In December 2022 and January 2023, Global Asia Research Center, Waseda University hosted special lectures entitled “Emplotting the Japanese empire” (帝国日本：筋書き化の問題) presented by Jordan Sand, Professor at Georgetown University. On January 13th, the third lecture, The Short Happy Life of the Nation of “Manchukuo”, was successfully held.

At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Sand mentioned the problem of the terminology. As Chinese scholars call Manchukuo “False Manchukuo”, he thought that it is a useful term. Manchukuo was false in the sense that it was built on a false premise of popular sovereignty, and it raises the question of what makes a modern nation-state true. Then, the artificiality of Manchukuo is an intriguing thing to think about the rhetoric of a harmonious nation-state. Manchukuo was in many ways a performance to show a kind of multi-ethnic multicultural corporate state, although in reality it was more of a disputed frontier of various settlers.

Then, Professor Sand introduced some historical documents about Manchukuo. There were extraordinary propaganda campaigns directed at Geneva by the Manchukuo bureau of information. “The Voice of the people of Manchukuo” is a very interesting booklet in English and we can note that the contents repeat how everybody has a certain role to play just as in the Concordia different groups are represented as communities. One of the documents showed the lives of mass migration of Korean farmers and said, “This is really a heaven-sent opportunity for our Korean residents … and enable us to live in a land of peace and prosperity with a bright future”. Then, professor Sand raised a problem about who believed the propaganda and introduced the words of Slavoj Zizek, a very popular psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. Professor Sand mentioned a hypothesis that people believe that others want them to believe them.

Professor Sand also referred to women in Manchukuo. Images of women were an important part of propaganda for the Manchukuo state, but he insisted that we should not rule out the possibility that some idealistic and ambitious women. This lecture introduced two women’s interviews. Mrs. Gu, who visited Manchukuo when she was eighteen years old, lectured on the importance of female virtue, breast-feeding, women’s education, and prenatal education. Fukushima Yoshie thought that she had to go to Manchuria to take care of the children there and succeeded in her business with her husband.

At the end of the lecture, Professor Sand pointed out the importance of women’s stories and minorities’ stories in Manchukuo, not just because history should include lots of voices but also because the story has been so dominated by the male elites in Japan and China. Then, Professor Sand also insisted that it is important to think about what was false and what that implies for nation-states more broadly and for continued empires today.