mean their effort and sincerity, and at the same time, they mean those Gisaeng (Gwonbeon) with outstanding skills from Namdo. Through this, it can be seen that Hannam-Gwonbeon’s unwavering momentum and hope for eternity.
 These Gisaeng of Hannam-Gwonbeon learned their skills with constant effort and sincerity amidst the changes of the times and sought to be recognized for their technical-artistic abilities through performances. For these Gisaeng, technical-artistic crafts were not simply a means to make money, but a means to prove their worth as artists with tradition and expertise. Therefore, Gisaeng during the imperial Japan’s forced occupation period should not be recognized only as a sexual object, but there is a need to re-identify as artists who continued the tradition and passed it on to future generations.

Abstract: This article analyzes mosurin , a plain-weave wool fabric made in Imperial Japan (1868–1945), from both a historical and a literary standpoint. It offers an analysis of military-related patterns on mosurin fabric, representations of mosurin in print media including Japanese prewar textbooks, and descriptions of both the consumer culture surrounding this fabric and the female factory labor involved in its production in modern Japanese literature. The article argues that mosurin in Imperial Japan was linked with popular consumerism, labor activism, and imperial and wartime propaganda.

Reviewed by: Lost and Found: Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan by Hi-raku Shimoda Brian Platt (bio) Lost and Found: Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan. By Hiraku Shimoda. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2014. x, 159 pages. $39.95. This book contributes to a growing body of English-language historical scholarship on the function and identity of regions in Japan. The focus on subnational units itself is not what distinguishes this body of scholarship, for historians have long chosen such a focus as a means of narrowing their bodies of evidence and conducting fine-grained studies of local dynamics. Rather, what defines this scholarship is that the region is the telos of the analysis, even if broader issues are also in play. Hiraku Shimoda’s book is [End Page 192] on regional identity in Japan and its place within the larger narrative of the modern nation-state. His choice of Aizu as his geographic focus is compelling, owing to the fact that it played the role of enemy to the cause of imperial restoration and thus served as an antithesis to the emerging national narrative in the decades following the Meiji Restoration. The question of how Aizu was rehabilitated within that narrative forms the analytical thrust of the book. Two of the five main chapters of Shimoda’s book focus on the Tokugawa period. During this time Aizu was a distinct political unit: a geographically contiguous domain, headed by a single political authority. It therefore stood in contrast to many other regions of Tokugawa Japan that were divided into multiple political jurisdictions and whose geography created great diversity within the region—a notable example of this being Shinano, which was the subject of another recent book on regional identity by Kären Wigen.1 For most of the Tokugawa era, Aizu was headed by the Matsudaira house, and under its headship the domain came to play an important geopolitical role as a loyal military ally of the Tokugawa. After the Matsudaira were appointed in the mid-seventeenth century to govern Aizu—they were a transplant from Shinano, in fact—they set about the task of familiarizing themselves with the land and people they governed. Often at the bakufu’s behest, they generated maps, population registers, and cadastral surveys, which charted out the physical landscape of the domain. They also compiled gazetteers and domainal histories that filled the physical landscape with cultural information and narrated its historical development—as one might expect, in a way that bolstered the legitimacy of the Matsudaira’s claims to domainal rulership. The domainal government also actively propagated the notion of domainal service (kokueki), which provided moral justification for policies prohibiting farmers from absconding and preventing the export of certain goods. And the domainal government was not the only source of knowledge production about Aizu or rhetoric about domainal identity. Local intellectuals wrote gazetteers and travel literature; privately produced (though sometimes officially endorsed) agricultural handbooks took Aizu residents as their imagined audience; and merchants appropriated the language of domainal loyalty when advocating for protectionist economic measures. While all of this activity provided potential grist for the making of a domainal identity, in his next chapter Shimoda cautions against jumping to anachronistic claims of proto-nationalism on a regional scale. He argues, first, that the rhetoric of domainal service was, by and large, targeted to the limited audience of the samurai. He also emphasizes that the domainal government [End Page 193] lacked the institutional reach to actually instill domainal identity in the population—and indeed, it lacked the inclination to do so, since it did not see the need to secure an active political commitment from the general population. In the eyes of domainal authorities, the people were “less the inkling of a nation, or even a distinctly regional people, than a tellingly premodern, uneven collectivity” (p. 35). The defining moment of Aizu’s history came at the end of the Tokugawa era, when it defended the bakufu against the imperial forces from Satsuma and Chōshū in the Boshin War. Shimoda describes Aizu’s experience in the aftermath of its defeat, which was not unlike that of defeated nations in international warfare. The...

