| Beginning in late 1931, Japan expanded and consolidated its colonial management of Northeast China by seizing the entire region and establishing the puppet state of Manchukuo. Until the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945, Manchukuo's Japanese managers carried out an extensive program of state, economic and infrastructure development. Considering state and economic planning to be closely related, they integrated them. Physical planning, city building and architecture were at one intersection of their concerns for economic development, state power, and representation of authority and state ideology.; Construction was fundamental to the new state, and a central metaphor by which its creators understood and articulated their ambitions to build an ideal state and society, with model cities to enable an ideal way of life. They did not confine these goals to Northeast China. Manchukuo was a project of reconstruction also aimed at the rest of China and Japan. These were utopian ambitions beyond the resources of the Japanese Empire, and the Manchukuo project soon began to encounter obstacles that it was unable to overcome. Nevertheless, planners still envisioned Northeast China as an “empty page,” and continued the attempt to construct ideal, utopian cities there.; This dissertation approaches the construction of Manchukuo from various perspectives. It examines the development of the flexible concept of Manchuria, which was easily remade into Manchukuo. It examines Japanese systems of regional colonial management before and after the formation of Manchukuo. It traces the development of Japanese city planning, and planners eagerness to find an “empty page” outside of Japan where they could realize the ideal cities denied them in Japan. It examines the practical difficulties of construction labor during the Manchukuo regime and the development of three model plans—for model fortified villages for Japanese agricultural immigrants, for the industrial city of Dadong, and for Shinkyö, the capital of Manchukuo. Shinkyö is examined as ideal capital and model for Tokyo, a cultural center, a publicity project, and as an unfinished site for incorporating the Emperor of Manchukuo into Manchukuo. |
