| This dissertation examines the "opium problem" of Dairen and the Kwantung Leased Territory (KLT) throughout the period of Japanese control (1905-1945). By the late 1920s Dairen, a port city on the south Manchurian coast, manifested the world's highest per-capita rate of opiate consumption, and the second-largest volume of trafficking. The enormous drug market served as the basis for an imperial discourse on opium as a social problem: the ahen mondai. Contributors positioned opium as both the cause and consequence of Chinese inferiority and sovereign unfitness. Abstinence from narcotics, by contrast, indicated Japanese superiority and justified expansionism on the Asian mainland. This analysis exposes the gap between the Japanese presentation of opium and its social realities, probing the consequences of the opium market from the perspective of drug users, dealers, and doctors. These collective participants engaged with opium for one or more of the following purposes: to secure economic well-being, increase professional standing, and improve their position within Japan's racial hierarchy. The Japanese regime (Kanto Totokufu/Kanto-cho), which was financially dependent on both the legal and illegal opium traffic, sanctioned these objectives to increase its power over society and its political rivals, particularly the South Manchurian Railway Company. In providing payoffs to all parties, the narcotic economy drew elites and subalterns alike into new communities of interest, blurring distinctions between "collaboration" and "resistance" and eliciting a political stability and quiescence unparalleled within the Japanese empire.;The primary contribution of this study is highlighting the importance of opium to social management, military encroachment, and imperial legitimacy in Manchuria. In contrast to existing histories of opium in East Asia, which approach narcotics as a topic of top-down politico-economic history, this bottom-up analysis increases our understanding of the experience of the subject. I call attention to experiments in policy and ideology of the pre-1932 era of Japanese expansion, generally overlooked by scholars in their focus on Manchukuo. Beyond these regional considerations, my investigation of drugs, commodities that traverse and transgress all national boundaries, integrates the study of the Japanese empire, now a specialized topic, into the larger history of the early twentieth-century world. |
