Japanese colonialism in Manchukuo
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A political project known as "Manchukuo" was created by the Imperial Japanese Army in northeastern China during the 1930s and 1940s. Planning was tightly focused on economic, political, and military strategic aspects fo this puppet state. A multidimensional complete plan was created for these Manchurian lands.
This project incorporated political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions of Japanese development of "Manchukuo" all the way from the first stages of theoretical thinking and paper planning to putting those ideas into real practice in the Manchurian lands.
The Japanese Army was sent to Manchuria as one great mobilization from the Japanese homeland for these imperialistic plans; which also stimulated and provocated some transformations in various domestic modern institutions in homeland Japan and the nearby provinces of Chosen and Kwantung Leased Territory.
These six modern transformations in homeland Japan were:
- First, how the establishment of "Manchukuo" altered and expanded the role of increasingly commercialized and nationalizing mass culture in politics when Central Government founded Industrial and Commercial State Monopolies. How the South Manchurian Railway Company amongst others in land or signed agreements with private industrial interests in similar business.
- Second, how mobilization of various social groups at home for the empire building in Manchuria transformed the relationship between Japanese state and society. How the surging ofultranationalists sentiments in citizens also stimulated the surging of more Secret Societies. Why they supported all official policies.
- Third, how the empire building in Manchuria produced close, yet tenuous, alliances between militarist (Gumbatsu) and private economic interests (Zaibatsu) groups both in Manchuria and in homeland Japan in relation to future commercial and industrial business expansions in Russian Siberian areas.
- Fourth, how the Manchu "empire" building offered a wide range of career opportunities for displaced Japanese Marxist and liberal intelligentsia "exiled" in the Manchurian hinterland, where they were able to further their utopian social ideals and visions during the 1930s.
- Fifth, how Japanese Army's Project in Manchuria after 1931 became an own "laboratory" for experimenting with state capitalism Collectivism and industrial developmentalism, guiding the Army's interests which subsequently left their imprints on Japanese domestic economic structures, along Militarist-Socialism political Army thought in native government administration.
- And last, how the process of empire building, particularly its emigration and colonization project, stimulated the expansion of state apparatus joining with military strategical and national security and expansioninst interests nearest the Russian Far East (Outer Manchuria) and Siberia for organizing one security line against dangerous Communist ideology.
This Japanese Army empire project implemented in Manchuria was "Complete" because of its intense relationship with the metropolis and extensive mobilization of various social forces at home: "total war planning and total empire was made on the home front. It entailed the mass and multidimensional mobilization of domestic society: cultural, military, political, and economic"
The inclusive and all-encompassing nature of the Japanese Army Manchurian Project in the 1930s and 1940s entailed inherent contradictions, including the fact that Army s "empire" building in the Manchurian hinterland produced odd alliances among military officers, bureaucrats, capitalists, and right & left-wing intellectuals. Although unified under the utopian ideal of "total imperialism", each group envisioned different versions of a total empire.
These contradictory forces always held the process of empire building in a precarious balance. In support of its own proper policies,the central government developed one imperial mass culture and government propaganda apparatus alongside of managing of own native cultural and social thought in benefit of their propaganda policy. The "Japanese Army theory of development in Manchuria" also disappointed those who had a more interior look at "Manchukuo" itself and inklings about what "Manchukuo" meant for Chinese Manchurian, Mongol, White Russian, East Jews and Korean besides others.
