Manchukuo

• 1. Introduction

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  Manchukuo lasted just thirteen years, from 1932 until its dissolution in 1945, yet it carried the grand title of empire and the trappings of a brand new civilization. A press release from the Japanese Information Service on the 1st of March 1932 announced its glorious advent with the eyes of the world turned on it. The statement boasted that never in the chronicles of the human species was any state born with such high ideals. Behind that language sat a simpler reality. This was a puppet state of the Empire of Japan in Manchuria, founded on lands seized in the Japanese invasion of the region. At its head sat Puyi, the last emperor of China, a man invited to reign who held no actual political power. So how did the final Qing emperor end up as a figurehead on a borrowed throne? Who really ran this country? And why did idealistic young people from Japan flock to a place built on slave labor and forced evictions? The answers run from a railway built by Russia to a biological warfare unit hidden at Pinfang.

• 2. A Borrowed Emperor

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  Puyi was forced to abdicate at the age of six when the 1911 Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and permanently abolished the dynastic system. The Qing had governed China since the 17th century, founded by Manchus from northeastern China who conquered the Han Shun and Ming dynasties. Decades later, Japanese officials brought Puyi back to serve as the nominal regent of their new puppet government, an effort to manufacture an air of legitimacy. One of his faithful companions in this venture was Zheng Xiaoxu, a Qing reformist and loyalist who would become the state's first prime minister.

  On the 18th of February 1932, the Northeast Supreme Administrative Council proclaimed Manchukuo, and the country was formally established on the 1st of March in Xinjing. The city of Changchun was renamed and became the capital. Manchukuo received formal recognition from Japan on the 15th of September 1932 through the Japan-Manchukuo Protocol, signed after the assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi. On the 1st of March 1934, the republic became a monarchy, and Puyi assumed the throne under the era name of Kangde. Yet very little changed in the actual functioning of government. A General Affairs State Council held real power, and each Manchu minister served as a frontman for a Japanese vice-minister who made the decisions. The commander-in-chief of the Kwantung Army doubled as Japan's ambassador, with the added ability to veto the emperor himself. When the Soviet offensive came, Puyi abdicated on the 17th of August 1945, hoping to flee to Japan and surrender to the Americans.

• 3. The Wild West Of Asia

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  Japanese publications from 1905 onward described Manchuria as a sacred and holy land where many Japanese had died as martyrs. The Russo-Japanese War had cost Japan dearly. The country mobilized one million soldiers to fight Russia, one for every eight Japanese families, and suffered about 500,000 casualties. The war nearly bankrupted Japan and forced acceptance of the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States. Many Japanese felt they had won the war but lost the peace, and an anti-American riot broke out in Tokyo between the 5th and the 7th of September 1905.

  In Japan, Manchuria was widely seen as analogous to the Wild West. It was a dangerous frontier full of bandits, revolutionaries, and warlords, but also a land of boundless wealth where ordinary people might become very well off. The Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway, running from Harbin to Vladivostok, had symbolized strong Russian influence in the region by the 1890s. In 1906, Japan established the South Manchurian Railway on the southern half of that line. The Japanese-owned company, known as Mantetsu, held a market capitalization of 200 million yen, making it Asia's largest corporation. It owned ports, mines, hotels, and telephone lines, dominating the economy.

  The Japanese population grew alongside the railway, rising from 16,612 in 1906 to 233,749 in 1930. Most of these Japanese were middle-class white-collar people who saw themselves as an elite, while the majority of Mantetsu's blue-collar employees were Chinese. The conquest proved extremely popular at home, seen as an economic lifeline for an economy battered by the Great Depression. The most popular song in Japan in 1932 was the Manchuria March, whose verses claimed the seizure was a continuation of what Japan had fought for against Russia.

• 4. Marshals And Mukden

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  Marshal Zhang Zuolin, the Old Marshal, established himself in Manchuria during the Warlord Era with Japanese backing. The Kwantung Army eventually found him too independent and assassinated him in 1928, blowing up the bridge his train was crossing. Three Chinese men were murdered and planted with explosive equipment to appear as the killers. The generals expected Manchuria to descend into anarchy, giving them a pretext to seize the region. The plot was foiled when Zhang's son, Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal, succeeded his father without incident, and Tokyo refused to send additional troops.