Between 1894 and 1936, Imperial Japan fought several “small wars” against Tonghak Rebels, Taiwanese millenarians, Korean Righteous Armies, Germans in Shandong, Taiwan Indigenous Peoples, and “bandits” in Manchuria. Authoritative accounts of Japanese history ignore these wars, or sanitize them as “seizures,” “cessions,” or occasions for diplomatic maneuvers. The consigning the empire's “small wars” to footnotes (at best) has in turn promoted a view that Japanese history consists of alternating periods of “peacetime” (constitutionalism) and “wartime” (militarism), in accord with the canons of liberal political theory. However, the co-existence of “small wars” with imperial Japan's iconic wars indicates that Japan was a nation at war from 1894 through 1945. Therefore, the concept “Forever War” recommends itself for thinking about militarism and democracy as complementary formations, rather than as opposed forces. The Forever-War approach emphasizes lines of continuity that connect “limited wars” (that mobilized relatively few Japanese soldiers and civilians, but were nonetheless catastrophic for the colonized and occupied populations on the ground) with “total wars” (that mobilized the whole Japanese nation against the Qing, imperial Russia, nationalist China, and the United States). The steady if unspectacular operations of Forever War– armed occupations, settler colonialism, military honor-conferral events, and annual ceremonies at Yasukuni Shrine–continued with little interruption even during Japan's golden age of democracy and pacifism in the 1920s. This article argues that Forever War laid the infrastructural groundwork for “total war” in China from 1937 onwards, while it produced a nation of decorated, honored, and mourned veterans, in whose names the existing empire was defended at all costs against the United States in the 1940s. In Forever War—whether in imperial Japan or elsewhere–soldiering and military service become ends in themselves, and “supporting the troops” becomes part of unthinking, common sense.

Reviewed by: Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan by Kate McDonald Annika A. Culver Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan. By Kate McDonald. University of California Press, 2017. 272 pages. Softcover, $34.95/£27.95. Kate McDonald’s masterful analysis interweaves theory and primary texts to examine the spatial politics of “place” in the context of imperial Japan. As McDonald argues, the Japanese empire primarily located itself as a social phenomenon that “possessed colonized lands by domesticating, disavowing, and disappearing other claims to that same land” (p. 1). One important means that the state, institutions, and private individuals used to accomplish this end was imperial tourism, which was concerned not only with the manufacture of impressions and images of colonial areas but also with the creation of a politics of the imperial center that enabled both colonizing and colonized elites to measure their own regions with a kind of barometer of modernity fashioned by the dictates of Tokyo. These narratives, of course, elided the fact that Japan itself was noticeably unevenly developed and asynchronously modernized in the early to mid-twentieth century and that pockets of rural and urban poverty remained to rival any in the regions taken over by its empire. McDonald’s book joins other studies on narratives of place by imperial Japanese travelers and writers that have been published by scholars such as Donald Keene (focusing on accounts of the United States, Europe, China, and elsewhere), E. Atkins Taylor (colonial Korea), Robert Tierney (Taiwan), and Kenneth Ruoff (wartime Manchuria).1 McDonald’s study spans from roughly 1906 to 1938, beginning with a discussion of the pivotal role of the Russo-Japanese War in stimulating imperial tourism and seemingly ending with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), which no doubt somewhat impeded travel. (The equally ideologically laden travels by Japanese intellectuals and entertainers to support the war effort are not a part of her investigation.)2 Initially, tourism was promoted by imperial boosters to “develop affective ties to the contested territory” (p. 36), such as in the case of trips to Manchurian battlefields in the Russo-Japanese War like the famed “203-Meter Hill” above Port Arthur, where thousands of Japanese and Russian troops lost their lives. Soon the practice evolved into a set of visits that helped to demonstrate the success of Japan’s colonizing mission. Following the First World War, tourism functioned as a means of disseminating visions of the empire’s cultural pluralism; such depictions became increasingly problematic as wartime Japan absorbed multiple Asian peoples after the invasion of China proper in the late 1930s and of Southeast Asia and the Pacific in the early 1940s. McDonald views this process of imperial identity formation via imperial tourism as an essential aspect of state building that was bolstered by “the fiction of a kokumin defined by a shared historical experience” (p. 38). This narrative of supposed unity was, however, also coupled with the “discourse of colonial incivility,” in which the [End Page 111] purported backwardness and social indecency of the out-of-place colonized justified their imperial control by the Japanese (p. 53). After the 1920s, such views would dissipate into accounts expressing astonishment as to how some colonized peoples (such as urban Koreans and indigenous Taiwanese elites) had assimilated the Japanese language and customs a bit too well, leading the imperial observer to question his or her own self-identity. Indeed, by the 1930s Japanese travelers even expected those they encountered in the colonies to speak Japanese well, while they themselves remained in a privileged position in which they “could demonstrate their authentic Japanese-ness by speaking it improperly”—in other words, “native” speakers could flaunt their casual disregard of linguistic rules (p. 143). The first tours of Manchuria and Korea began in 1906, with a fully developed imperial travel industry flourishing by 1918. Such tours were initially prohibitively expensive, allowing only elite travelers access to a firsthand view of the colonies. Later, the imperial government, along with educational and other bodies, subsidized inspection trips through which more middle-class imperial subjects could gaze upon the apparent splendor of their empire as reflected...

