This article revisits Japan's empire-building in Northeast China through the construction of and reactions to the Daidō hiroba 大同広場 (Plaza of Great Unity) in Shinkyō, showing how Chinese and Japanese challenged the top-down attempt for building a totalitarian empire. These re-interpretations and definitions of Hiroba unveiled the diversity, dynamics, and complexity of Manchukuo society that cannot be fully grasped in a nation-state framework. Moreover, their voices challenged the previous depiction of such imperial monumental space as the physical materialization of imperial governmentality but a contested site where individuals challenged the official vision of Manchukuo. This article examines documents ranging from governmental documents to works of literature in both Chinese and Japanese. Compared to Japanese planners' vision of the Hiroba as a site of governmentality, visitors and local residents held differing interpretations of this space: some Japanese disapproved the attempt to reframe the urban space by a totalitarian regime, and many Chinese redefined the meaning of this “utopian” urban space to accord with their own tradition and everyday life.

This article examines the zoological gardens established by Japanese imperialists in colonial Seoul (1908) and Taipei (1914). Drawing on multilingual sources, it argues that zoos explicitly exposed the unequal interethnic and interspecies hierarchies that undergirded the colonial project. The colonial zoo was an ambivalent “dreamscape”: a carefully constructed landscape of iron cages and manicured pathways wherein colonizers’ dreams of ordering the natural world and colonized populations existed in uneasy tension with the actual experiences of zoo visitors and encaged zoo animals. Intellectuals sometimes criticized zoo excesses or identified the bondage of caged animals with the colonized experience. Yet these zoos also enjoyed immense popularity as Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese visitors alike participated in the physical and discursive subjugation of zoo animals. Sensitivity to these contradictions, this essay contends, is essential for understanding both the broader significance of these institutions and their contested legacies today.

This article focuses on the 1935 discovery of what is now believed to be a selenium deficiency disorder in the Japanese client state of Manchukuo. The epicenter of this disease had served as pasture for Oirat Mongols until the late nineteenth century. Opening up the land for reclamation by Chinese migrants put greater pressure on each acre to produce food. With a limited supply of selenium in the soil, the intake of this mineral by crops decreased over time, especially under the extractive conditions of the soybean industry during the Japanese occupation. Japanese theories on climate and hygiene made legible the consequences of transforming this nomadic borderland into an agrarian heartland on colonized bodies. By bringing attention to the understudied Mongol territories in Manchukuo, this essay goes beyond environmental histories bound by the nation-state to reveal the corporeal costs of settler colonialism and ecological imperialism.

Probing into Japan’s quest to legitimize itself within the Islamic sphere, this article examines some of the lessons that imperial Japan hoped to learn from the Germans and the Italians regarding their respective handling of Muslim populations in the Middle East and North Africa. For their part, Muslims living under Japanese occupation on the mainland often benefited from Axis cooperation and were able to create relationships with Muslims beyond China. In the article, I posit that Japanese militarists used their Axis connections as a powerful rhetorical tool to position themselves as liberators from Western imperialism and communism throughout Asia. I also argue that, by examining intellectual currents circulating Eurasia through Axis-facilitated connections, we glean a more nuanced understanding of global anti-colonial movements among Muslim populations from the Maghreb to Manila in the post-war era.

This article examines two tutelage campaigns launched by Japanese social reformers targeting Japanese emigrant women in Manchuria and California in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It reveals how these two middle-class-based social campaigns jointly paved the way for the Japanese state's ‘continental bride’ policy in the late 1930s, which mobilized and exported women from across the nation to Manchuria on an unprecedented scale. Synthesizing the stories of Japan's colonialism in Manchuria and Japanese labour migration to the American Pacific coast, this study traces the convergence and flows between the women's education campaigns in Japanese communities on both sides of the Pacific. It moves the debate of Japanese imperialism beyond Asia and situates it in a transnational space encompassing the local, the national, and the global.

This article explores the role of Pan-Asian ideology in Japanese imperialism and how it is reflected in literary texts produced in Manchukuo. Through the analysis of Chinese and Japanese literary works this study examines the construction of ethnic identities and difference which was central to both Pan-Asian discourse and Manchukuo national identity. In both types of works the Japanese and Chinese characters use the concept of ethnicity or culture to reveal different realities of Manchukuo's ethnic politics. While the insoluble separation between the Japanese and the Chinese in Ushijima Haruko's “A Man Called Shuku” betrays the ethnic harmony proclaimed by the Manchukuo regime, Gu Ding's “A New Life” suggests a possibility of true harmony between the two ethnicities. Where the Japanese vice governor's distrust of his Chinese subordinate in Ushijima's story reflects the author's own fear and guilt about her privileged social position, the Chinese protagonist in Gu's story emphasizes the importance of Japanese modern medicine during a plague outbreak as well as his importance as a mediator between the colonizer and his countrymen in order to justify the author's association with Japanese imperialism.