  In 1931, the Mukden incident triggered the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria. Japanese militarists moved to separate the region from Chinese control. On the 16th of February 1932, the Imperial Army hosted a Founding Conference with Liaoning governor Zang Shiyi, Heilongjiang governor Zhang Jinghui, Kirin Provincial Army commander Xi Qia, and general Ma Zhanshan. Two days later, the Council declared the northeast provinces completely independent. Local Chinese organized volunteer armies to oppose the Japanese, and the new state required a war lasting several years to pacify the country.

• 5. Idealists And Slave Labor

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  Many of the young Japanese civil servants who went to work in Manchukuo were on the left, or had once been, a fact the American historian Louise Young found among the most striking aspects of the state. To rule a place with a very statist economy, Japan needed university graduates fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and in the 1920s and 1930s many such graduates were progressives involved in left-wing causes. The Japanese historian Joshua Fogel wrote that the lingua franca of their debates was always Marxism. Research teams of five or six young civil servants, guarded by detachments of twenty or thirty soldiers, went into the field to determine whether Manchukuo was in a feudal or capitalist stage.

  The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 had made the very act of thinking about altering the kokutai a crime, and by 1933 the Japanese state had reduced both the Socialist and Communist parties to rumps through mass arrests and Tenko. Tenko, meaning changing directions, was a process of police brainwashing that turned former leftists into fanatical rightists. One such convert was Tachibana Shiraki, once a Marxist Sinologist, who went to Manchukuo in 1932 proclaiming that the five races working together was the best solution to Asia's problems. Many idealists believed they could achieve a revolution from above. Louise Young observed that the absolute power they enjoyed over millions of people went to their heads, citing Lord Acton's dictum that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

  Starting in 1936, the state launched Five Year Plans modeled on those of the Soviet Union. In 1935, the reform bureaucrat Nobusuke Kishi was appointed Deputy Minister of Industrial Development. Kishi persuaded the Army to let the zaibatsu invest, pioneering a system where bureaucrats devised plans that corporations were ordered to carry out. The American historian Mark Driscoll described this as a necropolitical system in which Chinese workers were treated as dehumanized cogs. Heavy industry expanded dramatically using slave labor, and Manchukuo's steel production exceeded Japan's in the late 1930s. The crackdown caught up with the idealists. In November 1941, the Kenpeitai raided the Social Research Unit of the South Manchurian Railroad Company and arrested fifty workers. At least forty-four were convicted of violating the Peace Preservation Law, and four died in the harsh conditions of Manchukuo's prisons.

• 6. The Kingly Way

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  The official ideology of Manchukuo was the wangdao, the Kingly Way, devised by Zheng Xiaoxu, a former mandarin under the Qing turned prime minister. It called for an ordered Confucian society promoting justice and harmony, billed as the beginning of a new era in world history. The wangdao was expressly hostile toward individualism, which it dismissed as a decadent European concept inimical to Asia. Zheng, with the Japanese legal scholar Ishiwara Kanji, attacked the European legal tradition for promoting selfishness, greed, and materialism. The purpose of law was not to protect the individual but to ensure subjects fulfilled their duties to the emperor.

  Manchukuo's legal system rested on the Organic Law of 1932, which featured a twelve-article Human Rights Protection Law and a supposedly independent judiciary. The Japanese invested great effort in this system, believing it the fastest route to international recognition, even though the League of Nations had ruled that Japan broke international law by seizing Manchuria. The Judicial Law College, headed by the Japanese judge Furuta Masatake, opened in Changchun in 1934. Its first class held only 100 places, but 1,210 students applied. Students wrote essays on the harmony of the five races and the political theory of the Kingly Way, and their Japanese professors were astonished by their enthusiasm, though they noted the essays were hard to tell apart.

