In Manchuria (31 page)

Unnoted, of course, were the rumors of conscripted Chinese infantry who had killed their Japanese commanding officers, as other mutinous troops had done in Manchukuo.

The costume play of Puyi’s life continued. On his return from Nomonhan to the capital’s train station, “Imperial Guards fired a salute in honour of the returning Sovereign who appeared to be in excellent health.” As a military band played the national anthem—
The world has a new Manchuria, / Manchuria is the new world
—the train steamed to a halt at a platform thronged by officials who included Vice Minister of the Imperial Household Department, the Public Peace Minister, and Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal.

In April
1941
, the Nomonhan Incident officially concluded when Japan and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact that freed the latter to mass its forces against Nazi Germany. With Manchukuo’s Mongolian and Siberian border now as secure as its Korean and Chinese one, Japan’s battle-tested military turned its attention to the rest of China, and the Pacific.

In
Manchuria
magazine’s summer issue of
1941
, Charles Bishop Kinney reported
BUMPER CROPS FORECAST FOR ALL OF MANCHURIA
but also
SEVEN MORE KINDS OF NECESSITIES TO BE RATIONED
. Japan was forging a “new world order,” he wrote in a story headlined
THE EAST ASIAN SPHERE OF COMMON PROSPERITY
. An item about Puyi and the founder of the Gestapo began: “His Majesty was pleased to confer the First Order of Merit with the Grand Cordon of the Lungkuang on Reich Marshal Hermann Goering for kindnesses shown.”

On December
7
, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and overran Hong Kong, declaring war on the United States and Great Britain. Puyi announced that Manchukuo was also at war, pledging, “Together as a united people we shall come to the aid of our ally.” Yet Puyi would once again sit this dance out, watching from the sidelines until August
1945
, when the Soviets broke their nonaggression pact, declared war on Japan, and unleashed a million battle-hardened soldiers into Manchukuo.

Japan, “our ally,” abandoned the Northeast and its thirty million people, including three hundred thousand Japanese farmers enticed to move there as “soldiers of the hoe.” Little did they know they were also the first line of defense against such an invasion. The Japanese army had secretly called them “human pillboxes.” Now they were on their own.

CHAPTER
13

Occupation's Aftermath

“Go! Go and colonize the continent!” propaganda posters urged Japanese beginning in
1936
. “For the development of the Yamato race, to build the new order in Asia!” The campaign echoed the American nineteenth-century appeal “Go west, young man!” with “Go to the continent, young man! A new land awaits the village youth.” Despite the Depression in which rural Japan was sunk, migration to Manchukuo was framed in patriotic terms, not economic ones, and focused on the empire's future rather than its present, racked by food shortages, overpopulation, and an American embargo.

Colonization manuals included articles aimed at men such as “The Joy of Becoming a Progenitor”: “What could be better than creating a new country and of becoming the founding fathers to that country?”—and, for women, “The Joy of Breeding.” Its accompanying image showed a mother with child standing before a herd of grazing sheep. A
1941
journal promised, “If you become a Manchurian pioneer, you can be an owner-farmer, and you will see permanent prosperity for your descendants. There is no way to revive the [home] villages other than developing Manchuria.”

Under the “Millions to Manchuria” plan, Japanese villages would be replicated in Manchukuo, with branch family members—second and third sons, for example—sent to pioneer a satellite outpost sharing the same place name. Unbeknownst to settlers, the majority of these villages were established in bandit-infested areas or along the Soviet border. Photos show Japanese soldiers teaching newly arrived women, infants lashed to their backs, how to fire the single-bolt rifle each household was issued on landing.

Beyond patriotism, tangible incentives enticed civilians to Manchukuo. Skilled professionals such as doctors, teachers, and agronomists earned double their salary at home, while farming households received twenty-five acres of arable land, ten acres of grazing land, equipment, seed, and funds for cows, horses, and hired labor. Men were exempt from the military draft.

The land they were given on arrival in Manchukuo was not, as initially planned, uncultivated swamps and forest that they would open to the plow. Instead, settlers were handed cultivated land belonging to the native population, seized via army-forced evictions and coerced sales—paying as low as
15
percent of the land's assessed value. Dissenters could expect the retribution noted in a Japanese police chief's report: “More than twenty armed men were sent to the area in question, and they either bayoneted farmers who did not comply with their orders or killed their cattle, dogs, and chickens.” Often the displaced faced two options: accept a plot of uncultivated land, or become hired labor on their former farm.

While colonization left a visible imprint on Northeast cities, the remains of the Millions to Manchuria movement have all but vanished from the countryside. One of the most publicized migrant villages was a branch of the Japanese hamlet of Ohinata founded in
1938
at Sijiafang (Place of Four Families), forty miles northeast of Wasteland.        

A Japanese novelist was paid to document Ohinata's migration, resulting in a popular newspaper series and a book that spawned a film, plays, and songs. The one schoolchildren sang when sending off the settlers went:

 

Just plant one grain of wheat

And the life in our home will prosper

Work together until everything is beautiful

In the paradise we will build

Oh, Ohinata in Manchuria

 

The writer traveled with the settlers. Now I used his novel as a map to search for the village. The train departed at
5
:
24
a.m., and once again I had an entire hard-seat-class car to myself. Cool morning air blew through the open windows, and the sun, which rose at four in summertime, shone warmly on my face. For two enjoyable hours the train lumbered through rice paddies and birch groves—flushing out the occasional pheasant—past hamlets with post-Liberation monikers such as Restoring Asia.

