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Making sense of the spectacular performance of postwar Japanese economy is one of the central issues in Japanese contemporary history. Recently, economic and business historians are debating on the role of the colonial experience in respect of the Japanese postwar economic boom. In the light of this new issue, the analysis of life histories of Japanese commoners who migrated in the colonies is gaining relevance. This paper attempts to contribute to this debate focusing on 69 Japanese who lived Fushun in the first four decades of the 20th Century. Fushun, the "city of coil" of Manchukuo, was a medium-sized company town created by the South Manchurian Railway Company around the local coil mines. The main source of the paper is the biographical annals of notable Japanese people in Manchuria (Manshū shinshiroku), recently collected in a volume by Takenaka Shin'ichi. The evidence gathered for this contribution suggests that Fushun was as a city quite selective towards highly skilled Japanese migrants, and that not a few people had the chance to collect professional experience in Fushun, which could have been an important asset after the war. My analysis was focused on a small sample of male self-employed, employed in small firms, or public servants in Fushun. I plan to extend this survey in a new article considering also a sample of the numerous Railway Company employees in the same city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wartime shōkokumin discourse of Japan rested on two competing premises, each catenated with a different part of the compound word: the "shō" that emphasized children's immaturity and vulnerability and the "kokumin" that activated them immediately as mobilizable citizens. This paper charts how the tensions innate in shōkokumin discourse became manifest both at home and in the colonial territories abroad, focusing especially on the exceptionally ambiguous category of settler children in Manchuria. By employing settler children's tsuzurikata essays from the late 1930s and early 1940s as a central source of examination, the current study fleshes out the particulars of their lives in Manchuria – the trials and tribulations, as well as the privileges and prestige. Neither metropolitan shōkokumin nor colonial kōmin, the settler children in Manchuria had the double duty of becoming Manchurian and Japanese, embracing their role as the gatekeepers of Japan's Manchuria. Ranging from language acquisition and assimilating into local customs to declaring Japanese ethnic membership, settler children's writings expose how they articulated their relationship to the naichi metropole, and emphasized their identities as Japanese kokumin. Whether these children ever gained legitimate status as imperial shōkokumin during the turmoil and exigencies of war remains an unresolved question; however, what is clear is that the shōkokumin discourse itself operated as an imperial pedagogy, binding settler children to their double duties while not necessarily guaranteeing their rights at war's end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complexity of translation of borderland literature through a case study of the Japanese and Chinese translations of the Korean short story "The Red Hill." Written by the renowned Korean writer Kim Tong-in (김동인, 1900–1951) in 1932, this story features the Korean agrarian community in the Northeast Asian borderland of Manchuria and is conventionally considered a masterpiece of Korean national literature. When it was translated into Japanese and Chinese and anthologized in inland Japan and the Japanese Manchukuo respectively, the three texts of the same story in three languages conveyed different and contradictory national/imperial claims over Manchuria, a Northeast Asian frontier. This case study demonstrates how the very act of translating and anthologizing, as a process of linguistic transposition across cultural and national constituencies, may crystallize the sense of territorial competition through revealing, reshuffling, and redefining the covert intricacy of national relations in the original text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the continuity between cosmopolitan collaboration and wartime collaborationism from 1932–1941 by exploring the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) and its international staff. The CMCS managed China's international trade and directed the custom houses in northern China before 1937, and in occupied China and free China from 1937–1941. The customs revenues generated by this international trade were pledged to service China's international obligations. This article argues that both Chinese and Japanese staff members' activities to maintain the status quo could be considered as wartime collaborationism from the perspectives of Japan, Manchukuo, and the Collaborationist and Chongqing governments, but all parties tolerated their activities until the outbreak of the Pacific War. The reason for this was that all parties benefitted from the CMCS's management of international trade and its implementation of international obligations which had existed since the mid-nineteenth century. This article situates wartime collaborationism within the long-existing institutional network that was welcomed as cosmopolitan collaboration in the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods, rather than treating it as a unique wartime setup and ideology. Such a view also illuminates the postwar exchange of personnel and cooperation among former enemies, which grew out of prewar collaboration and wartime collaborationism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents accounts of seven travelogues, written by Hungarian travellers and professionals who visited or worked in Manchuria between the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. So far these texts have not received wide scholarly attention because they are accessible only in Hungarian, although they contain unique first-hand observations of the construction of the Eastern Chinese Railway and