Authors: Michael Meyer
The Lytton Commission, named for its head
After Japan formed Manchukuo in 1932, China appealed to the nascent League of Nations to intervene. It ordered the withdrawal of Japanese troops, a resolution that Japan ignored. The West’s attention was diverted by domestic concerns: British sailors mutinied at the Royal Navy yard at Invergordon; the failure of one of Europe’s most preeminent banks threatened the entire continent with bankruptcy; the United States remained mired in the Great Depression. Its Stimson Doctrine, named for the secretary of state, said it would not recognize territorial changes resulting from force, therefore Manchuria remained part of sovereign China. No sanctions were applied; the toothless doctrine’s one noticeable effect was to further alienate Japan from American influence and to view the U.S. as a threat.
A Japanese military officer mentioned to a reporter
Morton, p. 41.
The propaganda posters, another correspondent noted
Holmes, p. 12.
“They asked me only two questions”
Puyi, p. 188.
Japanese officers accompanied the commission
Inventory of the Papers of Roy L. Morgan. Box 1, Folder 6, MSS 93-4. Item 2: Affidavit of Henry Pu Yi, p. 8.
The president of the South Manchuria Railway
Elliot 2, p. 639. The poem was “Ode to Mukden” by the emperor Qianlong. Japan’s argument is still seen at Tokyo’s Yushukan war museum, which displays a time line dating back over two thousand years correctly, if elliptically, showing the homeland of the Manchu “with varying official names throughout history,” and kingdoms “frequently at odds with the Han Chinese.”
For more on the Lytton Commission, see Young, Louise (p. 150), Duara (p. 53), and the International Relations Committee, which gives a sampling of world opinion at the time, via newspaper editorials.
The commission was not convinced
The league stated it would not recognize Manchukuo and that Japan should recall its soldiers to within the South Manchuria Railway zone.
Time
magazine called the report the financially strapped league’s “last chance to escape political and moral bankruptcy as well.”
Japan’s representative to the league, Yosuke Matsuoka, pronounced: “Japan stands ready to be crucified! But we do believe, and firmly believe, that in a very few years, world opinion will be changed and that we shall be understood by the world as Jesus of Nazareth was.” Matsuoka would soon become the head of the South Manchuria Railway.
One witness was the American
Newman, p. 21.
The truce that ended the fighting
The Tangu Truce was named for the Bohai Sea port where the agreement was signed in May 1933.
“First Emperor Enthroned”
Manchuria Daily News
.
I expected the story to end with the observation
Paraphrasing Karl Marx’s appending of Hegel’s famous quote.
“A silk hat and frockcoat will be needed”
Japan Railways Department
, p. 000viii.
In an article he wrote for the
Atlantic
Kinney, Henry, 1.
In a
1924
Atlantic
articl
e Kinney, Henry, 2. p. 130.
The article described the horrors of
1923
’s Great Kanto Earthquake
. Since the Richter scale wasn’t developed until the 1930s, the quake’s magnitude has been estimated to have been between 7.9 and 8.4.
In a memo sent to Western journalists then
Kinney, Henry W., in Payson J. Treat Papers at the Hoover Institute Archives, Stanford University 1. Memo dated November 30, 1931.
There was no mention of the building of Shinto shrines
Yamamuro, pp. 187 and 194.
Foreign correspondents dubbed the puppet state
Ibid., p. 189.
The Times of
London
correspondent
Fleming 3, p. 130. This is a funny book. Fleming was twenty-seven years old on the trip, which he recorded in a diary that he did not organize into a book until 1952. His entries sound familiar to a traveler even today: “This hotel is depressing. The men on the desk are devoted to me, vaguely, I suppose, suspecting that I may one day ventilate their obscure and unnumbered grievances . . . A typical Harbin man deduced that I was a correspondent; finally insisted on giving me his name, written on a piece of paper with the word
drunk
after it. The only Russian in Harbin with a sense of humour” (p. 135).
