Between 1932 and 1945, more than 320,000 Japanese emigrated to Manchuria in northeast China with the dream of becoming land-owning farmers. Following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan's surrender in August 1945, their dream turned into a nightmare. Since the late 1980s, popular Japanese conceptions have overlooked the disastrous impact of colonization and resurrected the utopian justification for creating Manchukuo, as the puppet state was known. This re-remembering, the book argues, constitutes a source of friction between China and Japan today. The book tells the compelling story of ... More

Between 1932 and 1945, more than 320,000 Japanese emigrated to Manchuria in northeast China with the dream of becoming land-owning farmers. Following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan's surrender in August 1945, their dream turned into a nightmare. Since the late 1980s, popular Japanese conceptions have overlooked the disastrous impact of colonization and resurrected the utopian justification for creating Manchukuo, as the puppet state was known. This re-remembering, the book argues, constitutes a source of friction between China and Japan today. The book tells the compelling story of both the promise of a utopia and the tragic aftermath of its failure. The book refers to four created “memory maps” that draw on the recollections of former Japanese settlers, their children who were left in China and later repatriated, and Chinese who lived under Japanese rule in Manchuria. They are: the oral histories of farmers who emigrated from Nagano, Japan, to Manchuria between 1932 and 1945 and returned home after the war;Hikiage-mono (autobiographies); the memories of the children of Japanese settlers who were left behind at the war's end but returned to Japan after relations between China and Japan were normalized in 1972; and the memories of Chinese who lived the age of empire in Manchuria. The final chapter attempts to integrate the four memory maps in the transnational space covering Japan and China.