Authors: Michael Meyer
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 native 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.”