Reviewed by: Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan by Kate McDonald Jessamyn R. Abel (bio) Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan. By Kate McDonald. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2017. xviii, 254 pages. $34.95, paper. Since at least the publication in 1998 of Louise Young's path-breaking Japan's Total Empire, scholars have been exploring the many ways in which cultural activities and materials helped shape Japanese imperialism through their impact on the goals, desires, and expectations of the Japanese people. Kate McDonald's excellent Placing Empire takes this ongoing work along a new path, asking about the roles in empire building of mobility and representations of place, specifically through tourism promotion and travel writing. Through thoughtful analysis of a wealth of varied materials related to travel within the empire, she demonstrates that Japanese tourism to Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria (and, conversely, the tight restrictions on colonial [End Page 411] travel to the Japanese islands) contributed to what she labels the "spatial politics of empire," by which she means "the use of concepts of place to naturalize uneven structures of rule" (p. 7). McDonald traces the changing ways in which travel and the promotion of tourism by a variegated group of people she refers to collectively as "colonial boosters" helped to convince the Japanese public that colonial territories were and should be an integral part of the empire, while at the same time clarifying and maintaining a hierarchy among these disparate spaces, thus helping to remake ideas about the "inner territory," the colonies, and the empire as a whole. The preface of this book places it in the context of the study of imperialism, both in general and of Japan in particular, but its impact extends well beyond that field, contributing equally to scholarship on mobility and tourism. Taking the lead from scholars primarily in geography, sociology, and anthropology who have examined the meanings of movement for our understandings of space and place, historians have begun to consider the significance of space and mobility from our own disciplinary viewpoint. McDonald brings this field into conversation with the study of imperialism, highlighting the significance of mobility—and, importantly, the contrast between mobile and immobile populations—in the conceptualization, creation, and maintenance of empire and national identity. She also engages with work on tourism, showing the tremendous political significance of this leisure activity, as the collective experiences of Japanese tourists enjoying the sights in colonized territories helped legitimize and structure the empire. McDonald skillfully links together various levels of analysis, for instance, by showing how changes in international norms following the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 prompted new approaches to selling imperial tourism, which in turn impacted the spatial politics of Japanese empire. The book's overarching narrative about the spatial politics of empire demonstrates a shift from the early promotion of colonialism through a "geography of civilization" to the careful differentiation among diverse spaces and peoples within the empire through a "geography of cultural pluralism." In the two chapters that make up the first of the book's two sections, McDonald shows how advocates of empire used tourism to foster a sense of the colonies as part of Japan but lagging behind. They "placed" the colonies within Japan's history, economy, and nation by shaping the places travelers would visit and sights they would see through guidebooks and itineraries. For instance, situating important battle sites of the Russo-Japanese War as must-see tourist destinations for visitors from Japan engendered an affective connection to Korea and Manchuria, while highlighting the infrastructures of circulation and production displayed the close integration of the colonies in the empire. In contrast, the people of these spaces were consistently portrayed as uncivilized, stuck chronologically behind the Japanese nation. In these ways, colonial promoters mobilized tourism to doubly justify Japanese [End Page 412] imperialism: first, by convincing travelers that these territories were proper parts of Japan; and second, by suggesting the civilizing benefits of Japanese rule. The second section of the book, consisting of three chapters, shows how the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism was transformed by the two-pronged change that marked the empire and the...

