Beyond the Color Line: Anti-White Japanese Empire and the Making of Minzoku in Manchukuo

• In Event: Decolonial Knowledge(s)

Abstract

The Japanese Empire mobilized the ethnological concept “minzoku” as a means of constructing a new ethnic-racial order within the “Pan-Asianist” empire. This “Pan-Asianist” framework served as a strategic response to Western racial hierarchies that positioned Japan as inferior to “whiteness” (Kawai 2023). Based on this policy, Japan pursued policies of legal assimilation in Taiwan and Korea. Against this backdrop, a substantial body of scholarship on assimilation policies has accumulated in colonial Korea and Taiwan (Oguma 1998; Fujitani 2011; Ching 2001; Henry 2014). A similar ethnic policy was promoted in the puppet state of Manchukuo as well, with the official ideology articulated as Minzoku Kyōwa (Ethnic Harmony), which promised equality among ethnic groups. In practice, however, the everyday life of Manchukuo was structured by a rigid racial and ethnic hierarchy with the Japanese positioned at its apex (Young 1998, Tsukase 1998, Suzuki 2022). Scholarly attention has long focused on assimilation in Korea and Taiwan (Oguma 1998; Fujitani 2011; Ching 2001; Henry 2014), yet how Japan specifically defined and operationalized “race” and “ethnicity” in Manchukuo remains under-examined.

Drawing on newly discovered archival materials from the Manchu Ethnological Society (1943), the declassified 3,000-page report, An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus, and various scientific management studies produced by Southern Manchuria Railway Company during 1937-1943, this research identifies two competing and often conflicting ontologies of “minzoku” within the Japanese empire: first, the ideological ontology, a performative “Asian-ness” used to justify Manchukuo’s sovereignty; and second, the functional ontology, a much more punitive application of race used in labor management.

Authors

• Wei Zhou, University of Chicago

• Riko Kobayashi, University of Chicago