The commission was not convinced. After six weeks of investigations, its report concluded that China should retain sovereignty of the Northeast, even if that meant forming an autonomous region there. However, in an illustration of why the League of Nations was short-lived, in October 1932 members approved the Lytton Commission report by a 42–1 vote (Japan dissented) while proposing no sanctions or military intervention.
Japan withdrew from the league and pressed south into greater China, breaching the Great Wall in a series of battles at the beginning of 1933. One witness was the American scholar Owen Lattimore, who saw the Japanese “overrun 100,000 square miles of territory in ten days. They did it by the use of motorized transport and by cutting through the Chinese forces and driving deep, paying no attention to their exposed flanks.” It was, he wrote, the first modern blitzkrieg. “Only the Germans and the Russians seemed to have paid much attention. Other people thought it was just a lot of Japanese overrunning a lot of Chinese, and not worth study by professional soldiers.”
The truce that ended the fighting in May 1933 established a demilitarized zone extending sixty miles south of the wall, from the coastal First Pass Under Heaven to Beijing. The Chinese government was forced to accept that Japan controlled the Great Wall as well as the entire Northeast.
“First Emperor Enthroned,” heralded the Manchuria Daily News in March 1934. “At 8:25 a.m. of a desperately cold but typically sun-bright Manchurian day, Puyi, last monarch of the Manchu Dynasty, became the first Emperor of Manchukuo.” In the English-language newspaper’s “souvenir supplement,” advertisements from General Motors, Shell Oil, Sunoco, General Electric, and Ford offered “congratulations and all good wishes on today’s auspicious enthronement.”
The article detailed Puyi’s four-day fast and purification, meditations and prayers, silk robes and sable helmet. His motorcade of ten scarlet limousines had circled the city before stopping at the “ceremonial altar.”
I expected the story to end with the observation that great historical characters appear twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. But no: at the altar, Puyi wrote a message to the gods and set fire to the paper, sending his words skyward to heaven. “His Majesty is understood to have pledged his life to the service of the state . . . A great moment had passed into posterity.”
The purple prose was written by the South Manchuria Railway’s chief propagandists, an American father-and-son team named Henry and Charles Bishop Kinney. They left a scant biographical trail before arriving in Manchuria in 1927 to work for the company, producing maps and editing guidebooks that advised travelers: “A silk hat and frockcoat will be needed when making calls on persons of distinction or attending functions, such as the Imperial Garden Parties.”
Henry Kinney had worked as a journalist in Hawaii before heading the territory’s public school system for five years. In an article he wrote for the Atlantic in 1920, he praised the multiethnic harmony of the island, which the U.S. had recently annexed. He composed a song honoring the late Princess Kaiulani that was performed in schools on her birthday, but stressed that the Hawaiian curriculum should endeavor to make Americans out of the natives and settlers, including the large Japanese population. Was the seed of his admiration for Manchukuo’s “harmonious society” planted then?
Or perhaps it sprouted after Kinney moved to Japan to edit the magazine Trans-Pacific, bankrolled by an American knitting yarn magnate. In a 1924 Atlantic article, Kinney mentioned his twelve-year-old son—whom he called, “affectionately,” the Shrimp—and their home outside Tokyo, “the big foreign villa on the beach where we lived with the rest of a bachelor’s mess.” The article described the horrors of 1923’s Great Kanto Earthquake—later estimated to have had a magnitude between 7.9 and 8.4 on the Richter scale, flattening Yokohama and killing 140,000 people in the area—and his journey home from his Tokyo office to see if his son had survived. En route, he encountered the yarn magnate, who said the city would rebuild, and the Americans would stay to help. “We owe it to Japan,” he said. “The new government has courage. It’s going to reconstruct on a vast, progressive scale—so we must forget our losses and lend a hand. America has a mission here.”
