Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905–45 by Bill Sewell (review)

Few cities in Northeast Asia experienced such rapid growth and transformation as those in Manchuria. During the first half of the twentieth century, cities in this region were built and linked to competing and overlapping imperial and national projects, including those of the Chinese state and the Russian and Japanese empires. Constructing Empire is the first detailed study in English of Changchun, a city at the heart of this contested region and one that quickly developed from an inland trading outpost to a railway town to the capital of Manchukuo over the span of three decades. Bill Sewell focuses his analysis on Japanese urban and economic planners and on the Japanese colonial society that developed in the city. The book is well researched and adds an important case study to the growing body of scholarship on the urban history of the Japanese Empire.

In the introduction, Sewell provides a lively historical overview of Changchun’s early development, shedding light on the competition between Chinese, Russian, British, and Japanese powers as they sought to gain footholds in Manchuria. Sewell illuminates how, in the early twentieth century, Changchun managed to upstage rival towns, like the nearby Russian-controlled town of Kuanchengzi, through its connection to transport and trade infrastructure that came to be dominated by Japanese interests. In chapter 1, Sewell examines city planning, and he quickly covers the construction and transformation of the city from a railway town to a capital city. Chapter 2 goes into more depth and introduces readers to an array of Japanese planners and their designs for a modernist city and monumental capital. The central theme of the chapter is the intertwined framing of the city as an ideal of Japanese modernity and a pan-Asian capital. The Manchukuo state emphasized the latter, yet its capital remained very Japanese. The tensions between these overlapping visions become more apparent in the final chapters.

Chapter 3 focuses on economic planning and the significant efforts to transform Changchun from a trade outpost to a production-centered city during the war years. These plans were largely unfulfilled, but the total war effort did push new production and labor demands onto colonial society, an experience shared in other colonial cities. In chapter 4, Sewell explores colonial society, largely through the lens of Changchun’s Japanese residents. Despite the pan-Asian rhetoric and ideology of the Manchukuo regime—and of the growing Chinese population—the city remained segregated. Following his source base, Sewell is able to show us both Japanese perceptions of themselves and their views of the city’s large Chinese population. A lengthy concluding chapter covers the postwar period and the complex process of decolonizing the city, including the repatriation of Japanese civilians, and situates the city within a broader set of issues related to colonial legacies and contemporary Sino-Japanese relations.

The book has numerous strengths. It presents a detailed history of the planning of Changchun during its various phases of growth and includes the voices of the planners and their visions for the city. It suggests some important comparisons that will be of interest to urban historians and scholars of the Japanese Empire. Like other cities in the Japanese Empire, Changchun’s successive development projects, launched under shifting geopolitical conditions, led observers to highlight contrasts between newly planned areas of the Manchukuo capital, those areas built in previous decades by railway interests, and an [End Page E-7] older Chinese city. Sewell also captures the sense of “rivalry” between competing urban centers in Manchuria. This was both structural, in terms of industrialization efforts and the construction of monumental architecture, and also a matter of the perceptions that colonial elites and planners in Changchun felt when comparing the city to other Japanese-controlled urban centers like Dalian and Shenyang. The process of making Changchun into a capital city invites comparisons with other modern capital-planning projects, including the Nationalist government’s efforts to transform Nanjing and the...