many ethnographic notes. The author suggests that some narratives, especially those written by Hungarians who worked as engineering specialists, present very balanced analysis of the situation, because they belonged neither to the colonising project in China, nor to the colonised side, but rather were enthusiasts of technological modernisation. As a theoretical frame, the author attempts to apply notions and concepts developed by infrastructural and cybernetic anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National loss of territory is commonly described in corporeal language of mutilation and dismemberment. In this paper I argue that this language is not simply poetic or metaphoric but that it reflects a genuine association between the individual body and the national contours, and that this identification has been greatly facilitated by the emergence of the national map. In revisiting the common trope of the nation-as-body through inclusion of insights from neuroscience, I explore what happens when a lack of fit intervenes between the physical geographical extent of the nation and the mental map held by its inhabitants. Taking Manchuria as my main focus while suggesting a much wider applicability, I suggest that 'lost' territories, no longer included within the national body, remain nonetheless part of a previous national incarnation. As such, they draw national sentiments and affect, eliciting what can be labeled 'phantom pains'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses population movements across the Amur and the Ussuri River borders between Russia and China. It analyses the history of border crossing in this region from Russia's acquisition of the Amur and Maritime provinces from the Qing Empire in 1860 to the present time, with a focus on the 1920s and 1930s. The article's first part demonstrates that the movement of people (settlers, work migrants, refugees) across the two river borders went in both directions. The second part asks when the formerly porous river borders became sealed through strengthened military control. By analysing the mechanics of border crossing, such as the clandestine passages of Mennonites, a Russian–German Protestant sect, from Soviet territory into Chinese Manchuria over the Amur in 1929 and 1930, as well as the escape stories of other refugees from the Soviet Union, the article shows in its third part that the 'sealed' borders could nonetheless be transgressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians hold that to preserve the Manchu homeland the Qing court instituted a "policy of prohibition" (Ch: fengjin zhengce), forbidding Han immigrants from settling in the region until the final decades of its rule. Using Manchu-language archives from the garrison of Hunčun (Ch: Hunchun), this article questions whether such a prohibition guided local governance. In some jurisdictions in Manchuria, including in Hunčun, the Qing state did not always have an overarching policy towards Han migrants. Migration, in fact, was often less of a concern to the state than poaching. We can reassess the history of Manchuria accordingly. Modern historians have been preoccupied with the coming of Han migrants to Qing Manchuria; the Qing government in Hunčun was not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article reviews the political economy of Manchuria under the rule of Zhang Zuolin, which resulted in the economic instability that occurred during the winter of 1928. One can conjecture that the economic instability did not occur only because of the arbitrariness of the political and military regional government. The instability appears to be related to an ongoing seasonal demand for monies, which was relatively high between the months of September and March, since it corresponded to the period of commerce in soybeans − the region's main economic activity −, the migration of seasonal workers, and also the festive period of the Chinese New Year. The analysis was conducted based on primary materials published by the South Manchuria Railway Company, such as currency issuance and the variation of the exchange rate of the major currencies in circulation among foreign and Chinese currencies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sourcing is a bedrock routine of American journalism, but little is known about how it may have evolved over time. This exploratory study combines social scientific and historical methods to examine sourcing in New York Times coverage of two incidents separated by decades: the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and the Russian invasion of Chechnya in 1994. We find that while official sources have long been a mainstay of American reporting abroad, correspondents in the more recent case also made greater use of local eyewitnesses and media sources. Archival research and interviews reveal the contextual factors shaping these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of beancake, a new commercial fertilizer, marked a significant technological advance in Jiangnan agriculture in the late Ming. The popularity of beancake was a result of two developments: the severe fertilizer shortage in Jiangnan and the importation of Manchurian bean products during the Qing. However, recent studies by Kenneth Pomeranz and Li Bozhong exaggerate the volume of imports from Manchuria by ten to twenty-five times. They also ignore the limited time frame of the importation of beancake, for it was mainly concentrated in three or four decades during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact, though Manchuria had a great potential to produce sufficient beancake to relieve the chronic fertilizer shortage in Jiangnan, this potential remained largely unrealized before foreign countries became involved in the trade. The nineteenth-century agricultural stagnancy in Jiangnan did not result from the absence of the kind of "geographic luck" enjoyed by England, as Pomeranz claims. Instead, Jiangnan failed to take advantage of its privileged access to Manchuria to improve its agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]