BETWEEN SOVEREIGNTY AND COLONIALITY—MANCHUKUO LITERATURE AND FILM by YUE CHEN A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2018 ii DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Yue Chen Title: Between Sovereignty and Coloniality—Manchukuo Literature and Film This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature by: Roy Chan Co-Chairperson Daisuke Miyao Co-Chairperson Zhuo Jing-Schimidt Core Member Michael Allan Institutional Representative and Sara D. Hodges Interim Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2018 iii © 2018 Yue Chen iv DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Yue Chen Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures June 2018 Title: Between Sovereignty and Coloniality—Manchukuo Literature and Film This dissertation studies the cultural imagination of Manchukuo the nation (1932- 1945). As a nominal nation-state imposed upon Chinese Manchuria by the Empire of Japan, Manchukuo is a contradiction between sovereignty and coloniality, both due to the historical competition of geopolitical powers in the region and its multiethnic composition of the national community. In its short political life, Manchukuo bears witness to an unprecedented flourish of literary and film production. This textual corpus remains understudied and its relationship to Chinese literature and culture or Japanese literature and culture is insufficiently explored. Armed with postcolonial and minority discourse, this project examines how Manchukuo cultural production mediates the notion of the nation and sovereignty in the context of Japanese imperialism. The close reading and critical interrogation of this body of literary and filmic texts shall generate provocative questions for the reconstruction of Chinese literary studies and East Asian studies. The body of the dissertation consists of four interrelated arguments. Framing the reading in the context of recent scholarly debate on “the Sinophone,” Chapter two considers Manchukuo literature as a “minor literature” whose distinction lies in its writers’ use of “deterritorialized” Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. Multilingualism and v multiethnicity are therefore the (trans)national features of Manchukuo literary production. This literary “sovereignty” is then re-examined through the representation of Manchukuo’s women and family in Chapter three. Interpreting coloniality through reading gender relations, this chapter highlights the unusual progressive portrayal of women in Manchukuo. This discovery of Manchukuo women’s autonomy and mobility is reinforced in the interpretation of Manchukuo’s dramatic feature films. Working through feminist critique of gender division and looking into magazines of the era, chapter four and five analyze the films’ explanation of a contradiction within Japanese imperialism. This contradiction of “sovereignty” and “submission” gets further elaboration in Chapter five. An interpretation of the star text of Ri Kōran reveals her stardom and Manchukuo film musical provides a unique anti-romantic “affiliation” of the Manchukuo nation. vi CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Yue Chen GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Brandeis University, Waltham MA Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, 2018, University of Oregon Master of Arts, 2010, Brandeis University Bachelor of Arts, 2006, Beijing Language and Culture University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Modern Chinese Literature and Cultural Studies East Asian Film Studies PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Employee, University of Oregon, 2012-2018 Part-time Language Instructor, Brandeis University, 2010-2011 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: CAPS small grants for Graduate Students, Paper presentation at “When the Music Take Over”—International Conference of Musical, Center of Asian Pacific Studies, University of Oregon, 2018 EALL Research Travel Grants for Graduate Students, Paper presentation at “When the Music Take Over”—International Conference of Musical, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, 2018 EALL Research Travel Grants for Graduate Students, Paper presentation at the Annual Conference of Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, 2017 CAPS small grants for Graduate Students, Archival Research for Manchukuo Film Musical, Center of Asian Pacific Studies, University of Oregon, 2016 vii EALL Research Travel Grants for Graduate Students, Archival Research for Manchukuo Film Musical at Columbia University and Harvard University, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, 2016 Japan America Friendship Fund, Archival Research for Manchukuo Cinema at Waseda University, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, 2015 EALL Overseas Research Scholarship, Archival Research for Manchukuo Literature and Cinema in China, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, 2014 Siegel Graduate Travel Endowment Fund, Archival Research for Wang Jingwei’s Poetry, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, 2013 PUBLICATIONS: Chen, Yue. 2018. “Women’s Mobility and Autonomy on Manchukuo’s Film Screen.” Jumpcut 58, 2018. Chen, Yue. 2018. “Multiethnicity and Multiculturalism in the Minor Literature of Manchukuo. Positions: Asia Critique (forthcoming). viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First of all, I wish to express sincere appreciation to Professor Roy Chan and Professor Daisuke Miyao, for their advising, guidance, and numerous assistances in my preparation of this dissertation. Professor Chan’s professional and spiritual support have made my life in graduate school much easier than it would have been. I have learnt from him how to think and write as a scholar and how to live in academia. Without his careful reading and commenting on my draft, this dissertation would never been come into existence. My project owes a lot to the independent studies and lectures Professor Miyao offered in the academic year 2013-2014 at the University of Oregon. They helped me to