  Corporal punishment told a harsher story. Flogging, abolished in Japan itself, was a major part of the Manchukuo system. Writing in 1936, the Japanese judge Ono Jitsuo regretted imposing floggings but argued that of Manchukuo's 30 million people, more than half were ignorant and completely illiterate barbarians, too poor to pay fines and too numerous to imprison. After the Religions Law of May 1938, a cult of emperor-worship modeled on the Japanese imperial cult began, treating Puyi as a living god whose will could not be limited by any law. In 1937, a new category of thought crime declared that certain thoughts were now illegal. One Special Security Court in Jinzhou between 1942 and 1945 sentenced about 1,700 people to death and another 2,600 to life imprisonment, with the rising convictions feeding the need for slave labor in factories and mines.

• 7. Settlers And The Persecuted

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  By 1945, more than a million Japanese people had settled within Manchukuo, many of them young, land-poor farmers resettled from the inner islands. Almost half of the Japanese settlers came from the rural areas of Kyushu. The government had official plans projecting the emigration of 5 million Japanese between 1936 and 1956. The Manchukuo government seized great portions of land through price manipulation, coerced sales, and forced evictions, redistributing it to Japanese farmers while local farmers were relocated and forced into collective farming. Some settlers gained so much land they had to lease it back to its former Chinese owners, creating uneasy and sometimes hostile relations.

  In early 1934, the total population stood at around 30,880,000, with Chinese making up 96 percent, Japanese 2 percent, and Koreans 2 percent. The remaining fraction included White Russians and Mongols. Thousands of Russians had fled to Manchuria after the Russian Civil War, and in 1936 the Manchukuo Almanac counted 33,592 Russians in Harbin, the Moscow of the Orient, of whom only 5,580 held Manchukuo citizenship. Their status was ambiguous in a state whose official five races were the Chinese, Mongols, Manchus, Koreans, and Japanese. The Kwantung Army ran a secret biological and chemical warfare unit at Pinfang called Unit 731, which performed gruesome experiments. When its doctors demanded more European subjects to test strains of anthrax and plague, many Russians became unwilling human guinea pigs, kidnapped with the help of the Russian Fascist Party.

  The Jewish community faced a different fate. Some Japanese officials investigated the Fugu Plan to attract Jewish refugees as part of their colonization effort, though it was never adopted. Jews in Manchukuo were not subjected to the official persecution they faced under Japan's ally Nazi Germany, and Japanese authorities closed down local anti-Semitic publications such as the Russian Fascist Party's newspaper Nash Put. Yet harassment came from antisemitic White Russians, including the murder of Simon Kaspe. In 1937, the Far Eastern Jewish Council formed, chaired by the Harbin community leader Dr. Abraham Kaufman. After the Soviet invasion of 1945, Kaufman was arrested and imprisoned for ten years in a Soviet labor camp.

• 8. Collapse In August

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  The Manchukuo Imperial Army was established by the Army and Navy Act of the 15th of April 1932, growing to as many as 170,000 to 220,000 troops at its peak in 1945. Most of its soldiers were Manchurian-born Han Chinese, trained and led by Japanese instructors, and most units were regarded as unreliable by Japanese officers. The cavalry was the most effective branch. The air force suffered an early setback when one hundred pilots took their aircraft and defected to insurgents after murdering their Japanese instructors. By 1945, facing American bombing raids, pilots flew Nakajima Ki-43 fighters against B-29 Superfortresses, and at least one Ki-27 pilot downed a B-29 by ramming it in a kamikaze attack.

  On the 8th of August 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in accordance with the agreement at the Yalta Conference and invaded Manchukuo. The defenders faced 76 battle-hardened Red Army divisions transferred from the European front. On paper a 200,000-man force, the Manchukuo Imperial Army performed poorly, with whole units surrendering without firing a shot and some staging armed mutinies against the Japanese. The state was formally dissolved following the surrender of Japan in September, and the territory passed to Chinese administration the following year. The Soviets captured Puyi and eventually extradited him to the government of China, where authorities imprisoned him on charges of war crimes after the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949. From 1945 to 1948, Manchuria served as a staging ground for the People's Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War, and many former Manchukuo army personnel joined the Communists because the Nationalists executed collaborators with Japan. Most of the 1.5 million Japanese left behind were sent home between 1946 and 1948 in the repatriation from Huludao, though many orphans and stranded war wives remained in China, some not offered a path back until Japan organized a repatriation program in the 1980s.