Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young

that would reproduce itself, Japanese hoped to mount their imperial jewel in a permanent setting.⁴⁰

      The settler community created by the government's colonization program bore little resemblance to the Japanese society that had grown up in Manchuria in the years before Manchukuo. The older community was exclusively urban; the new settlements were in the countryside. A privileged elite of administrators, entrepreneurs, and professionals made up the urban community; the rural immigrants were drawn from the ranks of impoverished tenant farmers and the lumpen proletariat. Unlike the colonial elite, who eagerly flocked to the continent in the 1930s, swelling the urban population to close to a million in 1940,⁴¹ the farm immigrants needed to be bribed with offers of free passage, free land, and a long list of other enticements before they would be persuaded to take advantage of the opportunities in Manchukuo.

      Among other reasons, urban life was more attractive because fellow Japanese citizens comprised a large proportion of the population. In the two centers of urban settlement, Dalian and Fengtian, Japanese made up 29 percent and 59 percent of the 1932 population, respectively. The 300,000 rural settlers, in contrast, entered a world where they constituted a fraction of a percent of the estimated 34 million natives.⁴² The settlers were divided among just over a thousand villages scattered throughout the rural hinterland. Often the sole Japanese outpost for many miles, these immigrant villages were swallowed up in the Chinese multitudes that surrounded them. In addition, few of the urban Japanese intended to take up permanent residence in Manchuria, a fact much lamented by the ideologues of colonization. Since urban settlers had financial mobility, they often chose to return to Japan after finishing their tour of duty in the colonial service or their company's Manchurian branch. The agricultural settlers, however, came for good. The price of government aid was a lifetime commitment to their new home. Even if they changed their minds, returning to Japan was far from easy. They had severed ties with their home villages, selling off land and property, and in most cases they were financially dependent on the government and would be hard pressed to find funds to pay the fare home. Unlike their urban counterparts, the rural settlers were stuck in Manchuria—permanent residents, if not out of choice, out of necessity.

      Government involvement in the welfare of the farm settlements extended far beyond what was provided urban colonists. Rather like the economy itself, the immigrant villages were state-planned and state-managed. A swelling bureaucracy and ever-larger budget appropriations were given over to the micro-management of the immigrant villages. Everything from the number of livestock to the crop mix was prescribed by plan. State-run cooperatives bought colonists’ produce and sold them seed, fertilizer, and sundries for everyday use. State agricultural agents advised them and reported on their progress. Such attention aimed to secure their long-term survival and, at the same time, to ensure that colonists stayed put on the land.

      Like everything about Manchurian government policy, there was a heavy military coloration to the agricultural settlement program. Behind the big budgets and the state preoccupation with the welfare of the colonists lay a two-fold strategic agenda. First, in constructing Japanese villages in north Manchuria along the border with Siberia, administrators aimed to create a human buffer zone against the Soviet Union. Second, by settling Japanese in the rural centers of the Chinese resistance movement, officials hoped to deter further guerrilla warfare against the colonial state. To prepare them for their paramilitary role, the state included military maneuvers in the course of training provided to all agricultural settlers, and issued them arms along with tools and seeds when they arrived in their new homes. In effect, the settlers were turned into a strategically deployed reserve of the Kwantung Army.

      Through the agricultural settlement program, Manchukuo administrators created a new colonial society, one comprised of a weak and subordinated farming class that could be controlled in ways not possible with the urban colonists. Like the gamble for power by the Kwantung Army in 1931 and the risks taken to test out the planned economy, settlement was an experiment; it was an attempt to create a new instrument of the colonial state.

      These three projects involved more money, more resources, and more people with each passing month. Each step grew bolder and each decision more brash, as Manchukuo increasingly defined the cutting edge of imperial policy. By the late 1930s Manchukuo had become synonymous with the Kwantung garrison, pride of the Imperial Army, with the command economy and the yen bloc, and with the noble labors of the settlers who tilled the rich earth of Manchuria. What had been developed in the Northeast to meet the challenge of nationalism in China created a model for the construction of a new kind of empire. Japanese applied this model to an Asia where the rise of anti-imperialist nationalisms threatened the old formulas for imperialist cooperation and colonial management. In this way, the creation of Manchukuo ushered in an era of autonomous imperialism for Japan in Asia.

      AUTONOMOUS IMPERIALISM

      This third phase of imperialism lasted until the end of World War II. What Japanese officials called “autonomous diplomacy” signified two departures from past practice. First, it meant liberating imperial interests in Asia from a consideration of relations with the West. In the past, fearing diplomatic isolation, Japanese policy makers took careful stock of how a potential move in Asia was likely to be received in the West. Interventions were preceded by judicious multilateral negotiations. After 1931, however, the “Manchurian problem,” the “China question,” and the “advance south” all were decided unilaterally and in the face of Western opposition. The standoff between Japan and the great powers in the League of Nations in 1932-1933 signaled this change in direction. In the spring of 1933, failing to gain Western endorsement for its actions in Northeast China, Japan left the League and isolated itself diplomatically. Of their own volition, Japanese statesmen withdrew from the great power club into which they had labored so long to gain entry.

      Second, autonomy betokened a new independence for the colonial armies. In this sense the origin of the new phase of imperialism in a Kwantung Army conspiracy was of more than passing importance. Indeed, military faits accomplis followed one upon the other, as aggressive field officers took their lead from the success of the Manchurian Incident. Since Meiji times, imperial expansion began with military conquest. But by the 1930s, the imperial garrisons had multiplied and the institutional complexity of the armed services opened new possibilities for subimperialists. The trigger-happy proclivity of the garrison armies turned the boundaries of the empire into a rolling frontier. And as the army gained influence over political institutions both at home and in the empire, the tendency to resort to force when negotiations stalled only grew stronger.

      This “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to empire building drew Japan into a series of military conflicts. At first, China and the Soviet Union responded to Japan's go-fast imperialism with concessions.⁴³ In the early 1930s, the Nationalists were too busy fighting the Communists to resist the takeover of Manchuria. Stalin, preoccupied with agricultural collectivization, the five-year plans, and purging the party, decided to sell off the Chinese Eastern Railway in 1935 and retreat before Japan's advance into north Manchuria. But after the formation of a united Chinese Communist-Nationalist front in 1936 and the Soviet fortifications of the Manchurian-Soviet border, both China and the Soviet Union began to stand their ground. War broke out with China in 1937; and with the Soviet Union in 1938 and 1939.

      Similarly, American and European interests in Asia were initially consumed with domestic economic problems and the dissolution of the international financial system. The day before the Manchurian Incident, Great Britain went off the gold standard; there was little attention to spare for the Far East. Although after 1937 the United States opposed Japan indirectly by supplying Jiang Jieshi with war materiel, only in 1940, after the outbreak of war in Europe and the Japanese advance into Indochina, did the United States begin embargoes on strategic materials to Japan. The tightening of the economic screws led to the decision, once again, to attack; from December 1941, Japan was fighting a war against Britain and the United States, and the boundaries of the empire became an endless war front. In the process, the empire and the war grew indistinguishable. The hallmark of the new imperialism was a perpetual state of war. From the creation of Manchukuo to the occupation of Southeast Asia, policy makers and foot soldiers alike were propelled by a sense of crisis and the extraordinary needs of a nation at war.

      Following the model pioneered in Manchukuo, the autonomous phase of