Remembering China, Imagining Israel: The Memory of Difference

James Clifford writes in his article “Traveling Cultures” that there is no such thing as a singular culture equating a singular language. “This equation, implicit in nationalist culture ideas, has been thoroughly unraveled by Bakhtin for whom a language is a diverging, contesting, dialoguing set of discourses that no ‘native’—let alone visitor—can ever learn.” The very notion of a “field” of study—that of the anthropologist, for example—tends to blur or even to erase “cosmopolitan intermediaries,” the “wider global world of intercultural import-export in which the ethnographic encounter is always already enmeshed.” Clifford proposes to rethink culture in terms of travel, as “constructed and disputed historicities, sites of displacement, interference, and interaction,” in which the observer, the scholar, and memory also fully participate.¹

The phenomenon of emigration in general, and in particular the case of the Western émigrés in Manchukuo—the ephemeral puppet state of the “last emperor” in Northeast China from 1932 to 1945—illustrates with particular acuity Clifford’s point. Manchukuo, or the Great Empire of Manchuria, needed to justify its existence from the very beginning. As Mariko Tamanoi shows in her article “Knowledge, Power, and Racial Classifications: The ‘Japanese’ in ‘Manchuria,’” the declaration of independence of the new “empire” grounded its separation from China in the expression of the “will of 30 million people.”² It stated also “that there should be no differences among all those who live within this new territory.”³ What “compensated” or “covered up” the lack of a nationality law, never formulated during the thirteen years of existence of Manchukuo, was the slogan of the “harmony among its five races”: the Japanese, Han Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, and Koreans. According to the declaration of independence, in addition to those five races, “people of any other nationality will be treated equally with others, as long as they wish to reside permanently in Manchukuo.”⁴ The racial and national makeup of Manchuria was a rather complicated matter, like the name itself, never accepted in China, because the denomination was a colonial (both Japanese and Western) creation. Founding her analysis on official Japanese and “Manchukuoan” documents, personal diaries, and Japanese peasant settlers’ narratives, Tamanoi convincingly shows that one “should not overly rely on such ready-made, analytical concepts as race, ethnicity, or identity. To do so merely reproduces the same colonial racial discourse, rather than analyzing it.”⁵ In the case of Manchukuo, the categorizing agents were not uniform. The boundaries between Japanese and colonizer were permeable, hence the colonizer’s “anxiety.” Tamanoi wishes to have taken into account the “anxiety of the colonized, which, like that of the colonizer, was not uniform,” and which would have complicated the picture.

This is precisely what I would like to do here. It turns out that the picture is indeed complicated. The population census for the city of Harbin, compiled by the Manchukuoan Police Department in 1933 (and quoted in Tamanoi’s article), includes the following categories: Manchukuoans, Taiwanese, Soviet, Soviet without nationality, Japanese from Japan proper, Japanese Koreans, British, American, German, French, Italian, Polish, Jew, Greek, Dutch, Turk, Austrian, Hungarian, Dane, Latvian, Portuguese, Czech, Armenian, Belgian, Serb, Swede, Latin, Romanian, Swiss, Indian, and others. The Western émigrés of this list were among the “people of any other nationality” mentioned by Manchukuo’s declaration of independence. The great majority of them were refugees from the Russian Empire, colonizers who had to choose between the not very enviable perspective of “reemigrating” to the Soviet Union (where they generally disappeared in Stalin’s labor camps), taking Soviet citizenship but receiving only special surrogates instead of passports,⁶ or attempting to emigrate elsewhere—Shanghai, Tianjin, Tokyo, or with some luck, Australia, the Americas, or Europe, which became increasingly impossible with the buildup of worldwide conflicts. Most had no choice but to register with the Japanese-controlled Bureau for the Affairs of Russian Emigrés and wait for better...