Dreams of empire: The Japanese agricultural colonization of Manchuria (1931--1945) in history and memory

Although never formally annexed, Manchukuo (Manshukoku ), the puppet state established in 1932 under the auspices of Japan's Kwantung Army (Kantogun), was often spoken of as the "jewel" of Japan's wartime empire. The Japanese gave careful attention to the economic development of Manchukuo, and the latter soon emerged as a vital source of the foodstuffs and raw materials Japan needed to prosecute the war effort. In order to secure the nation's hold over that territory, the Japanese government undertook to colonize Manchukuo with large numbers of landed emigrants from the Home Islands. Carefully planned as a national project during wartime, and justified largely on strategic grounds, the settlement of some 270,000 Japanese farmers (out of a projected five million individuals) still stands as the largest such emigration in Japan's modern history.;In part, this study explores the constellation of public events and private concerns that came together in the early 1930s to revive a seemingly moribund dream of Japanese agrarian nationalism, newly focused on Manchuria as a "New Paradise" (Shintenchi) for the nation's indigent farming community. More importantly, this study focuses on the main agents of Japan's renewed imperial drive: the agricultural colonists themselves. The "Great Men" of Japanese imperial history such as Goto Shinpei and Ishiwara Kanji, unfortunately, have long overshadowed the far more numerous agricultural colonists. Where historians have incorporated the latter into their studies of colonial Manchukuo, these "footsoldiers of empire" have generally been accorded neither voice nor agency; they exist simply as faceless agents of colonial oppression. By investigating the ways in which the Japanese state publicized life in Manchukuo; exploring the candidates' motivations for choosing the difficult option of emigration; scrutinizing the colonists' lifestyle abroad; probing their relations with the Kwantung Army, government officials and native Chinese; and examining in detail the fate that befell them upon Japan's defeat in August 1945, this study seeks to break new ground in approaching the Japanese colonial experience in Manchuria from the vantage of wartime social history and postwar historical memory. In the process, a revised portrait of the agricultural colonist as both victimizer and victim is presented.