better understand formal analysis, Japanese film history, and cinema studies. I also receive a lot of valuable comments from him although he has been teaching at University of California San Diego since 2014. I thank Professor Zhuo Jing-Schmidt, who has been enthusiastic for my project. I am tremendously grateful to her for carefully and thoroughly reading my drafts, and for continuously supporting my pursuits. I also owe an academic debt to Professor Michael Allan, who always inspires me with great questions and pushes me to be more critical. I have received a lot of support, help, and valuable comments from Professor Epstein and all the participants in the writing workshop that she led in Winter and Spring 2018. I am very grateful for Professor Epstein’s caring and enthusiasm. In addition, throughout my years in University of Oregon, I have benefitted from professors in my department: Yugen Wang, Bryna Goodman, Alison Groppe, Luke Habberstad, Rachel DiNitto, Wendy Larson, Steven Durrant, Dong Hoon Kim. Without ix the department’s forcefully support, I cannot make the archival trips to China and Japan, as well as New England. I also want to express my gratitude to Kevin McDowell, Xiaotong Wang and Heghine Hakobyan in the Knight Library. Because of their help, I am able to get access to many rare materials of Manchukuo, its cinema and literature. Applauses also go to my beloved friends and colleagues: Heidi Shi, Clay Chou, Jun Lang, Steffi Hung, Yun Jiang, Xiaoyan Deng, Lee Moore, and Lindsey Waldrop. Their friendship, intelligence, generosity, and sense of humor made my life and study in Eugene happy and productive. Finally, I want to thank my parents for their continuous support, tolerance, and love. x TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 1 II. MULTIETHNICITY AND MULTILINGUALISM IN THE MINOR LITERATURE OF MANCHUKUO ....................................................................... 32 III. REIMAGINING WOMAN AND FAMILY THROUGH SOVEREIGNTY AND COLONALITY ............................................................................................. 61 IV. WOMEN’S AUTONOMY AND MOBILITY ON MANCHUKUO’S FILM SCREEN ................................................................................................................ 85 V. SINGING A NEW WOMAN INTO BEING—RI KŌRAN AND MANCHUKUO FILM MUSICAL ......................................................................... 136 VI. EPILOGUE ...................................................................................................... 177 REFERENCES CITED ........................................................................................... 184 xi LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. 1. Emperor Hirohito of Japan .............................................................................. 3 1. 2. Pu Yi, the Emperpr of Manchukuo .................................................................. 3 1. 3. Ri Kōran.......................................................................................................... 3 3. 1. Naruse Mikio, No Blood Relation .................................................................... 102 3. 2. Mizoguchi Kenji, Osaka Elegy ........................................................................ 103 3. 3. Sasaki Yasushi, Winter Jasmine ...................................................................... 103 3. 4. Kurosawa Akira, The Most Beautiful ............................................................... 105 3. 5. P1. I and P1. 2, the factory scene, Winter Jasmine ........................................... 107 3. 5. P1. 3 and P1. 4, the skating scene, Winter Jasmine .......................................... 108 3. 5. P1. 5. And P1. 6, the office and the restaurant scene, Winter Jasmine .............. 108 3. 6. the contrast of domestic spaces, Winter Jasmine .............................................. 112 3. 7. Ozu Yasujiro, The Only Son ............................................................................ 115 3. 8. Wang Xinzhai All’s Well that Ends Well .......................................................... 115 3. 9. The Only Son ................................................................................................... 116 3. 10. The Only Son ................................................................................................. 118 3. 11. The Only Son ................................................................................................. 119 3. 12. All’s Well that Ends Well ............................................................................... 121 3. 13. All’s Well that Ends Well ............................................................................... 123 3. 14. All’s Well that Ends Well ............................................................................... 125 3. 15. All’s Well that Ends Well ............................................................................... 127 5. 1. Zhou Xuan was in leisure ................................................................................ 150 xii Figure Page 5. 2. Ri Kōran worked with a camera on site ........................................................... 150 5. 3. Ri Kōran and Meng Hong in qipao and kimono ............................................... 151 5. 4. Ri Kōran was on a bus during her visit to Japan ............................................... 152 5. 5A film advertisement of The Song of White Orchid .......................................... 156 5. 6. A film advertisement of The Fighting Policman .............................................. 156 5. 7. Ethnic Harmony—Variation of Ri Kōran......................................................... 