Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young

epochal moments of the war on stage and screen recalled the giddy sense of pride felt when Japanese saw their nation catapulted into the forefront of international prestige and power. Tokyo theaters brought out stirring dramas like For the Fatherland (Sokoku no tame ni) and Kabuki tragedies such as The Gold-buttoned Soldier (Kinbotan no heitai).97 General Nogi, the Russo-Japanese War hero who had conducted the bloody assault on Liishun and later stunned the nation with his suicide after the death of “his Emperor,” was exalted in children's biographies and minstrel songs.⁹⁸ Tokyo's Meijiza Theater produced a “General Nogi” play in January 1932, and Kawai Pictures opened Remember General Nogi! (Omoidaseyo Nogi shogun) the following month.⁹⁹ Other war heroes like the martyred “military god” Commander Hirose were eulogized in children's songs and stories. The boys’ magazine Shnen kurabu accompanied an illustrated account of Hirose's final glorious hours with a paper construction set representing the Tokyo statue of Hirose. As the magazine described this “stirring” memorial to the great man, “the longer you look at it the more humbled you feel by his nobility.”¹⁰⁰ The boom of Russo-Japanese War theme products reconnected Manchuria to the victory that had startled the world and gilded the “lifeline” with the reflected glory of the earlier campaign.

      At the same time, the resurrection of elegiac Russo-Japanese War songs like “Sen'y

” (Comrade) called to mind the human cost of the war, shading images of the Manchurian lifeline with bitter memories of death and sacrifice:

      Here, many hundreds of leagues from home,

      The red setting sun of distant Manchuria

      Shines down on a stone at the edge of a field,

      Beneath which my friend lies.

      It grieves me to think of the brave hero

      Who only yesterday headed the charge—

      Ruthlessly setting upon the enemy

      I wonder, will he sleep well here?

      At the height of the battle,

      I raced blindly to the friend

      Who had been at my side

      As he fell suddenly,

      The flag with him.¹⁰¹

      Even before its resurgence in popularity during the Manchurian Incident, “Sen'y

” had made phrases such as “red setting sun” (akai yhi) and “hundreds of leagues from home” (koko wa mikuni o nanbyaku ri) common epithets for Manchuria. Revived in 1931, “Sen'y

” reminded Japanese of the importance of defending their foothold in Northeast China. Representing Manchuria as the site of loss, the place where fathers, brothers, and comrades in arms died in heroic sacrifice, the “Sen'y

” revival strengthened the sense of connection that the lifeline was coming to represent. Manchuria must be defended, for it was all that the Japanese had left of the loved ones they mourned.

      Such personalized narratives of loss were linked, invariably, with sacrifice for the nation. In “Sen'y

” this was conveyed by the reference to the flag. In “Manchuria March.” the hit song of 1932, it was suggested with a verse that made Manchuria into a national monument to the Russo-Japanese War dead:

      Look over at the war memorial!

      There the bones of our heroes,

      Dead in the war between Japan and Russia,

      Are long buried.

      Stained with a red river of blood,

      The evening sun shines upon it,

      Soaring high over the endless plain.¹⁰²

      Here the personal loss of a comrade in arms was generalized to the national loss of “our heroes.” Their interment transformed Manchuria into a national (family) graveyard, while the “river of blood” marked Japan's claim to Manchurian soil. Identifying Manchuria with the Russo-Japanese War, songs like “Manchuria March” made the lifeline into a metaphor for shared sacrifice and provided a blood claim to Manchurian territory.

      Such blood imperatives to defend the Manchurian lifeline were also phrased in terms of a blood debt to the Russo-Japanese War generation. Employing a familiar Confucian vocabulary of familial obligation, appeals to the blood debt circulated in the mass media in 1931–1933 suggested that the young owed it to their parents to protect the Manchurian empire. A reader's poem (senry) published in the popular magazine Kingu depicted service on the Manchurian battlefront forging a special bond between father and son: “Remembering Manchuria with a full heart/he leaves the warmth of the fire/to see his first born off to Manchuria.”¹⁰³ Such words implied that the Manchurian Incident was, in effect, a replay of the Russo-Japanese War. This, of course, was an absurd suggestion, for engagement with an ill-equipped and poorly financed warlord force (most of which was not resisting Japanese occupation militarily) was in no way comparable to facing the full strength of the tsar's army and navy. Poetic license aside, the point of such appeals was to elicit a reenactment of the outpouring of patriotic sacrifice for which the Russo-Japanese War was also remembered.

      Public memories linking the Russo-Japanese War to the Manchurian Incident fashioned Manchuria into a generational lifeline, connecting past and present and passing the burden of guardianship from father to son, from one generation to the next. A tribute to the first war dead published in Kingu singled out Captain Kuramoto for special mention because of such a family connection: “First the father in the Russo-Japanese War and now the son in the present incident, their heroic bones abandoned to the elements on the Manchurian plain.”¹⁰⁴ The notion of a generational lifeline also resonated with the doctrine of the family-state, the idea that all Japanese were part of one national family under the paternity of the emperor. Legally sanctioned in the Meiji constitution and promoted through the educational system, its moral prescriptions of “loyalty and patriotism” called for obedience to emperor and nation as an expression of familial piety. The idea of blood debt evoked in the Manchurian Incident war fever wedded patriotic duty toward this metaphoric national family with the personal feelings of obligation toward friends and family.

      In addition to these popular images of a line of blood and spirit that indebted the living to the dead and bound them to defend Manchuria, the lifeline came to symbolize an economic umbilical chord as well. Unlike the Russo-Japanese War images, the language of economic security was a new addition to the imperial lexicon. Since before the turn of the century, apostles of empire advocated the promotion of Japanese shipping to and trade with Korea and China, pointing to the links between commercial competitiveness and international prestige.¹⁰⁵ But at that stage the economic importance of empire was conceived in terms of export markets. When the experience of World War I taught military planners the value of colonies as import markets, Japanese began to evaluate the empire as a resource base for industrial production.¹⁰⁶ This new appreciation of colonies as a source of strategic imports was reinforced by the initiation of large-scale rice imports from Korea and Taiwan after the rice riots of 1918. For the first time, Japan was dependent on the colonies for domestic food consumption.

      The mass media discourse on Manchuria in 1931–1933 defined the lifeline in this new economic language of empire. Articles in best-selling magazines like Kingu and le no hikari called Manchuria a “bottomless treasurehouse,” referring to its “unlimited land” and “inexhaustible resources.” In short, it was the “key to the national economy.”¹⁰⁷ In the newly popularized vision of Northeast China, the empire was represented in terms of a resource base necessary for Japan's economic security, or even its economic survival. For a people mired in depression, the image of an economic lifeline was a powerful symbol, speaking to their hopes