Travelers could rely on all-American equipment
South Manchuria Railway Company 2, p. 49.
“The shriek of these American locomotives”
Ibid., p. 69.
The memo was discovered and published
Powell, p. 309.
And the talk of Japanese being “conspicuously boisterous”
Kinney, Henry W., in Payson J. Treat Papers at the Hoover Institute Archives, Stanford University 2. Memo dated June 8, 1935.
Manchukuo, he gushed, had
5
,
500
miles of railroad
Ibid. Memo dated March 10, 1937, on the fifth anniversary of the founding of Manchukuo.
In
1933
, Henry Kinney wrote
Manchukuo: A Handbook of Information
, p. 96.
Japanese had migrated in numbers before
Wilson 2, pp. 251–52. See also Young, Louise, pp. 310–12.
Fewer than one thousand Japanese farmers moved
Ibid., p. 253.
As planners drew up the modern Manchukuo capital
Young, Louise, p. 324.
Officials recorded the sale of
11
,
604
Ibid., p. 324.
In
1932
, after intense debate and lobbying
Ibid., p. 321.
In
1936
, however, the Japanese government
Ibid., p. 307.
Previously, Japan had backed Korean migration to the region
Hyun, pp. 36–43.
The South Manchuria Railway had urged farmers
Ibid., p. 52. The map appears on p. 48.
Puyi visited the wounded
Manchuria
, pp. 211–12. In Russian, the Nomonhan Incident is known as the battles of Khalkhin Gol.
Unnoted, of course
Inventory of the Papers of Roy L. Morgan. Box 1, Folder 6, MSS 93-4. Item 7: Interrogation of Pu Yi (Continued), p. 12. Puyi told the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal that this occurred at Nomonhan, although I found no other mention of this incident. In his landmark two-volume history of the battle, Alvin Coox reported a 1936 mutiny in eastern Manchukuo by one hundred Chinese troops who killed three Japanese officers, burned their barracks, fled over the Soviet border, then returned with Red Army escorts for further skirmishes. It provides this indelible image: “During the heaviest combat, ‘three men of a commanding rank in the Soviet army were unmistakably observed to be directing the deserters with whips’” (Coox, p. 95).
In
Manchuria
magazine’s summer issue of
1941
Ibid., pp. 215 and 129.
An item about Puyi and the founder of the Gestapo began
Ibid., p. 175.
Puyi announced that Manchukuo was also at war
Yamamuro, p. 194.
The Japanese army had secretly called them
Young, Louise, p. 406.
Chapter 13: Occupation’s Aftermath
“Go! Go and colonize the continent!”
Young, Louise, pp. 364–68.
Colonization manuals included articles
Ibid., pp. 368–69.
A
1941
journal promised
Wilson 2, p. 278. For an interesting look at how Japanese planners (including Uchida Yoshikazu, architect of the Tokyo University campus) envisioned these settlements, see Tucker.
Skilled professionals such as doctors
Young, Louise, pp. 400–401.
Instead, settlers were handed cultivated land
Ibid., pp. 401–4, and Tamanoi 2, p. 29.
Dissenters could expect the retribution
Wilson 2, p. 267.
One of the most publicized migrant villages
Scherer. Also noted in Tamanoi 2, pp. 31–32. I rely on Scherer’s translations, taken from her dissertation.
Just plant one grain of wheat
Ibid., pp. 205–6.
The train departed at
5
:
24
a.m.
It left from a little-used station in western Jilin city that resembled a German Gothic castle. It was a relic of the Young Marshal Zhang Xueliang’s attempt to break the Japanese monopoly and build a competing railway, called the Jihai Line. The station was designed by Lin Huiyin—also known as Phyllis Lin—the sister-in-law of the archaeologist Liang Siyong and aunt of Maya Lin, creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. Built in 1928, the station’s barn-roof, granite-block structure is meant to resemble “a crouching lion, with its tail ingeniously designed as a bell tower,” according to a plaque at its entrance. Around me passed crowds entering a temporary waiting room and construction workers—in yellow hard hats and olive green plimsolls—off to build high-rise apartments named Park Scenery House.
