1938 Takumshō Map of Agricultural Migrants to Manchukuo

Visually impressive and packed with fascinating detail, this 1938 map of Manchuria was produced by the Japanese government's Ministry of Colonial Affairs to summarize efforts to settle Japanese colonists in the puppet state of Manchukuo.

A Closer Look

Oriented towards the north, with a slight tilt towards the northwest, this map covers the vast Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, with adjacent parts of China and Mongolia. Administrative boundaries (national, provincial, county, town) and government offices (公署所) are recorded, as are rail lines (planned and operational), waterways, the Great Wall of China, and the Willow Palisade. A series of circles with various characters or shading indicate colonial settlement projects throughout Manchukuo, especially towards the northeastern part of the country bordering the Russian Far East. Solid red circles are settlements and training centers (訓練所) operated by the Ministry of Colonial Affairs, the forestry bureaucracy, the 'Young Pioneers' (discussed below), or the South Manchuria Railway Company, which in conjunction with the Young Pioneers established villages (鐵道自警村) of armed, semi-trained farmer soldiers to protect the Manchukuo national railway network (國線) from insurgent 'bandit' attacks. Other villages consisted of Japanese migrants who moved independently of the Japanese government, military, or semi-official organizations like the Young Pioneers (自由移民).

Imperial Japan's 'Wild West'

When the Japanese military invaded and occupied Manchuria in late 1931, they took control of a vast region (more than three times the size of Texas) that was sparsely populated but abundant in resources. With tenuous support from the existing population (a mélange of Japanese, Chinese, Manchus, Russians, Mongols, and other ethnicities) and no international support, Imperial Japan sought to quickly populate the conquered territory with a loyal Japanese population. The Japanese government pushed migration to Manchukuo in both Japan proper (which was suffering from overpopulation) and Korea (where poor tenant farmers who had been dispossessed by Japanese landlords posed a threat to social and political stability).

In effect, Manchukuo was presented as 'virgin' steppe with nearly limitless land whose native population had mostly been displaced, coopted, or assimilated - not so dissimilar from the American West. Propaganda posters, publications, and other media reinforced this message, while semi-governmental organizations (such as the 'Volunteer Youth Army to Cultivate Manchuria and Mongolia' 満蒙開拓青少年義勇軍, also known as the 'Young Pioneers') arranged for migrants' travel and settlement. More directly, the Japanese national government gave prefectures quotas of migrants to fulfill, and in May 1936, the military (Kwantung Army, discussed below) launched an ambitious policy to settle a million farmers in Manchuria (満洲農業移民百万戸移住計画).

The reality these settlers encountered was hardly the land of abundance and opportunity presented in propaganda. The weather was extreme, especially in the winter, the soil unevenly productive, and the work arduous (and for that reason, mostly carried out by Chinese, who were second-class citizens in the new state). More of the migrants were men, especially young men, resulting in a gender imbalance and the added frustration of difficulty in finding a wife. Nevertheless, through persuasion and less scrupulous methods - especially with Korean farmers, who were promised significantly more social mobility in the new imperial frontier than in their homeland - hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Koreans settled in Manchuria between 1931 and 1945, collectively numbering well over a million by the end of World War II, with the Japanese settlers alone claiming more than one-eighth of Manchukuo's land area. As Manchuria fell under Soviet occupation at the end of World War II, and then became the main theater of the Chinese Civil War, repatriation of these settlers was a complex and difficult process. Many Koreans stayed on, forming the core of the nearly 2 million Chinese-Koreans (朝鮮族) today, while most Japanese settlers were repatriated in the late 1940s on American ships from the port of Jinxi 锦西 (a portion of settlers and most Japanese soldiers captured by the Red Army were sent to forced labor camps in Siberia, only returning years later, if at all). Although Manchukuo disappeared with the end of the war, the dream of colonizing it did not; when the Chinese Communists assumed control of Manchuria, they similarly encouraged, cajoled, and forced people to migrate to the vast frontier to develop the region's agricultural and industrial resources.

