Harbin to Hanoi: Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940

3. Beans to Banners: The Evolving Architecture of Prewar Changchun

3 Beans to Banners The Evolving Architecture of Prewar Changchun Bill Sewell Spring 1937 likely represented the high point in the short history of the puppet state of Manchukuo (1932–45) and its new capital.1 The hostilities following that summer’s Marco Polo Bridge Incident inevitably required a reallocation of resources for the prosecution of war in China. And though the first five-year plan was launched that year, an array of new buildings was already completed or nearing completion , emerging amid a haven of parks, tree-lined boulevards, and modern infrastructure. The Japanese media understandably lavished a fair amount of attention on the new city and its promise, sometimes in foreign languages in an effort to sway public opinion overseas.2 Yet even some foreign observers often critical of Japan bestowed praise. For example, John R. Stewart—economist, independent scholar, and postwar member of the Occupation authority—described the capital as “modern and attractive.”3 Étienne Dennery, then a professor at the elite École Libre des Science Politiques in Paris and a postwar director-general of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, observed that one of Manchukuo’s two biggest successes was in city building, “most notably that of the capital.”4 After the war, University of Chicago professor Norton Ginsburg reported that the city offered “wide boulevards and elm-lined streets; parks dot the city and its suburbs; large modern buildings of brick, concrete, and stone rise from what was the site of soy bean farms.” This he deemed “a tragic tribute to the aspirations of the Japanese in East Asia.”5 Observations such as these are intriguing not only for their tone, but also for their topic, as prewar and wartime analyses tended to focus on strategic and economic issues. This orientation continued after the war, but other perspectives gradually emerged to provide a variety of 38 Bill Sewell insights, especially as to motivations and attitudes. This essay seeks to contribute to this effort by suggesting that prewar Japanese discourse regarding Manchuria—both in print and in stone—was not simply propaganda to be summarily dismissed. Although Japanese portrayals of their activities were unabashedly self-serving, the content of Japanese depictions was always contextual and a matter of choice, rendering it amenable to analysis. Therefore, in addition to the physical changes in the built environment transpiring as part of Changchun’s shift from railway hub to imperial capital, the transition within the discourse about that change reveals concerns Japanese architects and planners deemed significant. These transformations can be described in part as shifts from the mundane to the exotic and from the collegial to the commanding, but they are also indicative of broader shifts apparent among Japanese regarding their country’s relations with the world—from pragmatism to willful idealism and from Great Power cooperation to Axis-backed autonomous aggression. This said, a preoccupation for technical progress and a dismissive, inescapably orientalist perception of fellow Asians remained constant, betraying problematic yet enduring assumptions at the heart of the Japanese imperialist project in Manchuria. Changchun (“Eternal Spring”) developed as a farming and commercial center near a gate in the Willow Palisade, the tree-topped earthen rampart stretching from the Gulf of Liaodong that fenced off Manchu lands from Chinese encroachment. On territory assigned to Mongol allies of the Qing, China’s last dynasty, the settlement at Changchun was initially illegitimate, as the dynasty initially endeavored to preserve nomadic and ancestral homelands. Having leased sections of their land to rural Chinese migrants, however, local Mongol leaders petitioned the throne to legitimize their transactions and officially recognize the town. Acknowledging the sizeable Chinese population already present by the end of the eighteenth century, the court had little choice but to agree and allowed the construction of a perimeter wall and gates. The town thereafter grew of its own accord—even relocating to better ground nearby—and assumed, roughly, the usual Chinese urban form, albeit less square and oriented on a more northwest -southeast axis. Any lingering concerns for Chinese immigration harbored by the court, however, would soon dissipate. Compelled to Beans to Banners 39 cede Manchuria’s northern and eastern flanks to Russia in 1860, the Qing began encouraging settlement as a means of confirming sovereignty over what remained.6 This resulted in the creation of a new frontier community, an immigrant society dependent, to a great extent, on demographic and commercial linkages outside Manchuria. These realities would...