Reviewed by: Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan by Kate McDonald Takashi Yoshida (bio) Kate McDonald. Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xvii, 254 pp. Paperback $34.95, isbn 978-0-520-29391-5. McDonald’s study examines the discourse of tourism in the Japanese empire from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century in order to understand the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism in the context of world history. In particular, the author focuses on the imperial tourism from the Japanese mainland to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan. This book is divided into two parts, the first of which comprises two chapters, while the second consists of three chapters. There are also a separate introduction and a conclusion. Part 1, titled “The Geography of Civilization,” focuses on the period when Japan became an empire and acquired its colonies, roughly from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 to the 1910s, during which the tourism materials separated civilized Japan from uncivilized new territories. In contrast, part 2, “The [End Page 176] Geography of Cultural Pluralism,” revolves around the tourism discourse from the 1910s to the 1930s, during which the empire stressed unification among the peoples within. Chapter 1, titled “Seeing Like the Nation” details how imperial travelers and colonial promoters tried to build a space for the imperial Japanese subjects through the lens of the Japanese national people, the term defined extralegally and inconsistently. As its territory was expanded due to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, the imperial Japanese government tried to promote emotional ties between its people and its newly acquired territories such as Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. In order to produce patriotic national subjects, the government utilized expensive state-sponsored tours to and from its colonies so that the participants—Japanese and colonial social and political elites—were able to experience its new territories or metropole firsthand so that they could disseminate their experiences to the other subjects of the empire. For example, between 1897 and 1929, the government arranged eight tours to Tokyo and other places in Japan for Taiwanese elites, including indigenous Taiwanese leaders (p. 42). In July 1906, the Army and the Ministry of Education organized the first “observation travel” (shisatsu ryokō) to Manchuria in which approximately 600 teachers and students (middle school students and older) participated. In chapter 2, titled “The New Territories,” McDonald analyzes various Japanese tourist guidebooks to Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria including those published by the Government General of Taiwan in 1908, the South Manchuria Railway Company in 1909, and the Government General of Korea in 1915. These tourist guidebooks, as well as itineraries provided by the Japan Tourist Bureau (JTB), a public-private organization, featured three modes—namely economic, historical, and nationalistic—and highlighted the success of Japanese rule over the colonized territories while at the same time disconnecting the pasts and futures of colonial subjects from their lands. For example, all these guidebooks praised the role of the Japanese empire in modernizing colonial port cities such as Pusan, Keelung, and Dairen, while disregarding any contributions by the colonial residents. These guidebooks promoted an imaginary Japanese society as Japan proper consisted of not only modernized cities but also undeveloped rural areas that are much less industrialized than port cities in Korea, Manchuria, or Taiwan. Chapter 3, titled “Boundary Narratives,” discusses the new boundaries within the empire that emerged after World War I and restricted the mobilization of the colonized people. In order to deal with the threatening notion of self-determination, empires around the globe endorsed cultural pluralism in theory, and the Japanese empire was no exception. While on [End Page 177] the one hand the empire promoted the assimilation ideal and unity among different ethnic groups, it on the other hand limited the movement of colonial people, during which time commercial tourism became very popular and the Japanese people were allowed to travel freely. The chapter examines various narratives in association with tourism and underscores official and unofficial discrimination that colonial subjects endured. In chapter 4, titled “Local Color,” the author details the process through...

