Aerial transport and photographic technology combined to produce compelling spatial and temporal representations of Inner Asia. The halting advance of the Manchuria Aviation Company, well beyond the terrestrial boundaries of the empire, certainly demonstrated the possible extent of reconnaissance from the sky. The thousands of aerial photographs by the Manchuria Aviation Company in the 1930s and 40s might initially point to a panoptic fixation of imperial Japan. Mapping and measuring the terrain, plotting points to coordinates on a putatively universal grid, these pursuits meant another level of scientific entrenchment where the land could not escape the purview of trigonometric calculation.

Even after these photographs themselves sit in archives as forgotten ‘moments’ and collect dust, their tangible legacies remain. In bringing the land increasingly under a kind of ocular occupation, the aerial perspective emphasized a precise, revelatory, and immediate kind of knowledge. Monuments to colonial development built upon felled forests and barren earth stand as an enduring, though ambivalent testament to the technological imaginary, the realm of possibility for empire opened up by the view from above. By war's end, however, the view from above took on new meaning for Japanese, in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and a number of other cities across the archipelago, but a different, far more destructive meaning.