SIGNIFICANT SOIL: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria | By Emer O’Dwyer | Pacific Affairs

SIGNIFICANT SOIL: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria | By Emer O’Dwyer | Pacific Affairs



BOOK REVIEWS, NORTHEAST ASIA


VOLUME 92 – NO. 1




SIGNIFICANT SOIL: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria | By Emer O’Dwyer


Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 377. Cambridge, MA; London, UK: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2015. xv, 511 pp. (Map, tables, illustrations.) US$59.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-50433-2.

Although there have been numerous excellent studies on Japan’s rapid descent from a budding liberal democracy into a militaristic, fascist regime in the 1930s, Emer O’Dwyer offers a valuable addition to pre-existing work by utilizing the case study of civic action in the Kwantung Leasehold’s Dairen to explain this transformation. In Significant Soil, her intricate examinations of metropole-periphery interactions in the opening decades of the twentieth century put her study squarely in the teikoku-shi (“imperial history”) field, which “allows for a look at political structures within multiple colonies alongside analogous institutions in Japan” (5). O’Dwyer’s knowledge of not only the English but also the Japanese historiography related to Manchuria and imperial Japan is impressive to say the least. This combined with numerous cross-references, entertaining anecdotes, and detailed accounts of individuals caught in the cross-hairs of empire creates an original and informative historical monograph.

O’Dwyer begins her work by focusing on the city of Dairen and its key role in the expanding Japanese empire, providing an important overview of the city and its historical distinctiveness through its status not only as Japanese Dairen, but also as Russian Dalny, and most recently, Chinese Dalian. In addition to its booming economy, key geographic location at the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, and cultural reputation as the so-called “Paris of the East,” Dairen was subject to a unique set of circumstances; although a municipal code based on those in the Japanese metropole was established for Dairen in 1915, the Meiji Constitution never extended to either Dairen or nearby Port Arthur (46). In fact, Dairen and Port Arthur were the first cities in the empire outside of the metropole to be granted a municipal code, largely due to the constant invocation by Dairen citizens of constitutional governance that mirrored what was occurring in Tokyo during the “era of crowd politics” (78).

To explain why Tokyo granted Dairen a municipal code in 1915, O’Dwyer draws on a range of domestic and global factors that, as in other parts of her work, shows her overarching comprehension of historical developments. She cites World War I, Japan’s growing aggression toward China as exemplified by the Twenty-One Demands, and the increasing politicization of Dairen’s Chinese population amidst a larger trend of growing Chinese nationalistic and anti-imperialist sentiment to explain why Tokyo was suddenly willing to grant settlers certain political concessions as a way of making the leasehold “unquestionably Japanese” (83). In subsequent chapters, she demonstrates how and why popular political participation in Dairen continued to grow through the early 1920s through her recounting of the Three Rails Affair of 1916 and the decision in 1924 to revise the Dairen and Port Arthur municipal codes.

O’Dwyer moves seamlessly from discussing Dairen’s early years of settler political participation to an examination of the growing political role played by young Mantetsu employees in the Manchurian Railway Zone. It would be difficult to write a history of Dairen or the Kwantung Leasehold without including the “kingdom of Mantetsu”—the megalith Japanese railroad company, whose headquarters were in Dairen, not only remains to this day the largest company in all of Japanese history, but also was the first of Japan’s “special companies” with a formal mandate from Tokyo to act as the governing authority in the Railway Zone (8–9). While there is an abundance of historical analyses on Mantetsu, most focus on elite actors and statistical analyses to the neglect of individual accounts. By contrast, in her analysis of Mantetsu employees’ extensive political involvement in the Manchurian Railway Zone, O’Dwyer is able to combine detailed statistical analyses and a masterful recounting of events on the macroscale with a simultaneous examination of individual involvement. In this way, she continues the trend initiated by Japanese historians such as Peter Duus and Louise Young in “endowing the previously undifferentiated Japanese colonial population with faces, names, and stories” (10).

Significant Soil covers the popular political involvement of Dairen and Mantetsu personnel both before and after the Mukden Incident when the Kwantung Army began its military invasion of Manchuria. A central contribution O’Dwyer makes here is to challenge the traditionally black-and-white historical narrative in Japanese and Chinese historiographical traditions that utilizes September 18, 1931 to divide Japanese imperialism into two distinct eras. Through her case study of Dairen and the Kwantung Leasehold (which, she reminds readers several times, was never incorporated into the puppet state of Manchukuo), O’Dwyer convincingly demonstrates that the Kwantung Army’s military invasion of Manchuria represents not a breaking point, but merely an additional step towards Japan’s total militarization. Rather than a sudden and irreversible crackdown on popular politics, the Kwantung Army’s increasing interference in the lives of Leasehold residents after the Mukden Incident was only accomplished through a series of bureaucratic measures that initially engendered significant opposition, particularly from Mantetsu’s Dairen-based employees (278). The ruptures in the 1930s in the Kwantung Leasehold, O’Dwyer concludes, matter a great deal in showing the rise of Japanese militarism and how it affected not only the colonial peripheries of Dairen and Port Arthur, but also the imperial metropole of Tokyo (351).

As a rich addition to scholarship on relations between the Japanese colony and metropole and the non-linear progression of Japanese militarism in China’s Northeast, Significant Soil is an unprecedented masterpiece on the contours of the Kwantung Leasehold and the role of popular political participation therein. Similarly to Hyun Ok Park’s demonstrations of the evolution of the mindsets of Korean settlers in China’s Northeast (Two Dreams in One Bed, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), O’Dwyer convincingly shows how and why the political aspirations of South Manchurian Japanese settlers changed over time, “shaped by a process of competition and conflict with those forces perceived as threatening to South Manchuria’s primacy of place in Japan’s imperial portfolio” (4–5). This book is highly recommended to anyone seeking to understand the evolution of Japanese imperial objectives on the Asian continent or the contours of modern Manchuria from either the Japanese, Korean, or Chinese perspectives.

Emily Matson

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA

Last Revised: May 31, 2019