A decade later, Henry Kinney represented the South Manchuria Railway during the Lytton Commission’s visit. He stands beside Japanese military officers in a photo marking the occasion, silver-haired and resembling the actor Joseph Cotten. In a memo sent to Western journalists then, Kinney argued that the region had been “entirely primitive” but now held promise of becoming the “most prosperous part of China and one of the most rapidly developing countries in the world.” Why? “It is well known that Japan introduced Western civilization into Manchuria . . . the one part of China which made progress, while the rest of that unhappy country drifted further and further into chaos and destruction.”
Kinney did not write that even though Japanese represented only 3 percent of the population, Japanese was the language of school instruction—not Chinese, now called Manchukuoan. There was no mention of the building of Shinto shrines to which all subjects had to bow ninety degrees when passing; the drafting of 2.5 million citizens into compulsory labor; travel restrictions on natives, who were also forbidden to own land or eat quality rice; the six million tons of grain exported to Japan each year; or the six million tons of steel and 223 million tons of coal Japan extracted from 1932 to 1944.
Foreign correspondents dubbed the puppet state “Japanchukuo” and “Mannequinchuria.” The Times of London correspondent Peter Fleming—the elder brother of James Bond’s creator—traveled the region in 1934 and wrote that the Japanese exhibited “ruthless control.” At the Opium Monopoly Bureau, an uncharacteristically loose-lipped employee “poured out stuff for two hours,” explaining the profitability of the state-run drug trade, which included secretly lacing the tobacco of a best-selling cigarette with opium.
Henry Kinney, on the other hand, reported “not conquest, but development.” Travelers could rely on all-American equipment: the comfort of a Pullman sleeping car pulled behind a Baldwin locomotive over hundred-pound Pittsburgh rails. “The shriek of these American locomotives across Manchurian plains and through Manchurian cities is the voice of modern enterprise bringing a rich, modern life, opportunity, hygiene, education and happiness to an ancient people.” The railway cities were “amazingly like new western towns in the United States.”
The South Manchuria Railway even opened a public relations office in New York City, on East Forty-second Street (today it’s the address of the Asian & American Singles Club). On a visit to the U.S. in 1936, Henry Kinney compiled a list of media members favorable to Japan’s “policy of aggression.” The memo was discovered and published by an American journalist who later wrote: “After the Japanese discovered the leak they gave Kinney an extended vacation, which he was still spending with his Japanese wife on the French island of Tahiti when the war broke out.”
His son Charles Bishop Kinney took over, mailing dispatches headed For Your Own Information to American journalists and scholars. In them, he labored to correct “distortions,” such as reports of the Chinese resistance, which he dismissed as “bandit activity.” And the talk of Japanese being “conspicuously boisterous in restaurants and other public places?” Dear sirs, was this behavior not comparable to American visitors to Paris whose “exuberant actions made them themselves anything but popular with the French? Many were abroad for the first time.” Manchukuo, he gushed, had 5,500 miles of railroad, compared to 6,000 miles in the rest of China. Forty-eight new towns were planned. Mines were opened. One Manchukuo yuan was worth 28.5 American cents. Not conquest, dear sirs, but development.
In 1933, Henry Kinney wrote, “In view of the gravity of over-population in Japan and for the development of natural resources of this country, Japanese officials commenced to encourage emigration to Manchukuo on a large scale.”
Japanese had migrated in numbers before, notably to its northern island of Hokkaido (displacing the nat
ive Ainu people) and to Hawaii, where their increasing numbers led, partly, to the United States annexing the islands and, in 1924, to excluding Japanese immigration to America entirely. Similar acts were passed in Australia, New Zealand, Peru, and Brazil.
But previous attempts to encourage agrarian colonization in China had failed; the majority of Japanese living in Manchukuo were attached to the military or the South Manchuria Railway. Fewer than one thousand Japanese farmers moved to experimental farms established in the railway zone before 1931, and all but two hundred had returned home when Manchukuo was founded that year.
For the Home Islands, it was a time of economic crisis. The Great Depression affected Japan’s manufacturing sector, sending migrant workers back to their villages. Farming supported half of Japan’s workforce, but the rural economy reeled from falling rice and silk prices, then widespread crop failures. As planners drew up the modern Manchukuo capital and an imperial palace, half a million people died from famine in northern Japan. Officials recorded the sale of 11,604 girls into “service,” a byword for prostitution.
In 1932, after intense debate and lobbying in Tokyo, the Diet approved a modest budget for trial colonies of Japanese farmers in Manchukuo. The experiment started slowly: 470 farmers were sent over, settling in a far Northeastern Songhua river town. Five hundred would follow them the next year. In 1936, however, the Japanese government would launch the “Millions to Manchuria” scheme, which aimed at relocating one-fifth of Japan’s rural population there over the next twenty years.
Previously, Japan had backed Korean migration to the region. The South Manchuria Railway had urged farmers from Japanese-controlled Korea to cross the Yalu River in a “process that would result in a concrete circle of Japanese power in Manchuria.” A map in Korean middle school textbooks showed Seoul and Pyongyang linked by a loop of railroad with Harbin and other Manchurian cities. Korean migrants opened rice paddies—establishing the single annual crop as economically viable—and diffused the native population. This was seen especially in the expansion of the existing enclave of Kando (today’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture), where the Qing dynasty had granted Korean settlers the right to farm in the late nineteenth century in order to populate the northeast corner of Manchuria where China shared a border with Russia.
Among the Korean arrivals was a young man who attended middle school in Jilin city in 1927, joined the underground Chinese Communist Party, led guerrilla campaigns against the Japanese in Manchukuo, and changed his name to Kim Il-sung. His experience in Manchuria, he would later say, laid the foundation of the Korean revolution, and his ideology of juch’e (self-reliance) was still brutally adhered to a half century later in the isolated state he founded in 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
On July 7, 1937, a clash between Japanese and Chinese forces at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing erupted into full-scale war, enveloping all of China for the next eight years.
How many instances in history has there been massive conquest and suffering that we—in our culture, anyway—barely know about, or have forgotten? Yet in the Northeast, Japan’s occupation still feels near. You can sleep in former Japanese hotels, embark at Japanese-designed train stations, and descend into erstwhile Japanese bunkers. In the northwest corner of the region, on the railroad between Manzhouli and Harbin, a thirty-minute walk from the Hulunbei’er station up a grassland plateau leads to a former Japanese base. There, a monument made of piled ramparts says, in Chinese: NEVER FORGET.
Underground, in tunnels constructed along this western front by twenty thousand Chinese prisoners, a row of sodium bulbs casts a ghostly glow in the clammy air. Plaques in Chinese and English—not Japanese—detail the quarters, kitchens, infirmaries, and latrines. In restoring the site, Chinese workers repainted the walls. They took care, however, to trace around the black Japanese characters inked by the former occupants, warning of non-potable water and other dangers. Here, history has been spared the whitewashing brush.
The base was part of a line Japan established to defend the border against Soviet-controlled Mongolia. Over four months in the summer of 1939, Japanese and Soviet forces clashed here after Mongolian cavalry crossed into Manchukuoan territory to graze their horses. Hostilities accelerated from rifle shots to artillery to tanks to a dress rehearsal for the Second World War. A skirmish that began on horseback escalated into the air. Thirty thousand sorties were launched in this, the Soviet and Japanese air forces’ first wartime fighter-bombing campaign. A cavalry commander named Georgy Zhukov led the Soviet ground troops, employing tanks in maneuvers he would later use against Nazi forces in the Battle of Stalingrad and the capture of Berlin.
In the end, the Japanese were badly routed in what it called the Nomonhan Incident, named for the village where it started. Puyi visited the wounded, a trip recounted by Charles Bishop Kinney in a story headlined “Nomonhan Heroes Honored”: “On this auspicious day their past deadly struggle for over one hundred days against Soviet mechanized corps on the plain were more than rewarded by the Manchukuo Emperor’s comforting remarks.”
Unnoted, of course, were the rumors of conscripted Chinese infantry who had killed their Japanese commanding officers, as other mutinous troops had done in Manchukuo.
The costume play of Puyi’s life continued. On his return from Nomonhan to the capital’s train station, “Imperial Guards fired a salute in honour of the returning Sovereign who appeared to be in excellent health.” As a military band played the national anthem—The world has a new Manchuria, / Manchuria is the new world—the train steamed to a halt at a platform thronged by officials who included Vice Minister of the Imperial Household Department, the Public Peace Minister, and Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal.
In April 1941, the Nomonhan Incident officially concluded when Japan and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact that freed the latter to mass its forces against Nazi Germany. With Manchukuo’s Mongolian and Siberian border now as secure as its Korean and Chinese one, Japan’s battle-tested military turned its attention to the rest of China, and the Pacific.
In Manchuria magazine’s summer issue of 1941, Charles Bishop Kinney reported BUMPER CROPS FORECAST FOR ALL OF MANCHURIA but also SEVEN MORE KINDS OF NECESSITIES TO BE RATIONED. Japan was forging a “new world order,” he wrote in a story headlined THE EAST ASIAN SPHERE OF COMMON PROSPERITY. An item about Puyi and the founder of the Gestapo began: “His Majesty was pleased to confer the First Order of Merit with the Grand Cordon of the Lungkuang on Reich Marshal Hermann Goering for kindnesses shown.”
On December 7, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and overran Hong Kong, declaring war on the United States and Great Britain. Puyi announced that Manchukuo was also at war, pledging, “Together as a united people we shall come to the aid of our ally.” Yet Puyi would once again sit this dance out, watching from the sidelines until August 1945, when the Soviets broke their nonaggression pact, declared war on Japan, and unleashed a million battle-hardened soldiers into Manchukuo.
Japan, “our ally,” abandoned the Northeast and its thirty million people, including three hundred thousand Japanese farmers enticed to move there as “soldiers of the hoe.” Little did they know they were also the first line of defense against such an invasion. The Japanese army had secretly called them “human pillboxes.” Now they were on their own.
CHAPTER 13
Occupation’s Aftermath
“Go! Go and colonize the continent!” propaganda posters urged Japanese beginning in 1936. “For the development of the Yamato race, to build the new order in Asia!” The campaign echoed the American nineteenth-century appeal “Go west, young man!” with “Go to the continent, young man! A new land awaits the village youth.” Despite the Depression in which rural Japan was sunk, migration to Manchukuo was framed in patriotic terms, not economic ones, and focused on the empire’s future rather than its present, racked by food shortages, overpopulation, and an American embargo.
Colonization manuals included articles aimed at men s
uch as “The Joy of Becoming a Progenitor”: “What could be better than creating a new country and of becoming the founding fathers to that country?”—and, for women, “The Joy of Breeding.” Its accompanying image showed a mother with child standing before a herd of grazing sheep. A 1941 journal promised, “If you become a Manchurian pioneer, you can be an owner-farmer, and you will see permanent prosperity for your descendants. There is no way to revive the [home] villages other than developing Manchuria.”
Under the “Millions to Manchuria” plan, Japanese villages would be replicated in Manchukuo, with branch family members—second and third sons, for example—sent to pioneer a satellite outpost sharing the same place name. Unbeknownst to settlers, the majority of these villages were established in bandit-infested areas or along the Soviet border. Photos show Japanese soldiers teaching newly arrived women, infants lashed to their backs, how to fire the single-bolt rifle each household was issued on landing.
Beyond patriotism, tangible incentives enticed civilians to Manchukuo. Skilled professionals such as doctors, teachers, and agronomists earned double their salary at home, while farming households received twenty-five acres of arable land, ten acres of grazing land, equipment, seed, and funds for cows, horses, and hired labor. Men were exempt from the military draft.
The land they were given on arrival in Manchukuo was not, as initially planned, uncultivated swamps and forest that they would open to the plow. Instead, settlers were handed cultivated land belonging to the native population, seized via army-forced evictions and coerced sales—paying as low as 15 percent of the land’s assessed value. Dissenters could expect the retribution noted in a Japanese police chief’s report: “More than twenty armed men were sent to the area in question, and they either bayoneted farmers who did not comply with their orders or killed their cattle, dogs, and chickens.” Often the displaced faced two options: accept a plot of uncultivated land, or become hired labor on their former farm.
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