Mantetsu, the Kwantung Army, and Manchukuo

The Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War (1904 - 1905) granted to Japan, among other rights, the Kwantung Leased Territory and the southern section of the China Eastern Railway, from Changchun to Port Arthur (旅順 Lüshun), which became known as the South Manchuria Railway (the northern section between Harbin and Changchun was jointly managed by Russia and China and came to be known as the North Manchuria Railway). The company created to manage the southern section, the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu), soon developed into a mega-conglomerate that oversaw hotels, mines, mills, power plants, publishing, and much more, expanding Japanese influence in Manchuria to the point that it became a virtual colony. By the 1930s, Mantetsu was the largest company in Japan and by itself formed a significant portion of the Japanese economy.

Although Japan already exercised an informal empire in much of Manchuria, the territory was still under the control of the Fengtian Clique of warlords led by Zhang Zuolin. Meanwhile, a sizable Japanese garrison occupied the Kwantung Leased Territory, known as the Kwantung Army (or Kantō-gun in Japanese). The Kwantung Army was a hotbed of ultranationalism, militarism, and anti-democratic secret societies that produced several of Japan's future wartime leaders, including Tōjō Hideki. Although the Kwantung Army had initially supported Zhang Zuolin as a bulwark against Chiang Kai-Shek, who was seen as pro-Communist, he was assassinated soon after Chiang nominally reunified the country in 1928 when a bomb exploded under his private train traveling on the South Manchuria Railway. The plot had been hatched by junior officers in the Kwantung Army.

Three years later, on September 18, 1931, a group of Kwantung Army officers staged a false flag incident (another bombing along the South Manchuria Railway) to provide a pretext for invading and occupying Manchuria. Although Japan's political leaders and likely even the military leadership were unaware of the invasion plot, they did not force the Kwantung Army to retreat despite international condemnation because the invasion was extremely popular domestically and was a convenient solution to Japan's long-term problems with resource constraints and overpopulation.

Rather than make Manchuria a formal colony, as with Taiwan, or annex it outright, as with Korea, a puppet regime was established, led by the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Aisin Gioro Puyi (1906 - 1967), who had been living in the Japanese Concession in Tianjin. Puyi had expressed his desire to be re-enthroned and had support from the now-minority population of Manchus, who felt discriminated against in China since the Qing Dynasty's 1912 collapse. After being denounced as a traitor by the Chinese government, Puyi was smuggled out of Tianjin in the trunk of a car and conveyed to Manchuria, where he became the nominal head of the new state.

A vast, sparsely populated region that was tremendously rich in resources, Manchuria became a wild, violent, multiethnic imperial frontier. Forced labor was employed on a mass scale under brutal conditions. All manner of warlord troops, bandits, and rebels were present in Manchuria following Japan's invasion, and extremely harsh methods were used to suppress resistance. A special military unit (Unit 731) even engaged in horrific experiments on living subjects (often captured rebels and enemy troops, though also randomly selected civilians), such as biological weapons, chemical warfare, and vivisection.

Manchukuo became a steppingstone to further Japanese aggression throughout China, just as Korea had been a steppingstone to Manchuria. In the end, rather than being a showcase of rapid industrialization and a beacon of Japan's agenda of progress, or a bastion for the beleaguered Manchus and other non-Han ethnicities, Manchukuo instead became the archetype for the false promises and cruelty of Japanese imperialism.

Publication History and Census

This map was produced by the Ministry of Colonial Affairs (拓務省, Takumushō) of the Japanese Empire and printed by the Tokyo Printing Co. (東京印刷株式會社) in March 1938 (Shōwa 13). A name (seemingly 阿部正係) appears at bottom in pencil, perhaps the original owner of the map.

There are at least five editions of the map, published between 1935 and 1939, with the 1939 edition being the most common. The map appears to have been issued in multiple related publications, such as Hirake Man-Mō (拓け満蒙), a periodical put out by the Young Pioneers mentioned above, and the propaganda booklet Manchuria Pioneer Warrior: a Report on Life in the Bitter Cold (満州開拓戦士 : 酷寒下の生活報告). Regardless of edition, the map is quite scarce, with the 1938 edition only being independently cataloged among the holdings of the National Library of Australia.