Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young
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as this fiction may have seemed to many Japanese labored mightily to convince themselves and others of the truth of Manchurian independence. In the puppet regime they sought a form of colonial state that represented a new kind of collaboration between imperialist and subject, a formula for colonial rule neither formal nor informal that would accommodate nationalist demands for sovereignty and self-determination.
What Manchurian independence in fact accommodated were Kwantung Army demands for greater authority. Assuming position of all the key posts in the new state, the Kwantung Army created for itself an imperium in imperio. Before the establishment of Manchukuo, the army shared power with Mantetsu and, to a lesser extent, with the Kwantung governor general and the Japanese consulate. In the administrative reorganization, however, the latter two were effectively excluded from the decision-making loop while Mantetsu was forced into a subordinate relationship with the Kwantung Army. Moreover, in a parallel reorganization in Japan, the Army Ministry outmaneuvered the Colonial and Foreign Ministries, dominating the newly created Manchurian Bureau. This gave the military control over official communications between Japan and Manchukuo. Thus, not only did the Manchukuo government give the Kwantung Army a vehicle for expanding its power within the Northeast, but it also provided a channel for extending its influence over metropolitan government.
The size, reputation, and hubris of the Kwantung Army increased in tandem with the expansion of its power base in the new colonial state. Troop strength grew rapidly, reaching its peak at twelve divisions in 1941. The rapid and efficient occupation of Manchuria greatly enhanced the prestige of the army and brought the Kwantung garrison a wave of adulatory publicity. As the army redefined its strategic mission to focus on the threat from the Soviet Union along the Manchukuo-Siberian border, Kwantung Army units were built up into the crack troops of the Imperial Army. Preparing for a decisive strike north, the Kwantung Army forayed into Soviet territory, provoking border skirmishes that flared into war in the Nomonhan Incident of 1939. At the same time, the expulsion of Zhang's forces south of the Great Wall created a new turbulent frontier over which the army was anxious to establish control, spawning yet another series of plots and connivances to push down into north China and beyond. Interpreting liberally its mandate for the defense of Manchukuo, the army drove relentlessly forward to expand the territory under its control.33
The second phase in the construction of Manchukuo was economic. The puppet state became more than just a military project when the metropolitan government stepped up its involvement, gambling heavily on a bold experiment in the restructuring of the colonial economy. Against the backdrop of unprecedented economic crisis, the Japanese government began to view industrial development of Manchukuo as the means to rejuvenate the economy and create a self-sufficient trade zone protected from the uncertainties of the global marketplace. The military luster imparted by the early triumphs of the Kwantung Army was now enhanced by the investments that made Manchukuo a jewel of unrivaled value. The levels of money that poured in provided some of the most dramatic testimony of the Japanese commitment to Manchukuo. In Manchukuo's first five years, Japanese invested 1.2 billion yen, a figure almost equal to the 1.75 billion yen supplied to the region over the previous twenty-five years. Between 1932 and 1941, 5.86 billion yen were injected into Manchukuo, more than the 5.4 billion yen accumulated in the entire overseas empire—China, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, Karafuto, and Nan'y
It was more than just capital that Japanese invested. Starting in 1933, the metropolitan government sent a parade of bureaucrats including Kishi Nobusuke, Shiina Etsusabur
At the heart of the Manchurian experiment were two novel ideas of economic governance beginning to circulate in the industrialized world, though never before applied to a colony. The first, state-managed economic development, borrowed the Soviet model for the command economy. The second, the self-sufficient production sphere, or bloc economy, drew on economic analyses of military production in World War I. Replacing the old mandate for “managing Manchuria” the new economic mission of development (kaihatsu) called for coordinated industrialization of Japan and Manchukuo and aimed at military self-sufficiency.37
Under the banner of “Manchurian development,” the Manchukuo government created twenty-six new companies by the end of 1936, one company per industry in such fields as aviation, gasoline, shipping, and automobiles.38 Five-year plans were instituted beginning in 1937, setting ambitious production targets. While Manchurian development was skewed toward heavy industrialization, the agricultural sector was also brought within the sphere of government planning. Although policies like the introduction of new crops and the establishment of agricultural extension services and marketing cooperatives were geared primarily toward enhancing Japan's agricultural self-sufficiency, the developmentalist agenda of the Manchukuo government also sought to legitimate the colonial project in the eyes of the subject population. Recognizing that poverty created a breeding ground for anti-imperialist sentiment and communist agitation, administrators tried to eliminate some of the economic causes of discontent. Of course, developmental policies aimed at improving the welfare of the Chinese peasantry were easily compromised when they conflicted with imperatives for resource extraction or the interests of the collaborating Chinese elite. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of colonial development showcased new ideals of social reform that borrowed from the movement to mitigate rural poverty within Japan.
The new program transformed Mantetsu's role in the colonial economy. Previously, the economy was its private domain, and Mantetsu executives presided over an imperium in imperio. In the face of the Kwantung Army's advance into economic management, however, Mantetsu retreated from its mining and manufacturing activities, concentrating on management of its transportation network. Final control over its empire of subsidiaries was relinquished in 1937 to Manchurian Heavy Industries, the large public-private firm created to coordinate the industrial production targets of the Five-Year Plan. This represented a defeat for Mantetsu in its struggle with the army for control over the government institutions left vacant by the withdrawal of Zhang Xueliang from Manchuria. Victorious, the army used its domination of the puppet state of Manchukuo to initiate the heavy industrialization of the colonial economy and to reconfigure the institutions for managing Manchuria. Forced by these initiatives into a series of unprofitable investments in the new state-run industries and a network of strategic railways, Mantetsu's capital strength and profitability were gradually whittled away.
There were compensations. The new program put a premium on planning and generated an enormous demand for research. Mantetsu became the brain trust for Manchukuo development, later expanding into a center of planning for the empire as a whole. Mantetsu's prestige as a research institute reached its peak in the early 1940s, when the Research Department commanded a staff of 2,200 to 2,300 researchers.39 In addition to its new role in planning, Mantetsu was given a free hand in the economic development of north China—rapidly becoming the next frontier for Japanese imperial expansion—to offset its loss of jurisdiction in the Manchurian economy.
Following close on the heels of the new military and economic programs, the announcement in 1936 of the Japanese government's intent to carry out mass Japanese emigration to Manchuria signaled a third radical departure for the imperialist project. Grand in scope, the plan aimed to send five million farmers, a figure equivalent to one-fifth of the 1936 farm population, to a “new paradise” in Manchuria in the space of twenty years. By placing in Northeast China