Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan (review)

The last several decades have witnessed a surge of scholarly interest in the Japanese empire. Manchuria—the northeastern provinces of China where Japan established a sphere of influence after 1905 and the state of Manchukuo from 1932 to 1945—occupies a particularly prominent place. By the late 1990s, what had started earlier in Japan as the "Manchuria boom" had spread to English-language scholarship. Louise Young, Tak Matsusaka, Rana Mitter, Hyun Ok Park, and Prasenjit Duara, among others, have used Manchuria to explore issues of mobilization, resistance, collaboration, identities, and imperialism in early twentieth-century East Asia.

In recent years, Mariko Tamanoi, an anthropologist, has secured a unique place in a field dominated by historians, having published several well-regarded essays and an edited book entitled Crossed Histories on Manchuria.¹ Her latest book, which critically examines the postwar memories of Japan's agricultural colonialization of Manchuria, especially the violence that accompanied its end, starts where Louise Young's prize-winning book, Japan's Total Empire, left off.² In Young's study of Manchukuo and "the culture of wartime imperialism," a short chapter entitled "The Victims of Empire" briefly discussed the Chinese farmers displaced or mistreated by the Japanese agricultural settlers, who themselves suffered enormously as Japan's empire collapsed in August 1945. By focusing on the aftermath of empire, on the other hand, Tamanoi's new book joins the rapidly expanding subset of scholarly works that address postimperial issues such as postwar repatriation and reintegration (Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Lori Watt, Robert Efird); pursuit of justice, redress, and compensation (Yuma Totani, Sarah Soh, William Underwood); and memory (James Orr, Franziska Seraphim).

Tamanoi's book centers around what she terms "memory maps," which she uses to "organize, in terms of time and space, the narratives of those who remember, and they reveal complex interactions between the 'present' and the 'past.'" Put simply, she notes, "these maps are the voices of people" (p. 19). To create her first memory map, Tamanoi starts with her fieldwork in Nagano Prefecture where she had studied rural Japanese women for her first book. This is not a pure coincidence since rural Nagano supplied by far the largest number of agricultural colonists to Manchuria. She examines the oral memories, collected between 1971 and 1996, of Japanese farmers who emigrated to Manchuria between 1931 and 1945 and returned when the war ended. Using Memory Map 2, she analyzes "repatriate memoirs" (hikiage mono) written by Japanese repatriated from Manchuria shortly after the war. Here she teases out major themes of their remembered journeys of repatriation. In addition to the "compulsory group suicide," we now know about other aspects of their experience including the sale of Japanese children to the Chinese and the rape of Japanese women by not just Soviet soldiers but also by Chinese and others. Memory Map 3 focuses on the "orphans"—mostly children of Japanese settlers who had been left behind in China and who returned to Japan after the mid-1970s as well as their half-Japanese offspring. Here she documents their life histories, emphasizing their struggle to gain the right to return to Japan and to receive better treatment by the Japanese state and by society. Tamanoi's last memory map is devoted to the memories of Chinese farmers, especially those who had been adoptive parents to the Japanese orphans.

Highly structured along these "memory maps," the book presents numerous valuable snapshots of Japanese, Chinese, and Chinese Japanese individuals as they remember their own experiences before, during, and after the end of the Japanese empire in Manchuria. Tamanoi draws from a wide variety of sources: verbatim oral histories of repatriates or "orphans" collected by herself and other Japanese and Chinese researchers, three "ethnographic scenes," numerous published Japanese accounts, as well as ten "randomly selected" short memoirs published in the local "Literature and History Materials" (wenshi ziliao) in China. As a whole, Tamanoi succeeds in painting a complex picture...