“Especially for the construction”
Scherer, p. 213.
The writer described the settlers’ village
Ibid., p. 211.
When the Japanese settlers left
Ibid., pp. 205 and 209.
Although they made up only
17
percent
Chan, pp. 17 and 20. Young, Louise, citing Foreign Ministry surveys, found that of the 223,000 settlers at war’s end, only 140,000 (63 percent) ever returned to Japan. “More than a third of settlers—78,500 people—died in the wake of defeat” (p. 411). See Also Tamanoi 2, p. 167. Yamamuro cites the same figures as Chan: “roughly 270,000 settlers” and “some 80,000” dead (p. 282).
The Japanese army had abandoned them
Young, Louise, pp. 406–8. See also Wilson 2, p. 283: “No military protection was provided for them and there were no plans for their evacuation. In fact, Kwantung Army contingency plans against Soviet entry into the war, made two months before the event, placed the line of Japanese defense in such a way that the majority of Japanese settlers would be abandoned.”
“I had the misfortune”
I came across Nagamine via a 2010 article in
Nikkei West
, “Northern California’s longest printing Japanese-American newspaper—now in our 20th year.” See Sammon. I met Nagamine with his wife, their daughter Janet, and UC Santa Cruz professor Alan Christy. Their collaborative book and documentary film on Nagamine’s life is forthcoming.
Commanded by the architect of the Stalingrad
His name was Aleksandr Vasilevsky.
“Lightning flashed unexpectedly”
General Beloborodov quoted in Glantz, p. 44. His landmark and highly readable monograph gave the battle its more mellifluous name.
Once this site was a busy dock
The hamlet is named Yihantongxiang.
A Place of Four Families settler later recalled
Tamanoi 2, p. 48.
Several authors survived collective suicides
See Chan, pp. 19–22, and Itoh, pp. 186–87, for examples.
Hundreds of Japanese women
Estimates range from the hundreds to thousands. In a 2006 report, China’s state news agency said more than 10,000 Japanese gathered at the docks waiting for evacuation boats, and that “many chose to commit suicide.” By spring “more than 5,000 had died.” Of the survivors, 2,400 chose to be repatriated, while “more than 2,000 remaining, mostly women and children, were adopted by the local people.” (See “War Proves a Mixed Blessing for Some Japanese,” Xinhua, August 12, 2006.) Chan writes: “It is estimated that 20,000 Japanese refugees were kept in Fangzheng” in refugee camps. Only 8,649 survived the winter. By spring 2,300 had married Chinese men, 2,360 had died from disease and hunger, 1,120 children had been adopted locally, and 1,200 had tried to walk toward Harbin (Chan, p. 22).
In the first year after surrender
Young, Louise, p. 410.
An equal number was press-ganged
Dower, pp. 50–51.
I talked to him
The farm began by growing flowers, and is named A. Nagamine Nursery. It’s in the town of Watsonville.
Across Manchukuo, the majority of surviving settlers
Young, Louise, pp. 410–11. From the beginning, with a housing and food shortage at home, Japan was not officially eager to have settlers return. Even in postwar Japan, returnees receive a subsidized apartment, language and job training lessons, and a monthly stipend of around $1,500, a pittance in Tokyo, one of the world’s most expensive cities. An estimated 60 percent of returnees live on welfare (Tamanoi 2, p. 131). For details on the boat lift, see Maruyama.
Of the survivors
A local offspring of a Japanese woman and Chinese man told Xinhua that their parents’ union was not voluntary: “At that time, anyone could go there and bring a Japanese woman or child home,” said fifty-four-year-old Bi Zhongqing.