Manchukuo was a Japanese-led client state occupying northeast China from 1932 until 1945, whose sovereignty and legitimacy remained contested since its violent inception: on 18 September 1931, high-ranking Japanese officers including Ishiwara Kanji (b. 1889–d. 1949) plotted a manufactured Chinese “terrorist attack” on rail-lines near Shenyang as pretext for Japan’s Kantô (Kwantung) Army invasion of northeast China, which in several months drove warlord Zhang Xueliang (b. 1901–d. 2001) beyond the Great Wall, while Ma Zhanshan (b. 1885–d. 1950) continued resistance until 1932. Koreans bordering colonial Korea fought until 1933, with Japanese forces ultimately succeeding. In 1931–1932, the League of Nations Lytton Commission came to observe conditions: they condemned Japan for exploding tracks near Chinese barracks, and recommended Manchuria’s return to China—also blamed for fomenting anti-Japanese propaganda. These findings prompted Japan’s decoupling from multi-lateral organizations, and 1933 League of Nations departure. Japan’s government dithered over recognizing Manchukuo: not until Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi’s (b. 1855–d. 1932) assassination by a junior navy officer on 15 May 1932 was it recognized as an “independent” new nation. Organizations under Japanese control began propaganda campaigns convincing foreign countries, especially the United States and Great Britain, of Manchukuo’s legitimacy. Rationale for its creation included serving as imperial Japan’s natural resource “lifeline” and as political bulwark against Communism, with “empty” northeastern lands bordering the Soviet Union to relieve rural pressures for Japanese farmers. As a client state, it enabled resource extraction, where southeastern port cities like Dairen became trade nexi with Korea, China, and Japan. Japanese-occupied Manchuria provided spaces for innovation in technocratic planning, experimental agricultural stations, and transportation networks, largely run by the South Manchuria Railway (SMR) Company, which gained a toehold after its 1907 Dairen incorporation. Manchukuo’s key internal political and economic problems arose in failing to integrate diverse populations into a cohesive whole, though Japan’s intellectuals saw it as a utopian “blank slate” for developing new cultural forms and social management. Japanese bureaucrats and officials ran Manchukuo under Kantô Army influence where propaganda slogans like “racial harmony” and “Paradise of the Kingly Way” rang hollow for largely Chinese residents. With the Second Sino-Japanese War’s (1937–1945) eruption, factions in China, including the Guomindang (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP), saw Manchukuo as a contested arena: after his 1931 defeat, “exiled” warlord Zhang Xueliang retreated to Xi’an and briefly allied with Chiang Kai-Shek (b. 1887–d. 1975) to eventually retake Manchuria, while Mao Zedong (b. 1893–d. 1976) organized CCP resistance from his Yan’an base. Manchukuo contributed to imperial Japan’s war effort as rear operations base for military incursions into China and Southeast Asia: as reservoir for natural resources and manpower, it helped sustain warfare, while the controversial Pingfang-based Unit 731 under army microbiologist Ishii Shirô (b. 1892–d. 1959) perpetrated experimentation on Chinese and Allied POWs to develop biological weapons. Japanese settler families populated areas bordering the Soviet Union, cultivating land and producing livestock, including patrolling borders. The 9 August 1945 Soviet invasion forced the capitulation of Manchukuo’s troops and precipitated imperial Japan’s defeat of 15 August. Thereafter, Manchuria returned to Chinese control, initially under Communist forces, which prevailed in uniting China as the People’s Republic of China in 1949. English-language studies of Manchukuo began with a small group of US scholars, who used primarily Japanese, and some Chinese, materials. This budded from 1980s-era developments in Japan, where people identifying as zanryû koji (“left-behind orphans”) and their descendants began discovering Japanese roots. With Manchukuo’s wartime defeat, Japanese colonists fled for their lives, sometimes leaving children with sympathetic Chinese families for survival. Japan’s government first addressed “left-behind orphans” as a human rights issue in the 1980s, following renewed official diplomatic relations with China in 1972, and Deng Xiaoping’s (b. 1904–d. 1997) 1979 “Opening and Reforms” that allowed resuming business connections, with travel and cultural exchanges enabling personal connections. This openness helped Chinese scholars pick once-taboo topics, like collaboration with Japan during the wartime occupation. In the late 1980s, initial Japanese studies began emerging, prompting a 1990s “Manshû bûmu” (Manchuria Boom) featuring numerous secondary studies, followed by encyclopedias. In Japan, besides Tsukase Susumu at Nagano University, Yamamurô Shin’ichi and Kishi Toshihiko at Kyoto University are top authorities on Manchukuo’s history, while Liu Xiaoli at East China Normal University in Shanghai is an expert on Manchukuo’s literature like Kawamura Minato at Japan’s Hôsei University. This East Asian efflorescence inspired iconic English-language studies on Manchukuo, including an annotated bibliography of Chinese and Japanese sources by American historian Ronald Suleski (Suleski 1994, cited under General Historical Overviews, Manchukuo and Japan’s Empire), then president of the Tokyo-based Asia Society of Japan while an international publishing executive, who pioneered English-language studies of Manchuria/Manchukuo, followed by two US-based scholars, Louise Young (Young 1998), then at New York University, and Prasenjit Duara (Duara 2003; both cited under General Historical Overviews, Manchukuo and Japan’s Empire), once based at University of Chicago. A second generation of scholars whom they trained or inspired, began publishing in the early 2000s, like Canadian historian Norman Smith (Smith 2005, cited under Manchukuo Drugs and Intoxicants; and Smith 2007, cited under Women in Manchukuo) and American Asian studies scholar Mark Driscoll (Driscoll 2010, cited under Manchukuo Drugs and Intoxicants). A third generation includes US-based historians Annika A. Culver (Culver 2013, cited under North American Perspectives), Janice Mimura (Mimura 2011, cited under Economic Development), and Emer O’Dwyer (O’Dwyer 2015, cited under Manchukuo Cities), who examined Manchukuo’s intellectual and political underpinnings. A current younger generation of scholars increasingly focuses on cultural history and arts, primarily film and literature. Manchukuo studies, composed of research on a multi-ethnic Japanese-led state in Northeast Asia characterized by intersections between nations and peoples, is now a thriving field whose transnational perspectives foster interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinary studies. (NOTE: This annotated bibliography is comprised mainly of secondary sources and is not meant as comprehensive, and reveals my scholarly expertise as a cultural historian of imperial Japan who researches visual cultures of imperialism utilizing multidisciplinary Japanese, Chinese, and English sources. While inclusivity is attempted, sources prevail in these fields. My limited Korean reading ability precludes inclusion of Korean-language sources, which clearly warrant future attention.)

