I have taken to exploring various works focusing on empirical cases of Japanese urban planning in occupied Manchuria during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reading how Japanese authorities and intellectuals conceptualised, planned, and justified their renovation of the Manchurian urban landscape provides a highly rewarding perspective that deepens my conceptual understanding of space and spatiality. Crucially, the study of space must consider, first, how spatial conceptions were imbued with assumptions about power relations and, second, how spatiality was shaped by the ways in which people inhabited—or were excluded from—a given space.

Spatial imaginaries often embody power relations, including domination and subjugation. As Henri Lefebvre put it, space—as a product of the social—is very often the negotiator, if not the servant, of power.¹ Such an association can naturally take place in the most explicit of forms, whether in the style of architecture, the display of flags in public spaces, or the inclusion and exclusion of people from particular spaces. Yet the relationship between space and power permeates far beyond physical appearance or printed regulations, and can also be glimpsed in the ways in which people conceptualise space and approach it. As Louise Young points out, in the Pan-Asianist mission civilisatrice that characterised Japanese imperial expansion, one of the central motifs underlying this imagination of cultural superiority was Japanese prowess in urban planning.² Hence the scheme to redevelop the cities of Manchuria. An awareness of space itself — and of the need to regulate it — therefore had a direct bearing on whether a people was considered civilised or not. In this process, space per se was appropriated as a subtle vehicle through which the Japanese Empire could establish hegemony over its subjects.

The fundamental assumption of civility also runs through the specific way in which the Japanese conceptualised the urban renovation of Manchurian cities. Seeing Manchuria as a clean slate where their work would not be hindered by “the demands of commerce, the opposition of property owners, or already existing disorderly spatial arrangements” that they faced domestically, Japanese architects and Guandong Army authorities considered the region a utopia for major architectural ventures.³ Indeed, such an impression could be traced to its geographical conditions: Manchuria boasted large swathes of fertile land that contrasted sharply with the mountainous terrain of Japan.⁴ Yet was Manchuria truly so utopian as to constitute a complete blank slate for the Japanese to work upon? By no means was Manchuria empty. The Japanese themselves, among others, were clearly aware of this, as their 1930s tourist guides to Manchuria made reference not only to renovated cities such as Changchun/Xinjing, but also to obscure towns characterised by “chaotic market[s] and picturesque slums.”⁵ The depiction of Manchuria as a pristine utopia is therefore untenable given the extensive presence of traditional Chinese settlements. Yet Japanese authorities and architects nevertheless proudly proclaimed their ability to transform the face of Manchuria, speaking of it as “an empty page on which they inscribed cities.”⁶ The claim of Manchuria as a utopian space, an architectural tabula rasa, therefore lay not so much in the physical and geographical reality of the region as in the grotesque imbalance of power between the incoming Japanese and the indigenous Chinese population. Geography itself did not make Manchuria an architectural utopia; the occupation did. As Young puts it eloquently, the Japanese ‘modernity utopia rested on the foundation of the absolute power of the colonial state’.⁷ Apart from the street names and monuments in Xinjing that proclaimed prosperity and unity under the protection of the Japanese Empire, the daunting presence of power—in this case, primarily militarist and colonial—behind space can be further revealed by examining how this architectural enterprise itself was conceptualised by the incoming conquerors. It thus speaks to the deep interlacing of power and space.

People, furthermore, are not merely part of the backdrop of a space; they are constitutive of the space itself and of its spatiality. Indeed, as Lefebvre and de Certeau would delightfully approve, people are not just in space, they also produce space — just like the pedestrians constitute and define urban space as profoundly as the streets themselves.⁸ It may therefore be conceptually fruitful to approach space and spatiality from an encompassing human dimension. For one, the colonial nature of Japanese spatiality in Manchuria can be revealed not merely by examining the appearance of its cities and the rationale behind their renovation, but also by analysing the inclusion and exclusion of people from those spaces. In the 1933 Agricultural Immigration Plan, for instance, Chinese residents of immigrant villages were consigned to an outbuilding of the village hamlets. The broader demographics of modernising Manchuria over the years of Japanese occupation are similarly telling. Across major cities such as Xinjing, Fengtian, and Dalian, the Japanese population grew steadily, while the rate at which the Chinese population increased was dwarfed in comparison.⁹ In Xinjing between 1930 and 1933, the Japanese population surged from 10,097 to 23,715, while the Chinese population virtually stagnated, rising only from 23,307 to 24,356.¹⁰ Looking at people not only illustrates the colonial balance of power embedded in Japanese spatiality in Manchuria, but also unveils the almost morbid obsession with rationalisation for the imperial cause. In the same 1933 plan for immigrant villages, the only tasks ordained for Japanese residents were domestic and agricultural labour, with little, if any, concern for the “multiplicity of urban life” or social differentiation.¹¹ In this case, the extreme rationality of the Japanese Empire’s plans for Manchuria placed even its own subjects on the receiving end. In an almost dehumanising fashion, they were reduced to another cog in the imperial machine, whose primary duty was to produce for the greater cause. In the planning of space, therefore, it is not merely space itself but also people who are regulated. Looking at space consequently necessitates an analysis of the people who inhabit and produce it, and vice versa. People and power therefore constitute two vital conceptual passageways through which we can attain a better understanding of space and its significance.

1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991), p. 26 [↩]
2. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, Twentieth-Century Japan (Berkeley, 1999), p. 243. [↩]
3. Tucker, ‘City Planning Without Cities: Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo’ in Mariko Asano Tamanoi (ed.), Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, (Honolulu, 2005), pp. 53-55. [↩]
4. Ibid., pp. 53-54. [↩]
5. Young, Japan’s Total Empire, p. 268. [↩]
6. Tucker, ‘City Planning Without Cities’, p. 60. [↩]
7. David Buck, ‘Railway City and National Capital: Two Faces of the Modern in Changchun’ in Joseph Esherick (ed.) Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950 (Honolulu, 1999), pp. 65-66. [↩]
8. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 26-27; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 2011), pp. 92-93. [↩]
9. Young, Japan’s Total Empire, pp. 250-253. [↩]
10. Buck, ‘Railway City and National Capital’, p. 77 [↩]
11. Tucker, ‘City Planning Without Cities’, pp. 62-63. [↩]