Significant soil: settler colonialism and Japan's urban empire in Manchuria

Abstract

Like all empires, Japan s prewar empire encompassed diverse territories as well as a variety of political forms for governing such spaces. This book focuses on Japan s Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone in China s three northeastern provinces. The hybrid nature of the leasehold s political status vis-a-vis the metropole, the presence of the semipublic and enormously powerful South Manchuria Railway Company, and the region s vulnerability to inter-imperial rivalries, intra-imperial competition, and Chinese nationalism throughout the first decades of the twentieth century combined to give rise to a distinctive type of settler politics. Settlers sought inclusion within a broad Japanese imperial sphere while successfully utilizing the continental space as a site for political and social innovation.In this study, Emer O Dwyer traces the history of Japan s prewar Manchurian empire over four decades, mapping how South Manchuria and especially its principal city, Dairen was naturalized as a Japanese space and revealing how this process ultimately contributed to the success of the Japanese army s early 1930s takeover of Manchuria. Simultaneously, Significant Soil demonstrates the conditional nature of popular support for Kwantung Army state-building in Manchukuo, highlighting the settlers determination that the Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone remain separate from the project of total empire.