Scholars writing in English are just starting to investigate and research Japan’s interest in Islam. Beginning in the Meiji Era (1868–1912), imperial Japan attempted to create relationships with Muslims throughout China and Central Asia. These efforts were part of their plans to destabilize the Russian Empire (1721–1917) and the Manchu Qing Empire (1632/1644–1911) on the Eurasian continent. Later, these efforts to work with and coopt Muslims became an important part of their strategy to undermine the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communists, the British in India, and the Soviets in Central Asia. To many disenfranchised Muslims, the Japanese Empire presented a viable alternative to communism and western imperialism living throughout the region. This chapter presents an overview of some of the motivations for imperial Japan’s overtures to Muslims and examines the ways that imperial Japan appealed to Muslims living in China and Central Asia starting in the 1880s through to the early years of the Cold War.

Focusing on intersections of Asian area studies and U.S. ethnic studies, this article probes overlapping but hitherto neglected trajectories of Japanese colonialism and transpacific migrant experience and of modern Japanese history and Japanese American history. Constructed during the 1930s, expansionist orthodoxy of imperial Japan justified and idealized the agricultural colonization of Manchuria on the basis of historical precedence found in a contrived chronicle of Japanese overseas development in the American frontier. This study documents how Japanese intelligentsia, popular culture, and the state concertedly co-opted U. S. Japanese immigrant history in service of the policies of imperial expansion and national mobilization in Asia before the Pacific War. While involving conflicting agendas and interests between the colonial metropolis in imperial Japan and the expatriate society in the American West, the example of transnational history making elucidates borderless dimensions of prewar Japanese colonialism, which influenced, and was concurrently influenced by, the presence and practices of Japanese emigrants across the Pacific.

In the early twentieth century, Korean Catholic and Protestant Churches found themselves in a period of significant power transition, from a neo-Confucian dynasty to a colonial regime. Imperial Japan and Christianity thus posed a mutual challenge: church leaders worked to sustain and increase their Evangelical mission field within Korea's new socio-political environment, while, simultaneously, the Japanese depended on the cooperation of the Korean Christian communities to fulfil their colonial project. In this dynamic of State-Church relations, Catholics and Protestants constantly vied for ascendancy. This article examines how the two Christian denominations engaged with each other and with Korea's coloniser, as imperial Japan's policies varied and its international status fluctuated.

Rezension: Bernstein, Andrew (2006): Modern Passings. Death Rites, Politics, and Social Change in Imperial Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai´i Press.