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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

References for "Imperial Japan Up in the Air"

Works Cited

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Fan Changjiang. Sai shang xing. Shanghai: Dagong baoguan, 1937.

Frühstück, Sabine. Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

Itagaki Seishirō. “Mōko kōkū keikaku ni kansuru ken” (23 July 1936). Riku Man mitsu dainikki S11–8–40, 768–771, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

Kataoka Kenjirō. “Shashin sokuryō (otona no yomu kodomo no hon).” Mankō 121 (March 1944).

Kawaida Yoshimasa. “Kawaida nisshi shō” (26 June 1937). Manshū kōkū shiwa (zokuhen). Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan iinkai, 1971.

Manshū kōkū. Kōkū shashin wo riyō suru chiseki sōkuryō ni tsuite. Manshū kōkū kabushiki kaisha, 1936.

McDonald, Kate. Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination of Imperial Japan. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

Moore, Aaron S. Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931–1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Mutō Akira. “Ō-A kōkū renraku jitsugen no ken” (28 May 1940). Manshū kōkū keiei to gun to no kankei, Rikkū Manshū hōmen 128, 1665–1667, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

Nagabuchi Saburō. “Toku-ō kaiken ki.” Mankō 18 (July 1935).

“Orudosu no Barushan kei sakyū retsu (Hōtō taigan).” Chiri kyōiku 32.2 (May 1940).

Saint-Amour, Paul. “Applied Modernism: Military and Civilian Uses of the Aerial Photomosaic.” Theory, Culture & Society 28.7/8 (December 2011): 241–269.

Satia, Priya. “The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia.” The American Historical Review 111.1 (February 2006): 16–51.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Shashin sho. “Kōkū shashin sōkuryō.” Mankō 66 (July 1939).

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Works Consulted

Fedman, David. “Triangulating Chōsen: Maps, Mapmaking, and the Land Survey in Colonial Korea.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 2 (March 2012): 205–234.

Hiki Hisao. Ōzora no Shiruku Rōdo: Gobi sabaku ni kieta seishun. Tokyo: Fuyō shobō, 1971.

Jagchid, Sechin. The Last Mongol Prince: The Life and Times of Demchugdongrob, 1902–1966. Bellingham: Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, 1999.

Kimoto Ujifusa. Kōkū shashin sokuryō. Tokyo: Manshū kōkū, 1941.

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Kitada Masamoto. “Nihon mata ha Manshūkoku yori Shinkyō keiyū, tōkoku ni itaru kōkūro sōsetsu ni kansuru tōkoku sōri daijin no danwa no ken” (3 July 1935). Honpō, kaku kuni aida kōkū un’yu kankei zakken B.F.1.10.0.14, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives.

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Imperial Japan up in the Air
The advent of aviation in the early twentieth century opened up an uncertain and contingent space of the Japanese empire, in between borders that did not so neatly align between land, sea, and air. This new form of transportation superseded earlier networks of ships and rail, extending the Japanese empire westward, from Manchukuo to Inner Mongolia, and beyond.
This module examines how the aerial perspective, as made possible by aviation, helped Japanese occupiers imagine the Eurasian continent in its geographical vastness, and yet how their terrestrial limitations ultimately failed to sustain control over this space. For imperial Japan, the Manchuria Aviation Company (J. Manshūkoku kōkū kabushiki kaisha), founded in 1932, would become the predominant presence over Inner Asia during the wartime era.
The first pathway, Reading ManAir Magazine, delves into the modern spaces created by the Manchuria Aviation Company through its in-house magazine, ManAir (J. Mankō). The Manchuria Aviation Company advertised its services by portraying its technological prowess and geographical reach. The corporation also sold the concept of flight with images of the modern woman and, as the Pacific War intensified, militarized children. ManAir intentionally conflated patriotic duty and its profit motive, using nationalism as a vehicle to drive its commercial viability.

The second pathway, Eurasian Expansion, explores how Japanese air control outpaced its land occupation, as the Manchuria Aviation Company flew farther into the Republic of China and made alliances with Mongol princes. The territory surveyed by the Manchuria Aviation Company was sprawling, their mode of vision, exclusive: besides Japanese endorsements and Chinese critiques, indigenous reactions to these aerial incursions, for the most part, did not exist.
Finally, the third pathway, Technologies of the Gaze, focuses on the seemingly objective renderings of the land produced by aerial photographs, developed in the ‘dark room’ of Japanese imperialism. This form of visual technology both fueled and followed geographical understandings of the Asian continent in the 1930s and 40s.

Click here for a list of references for this module, which is also available from the module's Conclusion page.