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Bodies and Structures

Young, Total Empire

Louise Young, Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of the Wartime Imperialism, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 415.

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Mitsukoshi's Expansion Before 1945
This path highlights an imagined as well as physical imperial geography for Mitsukoshi, inconvenient to recall in the postwar political order. Erasure in memory smoothed the way for the retailer's postwar re-identification with "Western modernity," particularly individual consumerism. Nevertheless, how Mitsukoshi located itself during the war was more complicated. As Mitsukoshi struggled to "correct" its tilt toward the West under an imperial Japanist regime, its identity fragmented into seemingly competing spheres. Mitsukoshi ventured into the spaces of workshops, factories, and battle fronts even as it celebrated prominent Western artists, peaceful studios, and whimsical collectors' exhibits. On the one hand, this conflict led to withdrawal and exhaustion for Mitsukoshi by the end of the war. The journal ceased publication in 1943. On the other, its capacity to oscillate between production and consumption, expansion and retreat, Japanism and Western ways, suggests that Mitsukoshi should be analyzed along all these lines, before, during, and after the war. That is, we should not confine ourselves to concepts and categories that have aligned with Occupation ideology.
Mitsukoshi's collaboration with the Japanese state did not suddenly begin during the total war years of 1937-1945. Far from it: all of the major Japanese department stores had from the turn of the twentieth century provided active and profitable support for the state. They fiercely competed for marks of imperial approval, from awards at expositions to orders from the Imperial Household Ministry, while national holidays, imperial weddings, and visiting dignitaries presented capital opportunities to fly the "Hinomaru" (the rising sun flag) and offer special exhibits, merchandise and menus. Much of this was faithfully reported in the pages of Mitsukoshi.
This was also true for earlier government military ventures. During the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, Mitsukoshi sold decorative towels, handkerchiefs, flags, laurel wreaths and many other with images of Japanese military triumphs, published patriotic tales, and draped the premises with flags to celebrate victory.
Thereafter, Mitsukoshi and its rivals reliably cheered on the growth of the Japanese colonial empire with exhibitions, goods, and, in the case of Mitsukoshi, with the establishment of colonial outposts, which during the Asia-Pacific War followed in the wake of Japanese invasion.
In the early 1930s, Mitsukoshi solidified its cultural influence on the continent by opening branch stores in Seoul and Dalian. Their impressive architectural fronts—Art Deco for Seoul and Renaissance for Dalian—proclaimed Mitsukoshi's self-appointed role as a Japanese mediator of a Western modernity for Asia. The Seoul branch, in particular, quickly became a public landmark, and remains so under the current Korean ownership as Shinsegae. Mitsukoshi in Seoul—as in Tokyo—showcased the crowds with an open center cutting across floors, a grand staircase sweeping up from the ground level, and a rooftop garden from which the city could be surveyed. The store was a magnet for Korean "modern girls" and "modern boys" as well as members of the intelligentsia who leaned toward Western "modernization" in a Japanese mode.
The History of Tunken
By the 1930s, the Japanese colonial empire had expanded from Hokkaidō to Taiwan, Korea, and Northeast China. Japan’s continental ambitions entered a new phase with Manchuria, where the colonial administration established collective farms at the same time that the Japanese home government promoted the region as an industrial and modern Eden. Through translations beginning in the late nineteenth century, China adopted a number of neologisms coined in Japan. However, Chinese writers rarely ever referred to Han colonization efforts as zhimin 殖民. Instead, Chinese writers almost exclusively used an update amalgam of the classical Chinese terms for military settlement and land reclamation, tunken 屯墾. Borrowing from the far older terms tuntian and kaiken, tunken did not come into use until the 18^th century, and then only sparingly, appearing all of two times in the 18^th century Qing compilation of the Ming histories. The term tunken started to appear again in the Qing documents from the late nineteenth century, used in the context of the Northeast, but came widely into vogue only from the 1920s. The etymology of the term strongly suggests that tunken was popularized as a response to China’s perceived besiegement from imperialist powers.
For more on the officers, like Zou Zuohua, who headed the tunken effort in Xing An, continue on to the discussion of the colonizers.