'Sur le front...des missions': French-Canadian missionaries in the Japanese empire, 1921-1934

The late 1920s and early 1930s was a period of violent political and military upheaval in Japan and Northern China, a simmering powederkeg which finally exploded in the Manchurian Crisis of 1931-32. In the early 1930s, there were around 80 French-Canadians Catholic missionaries living in Japan and Japanese-held territory. In Manchuria, French-Canadian missionaries were in the middle of a war-zone, while in Japan, an increasingly militaristic government kept missionaries under closer supervision. Despite some recent publications on the work of French-Canadian missionaries in Japan and China, there is still a rather incomplete picture of their experience in this turbulent period. Through recently discovered first-hand accounts of French-Canadian missionaries published in the Montreal newspaper, Le Devoir, this paper reveals their representation of the Japanese and Chinese in the Japanese Empire in times of war and peace.Not peer reviewe