The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904-1932

This skillful history links politics, economics, and military concerns to the development of Japan’s empire in Manchuria. Beginning with the end of the Russo-Japanese War and concluding with the takeover of Manchuria from 1931, Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka shows how Manchuria remained a looming presence within Japanese political life. More strikingly, he argues against the idea that Japanese imperialism in the 1930s represented a radical break from the past. Far from it, he shows the construction of Manchukuo and Japanese foreign policy “as the denouement of an older story as much as the beginning of a new.”  

At the turn of the twentieth century, Japan joined the scramble for Asia as a colonial power in its own right: it conquered Taiwan, annexed Korea, and staked out a sphere of influence in the Chinese region of Manchuria. Over the ensuing decades, the latter became a kind of social laboratory in which Japan developed its own ideas and practices of colonial rule. This is probably the most specialist (I don’t like the word “obscure”) book on this list, but it is an eye-opening study of why and how Japan, which had found itself on the receiving end of European… show more.