Dreams of Empire: The Japanese Agricultural Colonization of Manchuria (1931--1945) in History and Memory

297 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999.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.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD