Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young

era it was no longer Asia but the West with which Japan battled for survival. The lines of advantage that military leaders called on their countrymen to secure in the 1890s became the lines of sovereignty in subsequent decades. Soldiers first fought and won these territories; then they patrolled them against enemies within and without. In the process, experience infused geopolitical imperatives with memories of sacrifice, death, and the hates of war.

      In Northeast China, as elsewhere, a distinct variation of colonial mission emerged, merging the historical specificity of this dominated territory with the broader goals of the empire as a whole. Inscribed in the slogan “managing Manchuria” (Mansh keiei), the quest for empire in the Northeast combined strategic and economic imperatives in equal measure. It is to the development of these interests in the early years of Mansh keiei that I now turn.

      “MANAGING MANCHURIA”

      In 1905 and 1906 the Japanese government established a Kwantung governor general to administer the Kwantung Leased Territory and created a network of consulates throughout the Northeast to act for the Foreign Ministry. Their influence, however, was quickly overshadowed by the growing prominence of the institutions created to spearhead the military and economic penetration of the new continental foothold. Indeed, the Kwantung Army and Mantetsu together defined the nature of empire in the Northeast.

      In keeping with the strategic importance accorded the new acquisition, a sizable military presence was established in the Northeast. The Kwantung garrison (reorganized in 1919 under its better-known appellation, the Kwantung Army) was composed of a regular army division and a heavy siege artillery battalion, both stationed within the Kwantung Leased Territory.¹¹ Supplementing this force were six independent garrison battalions of railway guards deployed along the railway zone, making a total troop strength of some 10,000 men. Except for a temporary loss of two railway guard battalions during military retrenchment in the late twenties, the Kwantung Army remained at this strength until the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident in 1931.

      Fearing a revenge attack after the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese Army planning concentrated on countering the Russian threat by turning Manchuria into a strategic buffer zone. Staff officers believed that in order to defend Japanese interests it was imperative to expand Mantetsu's lines into a network connecting Japan, Korea, and Manchuria which could move men and materiel quickly into position in north Manchuria. Thus the Kwantung Army was assigned a two-fold strategic mission: first, to help secure concessions from the Chinese to build new rail lines deemed strategically necessary; and second, to ensure that Manchuria remained free of the political and military disturbances beginning to spread throughout China.

      Over the course of the following two decades, the Kwantung Army pursued this mission with zealous determination. Acting sometimes at the behest of the army high command or with the unofficial support of civilian officials, and sometimes on independent initiative, Kwantung Army officers made the army into an agent of subimperialism. To the plotters, the revolutionary overthrow of China's imperial dynasty in 1911 and its subsequent descent into civil war provided a stream of opportunities to reshape the Chinese political situation to Japanese advantage. In the Northeast, Kwantung Army intrigues turned on nurturing the power base of the collaborationist warlord Zhang Zuolin and scheming to wrest Manchuria and Mongolia from Chinese control.¹²

      The practice of seconding military advisers to Chinese leaders (an estimated fifty Japanese officers advised Zhang's army in 1928) provided ample opportunity for various forms of Japanese intervention.¹³ During the late teens and twenties these military advisers supplied influence, information, funds, weapons, and even Japanese soldiers to ensure Zhang's victory over rival warlords. None of this came free, of course, and in exchange Japanese advisers secured promises of mining, railway, lumbering, and other concessions.

      At a low point in what had always been an uneasy partnership between Zhang and the Japanese, Kwantung Army plotters decided they were best rid of him. Leading the conspiracy, Colonel K

moto Daisaku ordered the destruction of Zhang's railway car while he was traveling north to Fengtian. Russian-made bombs, the suitably attired corpses of three murdered Chinese, and secret papers were left on the scene to deflect suspicion onto one of Zhang's rival warlords. The conspirators anticipated that Zhang's death would lead to major disturbances, giving the Kwantung Army a pretext to occupy Manchuria and install a puppet leader. But although the war minister proposed dispatching additional troops to Manchuria for just this purpose, the rest of the Japanese cabinet refused, and the Kwantung Army plot to precipitate war with China and occupy the Northeast failed. Nevertheless, nothing was done to dislodge the conspirators or to quell the destabilizing predilection of Kwantung Army officers for military intrigue and imperial agitation.

      While the Kwantung Army labored to strengthen Japan's strategic position on the continent, the mighty South Manchurian Railway (Mantetsu) undertook to open Manchuria to economic exploitation. A semipublic concern created in 1906 to manage the former Russian railway network with a capitalization of 200 million yen (increased to 440 million in 1920), Mantetsu was easily Japan's largest corporation. Mantetsu quickly expanded the Russian-built railway into an enterprise of staggering proportions. In addition to running freight and passenger services, the company operated coal mines at Fushun and Yantai as well as harbor and port facilities at Andong, Yingkou, and in the hub of Japanese activities in the Northeast, Dalian. Mantetsu maintained warehouses for goods and hotels for travelers; it administered the railway zone, which involved running schools and hospitals, as well as collecting taxes and managing public utilities. The research wing of Mantetsu became the center of Japanese colonial research, generating studies on all aspects of imperial policy throughout the formal and informal empire. Within a decade of operation, Mantetsu began to launch a string of subsidiary corporations. These included Dalian Ceramics, Dalian Oil and Fat, South Manchurian Glass Company, Anshan Iron and Steel Works, electric light companies and gas plants in the major cities, a shale oil factory, a machine workshop, and plants to mill flour and refine sugar.¹⁴

      For the first twenty-five years of its existence Mantetsu was an extremely profitable enterprise. Company assets rose from 163 million yen in 1908 to over a billion in 1930. A rate of return of 20 to 30 percent for all but a few of these years meant that not only was it the largest of Japan's companies, but frequently the most profitable as well.¹⁵ During the 1920s yearly revenue for this single company averaged 218 million yen, a sum equal to about a quarter of total Japanese tax revenue.¹⁶ The great majority of company revenue (75 percent) was generated by freight services.¹⁷ While the railway transported significant quantities of millet, sorghum, and coal, the key to Mantetsu profits was soybeans—exported to Europe for manufacture into vegetable fats and oils, and to Japan for fertilizer and feed. Mantetsu's development of the soybean trade reshaped Manchuria's agricultural economy into a heavily commercialized export economy reliant on the production of a single crop. It was the classic pattern of an extractive, colonial economy Soybean production increased four times between 1907 and 1927, by which time half the world's supply came from Northeast China. By monopolizing transportation and storage facilities, Mantetsu was able to charge premium rates on export-designated agricultural produce and maintain the company's extraordinary profitability.¹⁸

      By 1931, large numbers of Japanese had acquired an immediate taste of empire in service to one of these two institutions. Since the Kwantung Army was not composed of a permanent garrison unit, but rather was made up of regional divisions rotated for two-year postings, officers and conscripts from all over Japan saw service in Manchuria. By 1930, divisions based in Utsunomiya, Kyoto, Himeiji, Zents

ji, Hiroshima, Sendai, Asahikawa, and Kumamoto had taken their turns in the Kwantung Army. ¹⁹ Moreover, Japan had fought one major military engagement on Manchurian soil and launched a second from the Manchurian garrison. The Russo-Japanese War mobilized over a million soldiers, a figure that exhausted the military reserve system and meant that one in eight households sent a family member to Manchuria. The casualty rate was very high—close to half a million dead and wounded, leaving a popular association of the Manchurian battleground with sacrifice and grief.²⁰ The Siberian Intervention, launched against the newly constituted Soviet Union from 1918-1922, involved