Exiting a small blockhouse of a station put me in a broad, empty square. In the Japanese novel, this station was described as being fronted by “four old Manchurian dwellings.” The newly arrived Japanese had constructed “houses for a few hundred households,” in addition to a police station, school, and hospital. “We are looking forward to a brilliant future,” its narrator enthused, “as a medium-sized administrative center.”

The town, now named Shulan, had become just that, with offices and services clustered around two intersections. The book's narrator noted the area was already home to four thousand Chinese (“Manchurians”) and two thousand Koreans. Those moved off their land had become corvée labor. “Especially for the construction of the new village they come in very handy,” the novel's narrator said. “However, for the future I think we have to do some in-depth research about the problem of our leadership of the Manchurian people and our harmonious coexistence.”

The writer described the settlers' village as four square miles divided by a river “so clear that you can count the beautiful pebbles at its bottom.” A village named Place of Four Families no longer appeared on maps, but a few miles north of the station, nestled between the mountains and that river, was a hamlet called Four Big Families. Perhaps the name had been changed after Liberation? I boarded a minibus heading in its direction.

Fifteen minutes later the driver stopped the bus on a two-lane road hugged by verdant green paddies. I squeezed past the passengers standing in the aisle but hesitated at the door, seeing no sign of life to the horizon. As the bus faded from view, I stood alone, looking at the kind of bucolic landscape that inspired the novel's narrator to say: “I think that we are more than blessed with this settlement place in comparison to other places.”

A dirt road led across the railroad tracks, past a row of single-story homes that ended at a cornfield. A sign in a neighboring paddy identified the rice as Japonica #
1
, a variety also grown in Wasteland. I wanted to tell someone this, but my audience was two cows tethered to a gap-toothed wooden fence. Back at the train tracks, a man stepped out of the crossing house and nodded hello.

“I'm looking for Place of Four Families, where the Japanese farmers lived.”

The man frowned. “This is Four Big Families.”

“Where's Place of Four Families?”

“Never heard of it. It doesn't matter anyway: you're too late. Those little Japs all ran away. I wasn't born then, but I heard about it. No, nothing remains from that time.”

I walked eight miles down a poplar-shaded road, encountering no traces of life except for two signs. One announced Big Tree Village, which had no trees. The other urged the prevention of forest fires.

In the hamlet named Safe and Sound, the lone intersection held only a hand-painted blue plank nailed to a telephone pole, pointing the way to a tiny train station. Its broad plaza was made prettier by the bright green weeds that sprouted between the paving stones. Nothing looked Japanese; the biggest building in town was a Korean-built Christian church and elementary school. Both sat empty on a summer Saturday afternoon.

On the way back to Shulan and my train to Wasteland, the bus driver went off his route to drop me near a new bridge spanning the river, where owners washed their cars while parked in the shallows.

“You're looking for Place of Four Families, but what few people know around here is that this town used to be called that,” the driver said. “My father was a teacher who grew up here, that's how I know. The name changed to Shulan after Liberation.” (He proved to be right.) “My father told me that this is where the Japanese village was.” He pointed at a wide new road, lined with wide new government offices. The only sign said, in Chinese and Korean,
SECOND RING ROAD
. It was empty.

When the Japanese settlers left for Manchuria, children waved flags, and “the villagers let go of the handkerchiefs and shouted banzai, throwing both hands up in the air” as tears streamed down their cheeks. As their train pulled away from their Japanese home, the settlers heard a farewell song that went:

 

The pioneers of our great Japan

We divided the village of Ohinata

And went to Sijiafang in Manchuria

To build the paradise of the imperial way

We will all march together

 

Most of the settlers who woke in the Northeast on August
9
,
1945,
would not survive the fall of Manchukuo. Many committed suicide, together.

 

Although they made up only
17
percent of the
1
.
5
million Japanese living in Manchukuo, settlers accounted for nearly half its death toll, which equaled that at Nagasaki: out of
270
,
000
farmers in the Northeast,
80
,
000
—mostly women and children—died at war's end.

The Japanese army had abandoned them. The force that invaded northeast China fourteen years earlier had been reduced by the Pacific War, with units transferred south. Settlers took their place; at the end of
1943
,
50
percent of farmers had been placed along the Soviet-Manchukuo front line. As Japanese losses mounted in
1944
the army reneged on the draft exemption offered to settlers. It enacted a “bottom-scraping” mobilization in May, calling up all able-bodied men—most without any military training—as Germany surrendered and the Soviet Union turned its forces east. In Manchukuo the army pulled back from their positions vulnerable to the anticipated Soviet advance, leaving three-quarters of the region undefended. No evacuation was planned. A Japanese general bluntly said of the women, children, and elderly left in the settler villages: “Their only alternative is suicide.”

 

In February
1945
, the Pacific War was about to turn inexorably to the Allies' favor: after winning Saipan and its airfield, B-
29
bombers were in range of Tokyo. The Japanese army continued to draft all age-eligible reinforcements, however. “I had the misfortune of turning twenty that spring,” Akira Nagamine told me. “I knew the red paper was coming, and I was obligated to go.”

After all of the track I had ridden across the Northeast, and all the museums and colonial buildings I had visited and maps and books I had read, eighty-seven-year-old Akira Nagamine truly brought Manchukuo to life. Shipped from his Japanese hamlet of twenty farming families to defend Manchukuo's eastern frontier, he ended up trapped after the war in China's Northeast for eight years.