162 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1992 marked the tenth anniversary of the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations. The Japanese Shiki Theatre CompanySjh~ (Gekidan Shiki) took this opportunity to travel to Beijing and caused a sensation with the musical Ri Kōran(Li Xianglan). This production was a contemporary dramatization of Ri Kōran’s life during the Second World War, a legendary film and music star from Manchukuo. Manchukuo was a nominal nation-state installed by Japanese imperialists in Chinese Manchuria from 1932 to 1945. Under the identity of a Chinese actress, Ri Kōran (1920-2014), her film works produced during the Manchukuo era (1937-1945) were deemed as Japanese imperial propaganda. Because of her participation in the Manchukuo film industry and her intimate relationship with Japan, Ri was accused of treason by the government of Republic of China following World War II. However, Ri Kōran was only the name that she received when she studied in PekingW;(Beijing). Her birth identity was a person of Japanese descent, Yamaguchi Yoshiko†\É{. This identity invalidated the accusation of treason and saved her life. Ri Kōran was released and returned to Japan, returning to her performing career as Yamaguchi Yoshiko. In her later life, she developed a political career under the name of Ōtaka YoshikosěÉ{, and devoted herself to facilitating Sino-Japanese friendship. Having seen the musical of Ri Kōran in Beijing, Wang Meng ǥデ, the retired Minister of Culture of China, commented, “Yamaguchi Yoshiko should be released [by Chinese court] as not guilty, and Ōtaka Yoshiko should be treated [by Chinese 2 government] as a VIP; however, Ri Kōran should be buried forever.”1 Wang’s comments on Ri’s varying identities in fact reveal the prevalently complex attitude toward Manchukuo that Ri once personified. In China’s official discourse, Manchukuo, the nominal nation-state, is named as “Wei Manzhouguo” pǐDžà, the fake nation of Manchuria. Because it was an imposed regime superimposed over Chinese territory by Japanese imperialists, Manchukuo’s very historic existence continues to constitute a national humiliation for China. Manchukuo’s nominal sovereignty also represents a huge threat to China’s unification, because its once-prosperous history implies the possibility of a territory’s secession from China. Thus, the successive legal authorities in China, the Kuomintang, and the Communist Party, both concluded that the Manchukuo regime is “Wei,” or “fake.” The naming strategy explains Wang Meng’s desire to bury the name of “Ri Kōran,” for it represents an illegitimate nation-state and a national humiliation. Nevertheless, Manchukuo existed for fourteen years (1932-1945). The materialization of the nation-state, with its territory, citizenry, government, military, and diplomatic relationships, as well as its literary and film productions, can hardly be erased from people’s memory by labeling it with a single word, “fake.” The filmic and literary imagination of a modern and egalitarian society of Manchukuo, and Ri Kōran’s operatic singing of European-style songs, still linger in the live witnesses’ mind, despite the Chinese people’s resentment of Manchukuo’s colonial history. Ri Kōran was a symbol of Manchukuo, and a true witness to the twentieth-century East Asian history. Her childhood in Mukden øõ(now Shenyang ƽʬ) gave her a 1 Translation from Chinese is mine. The original Chinese text is “Ġ¼Lją¿jŻȫʟ ŭ8ôˑLją¿jŃ—[Ē8Ɨˉˆ•¾ijłĴèɍ” (Wang 2003: 135) 3 primary conception of multiculturalism. Growing up among Chinese children and receiving vocal education from a Russian émigré, Ri’s early experiences with multiethnicity and multilingualism molded this daughter of diasporic Japanese family into a child of cosmopolitanism. This cultural background enabled her to become the face of Manchukuo. Ri Kōran and Pu Yi Ǐk (1906-1967), the nominal monarch of Manchukuo (and also the last emperor of Qing Empire who was forced to abdicate after the Xinhai revolution in 1911), are two distinctively different embodiments of the nation- state. In his official portrait, Pu Yi is depicted with an emotionless face and dressed in an intimidating military uniform that highly resembles that of Emperor Hirohito ɝdõȀ (1901-1989) of Japan, despite Pu Yi’s strong preference for a dragon gown inherited from Guangxu Emperor „をȀĬ(1871-1908) of the Qing Empire (Aisin-Gioro 1965, 275). Through this reference to Emperor Hirohito’s shadow, Pu Yi’s appearance is apparently exalted, revealing his feeble claim of sovereignty (see Fig.1. 1 and Fig. 1. 2). In contrast, Ri Kōran’s image always includes a confidant smile (see Fig. 1. 3). Her energetic appearance represents a thriving new nation-state with boundless prospects. (Fig 1. 1. Emperor Hirohito of Japan) (Fig 1. 2. Pu Yi, the Emperor of Manchukuo. Photo courtesy of Harvard- Yenching Library) (Fig 1. 3. Ri Kōran, Photo courtesy of the Mamoru Collection in Columbia University Library) 4 Extensive scholarship has studied the political and the economic aspects of Manchukuo that Pu Yi embodies. Such discussions include the nature of the puppet state, Japan’s colonization, and the local resistance to Japanese imperialism (Mitter 2000; Duara 2003; Brooks 2005). This dissertation focuses on the aspects of Manchukuo that Ri Kōran stands for: the diasporic, the multiethnic, and the female who were dislocated in Chinese Manchuria and, voluntarily or involuntarily, became the people of Manchukuo. Japan’s imperial expansion into East Asia produced a large population of dislocated and deterritorialized people (Yamanaka 2005, 184). 2 It also provoked the establishment of Manchukuo on a land previously known as Chinese Manchuria, where the Qing Empire of Manchu descent originated. The multiethnic migrants, the working women and peasants constitute emergent communities and classes of the young Manchukuo. The crisis of personal and collective identity and the conundrum of deterritorialization occur concomitantly. Temporal disjuncture and displacement are obstacles that lie on Manchukuo’s way toward modernization. How do its people situate themselves in the linear history and conceptualize the notion of modernity? How to claim national independence? How do they comprehend modern ideas of nation and sovereignty? At this crucial time, Manchukuo’s distinctive cultural formation helps the nation-state and its people to cope with the new world and the world order. 2 According to Yamanaka’s research, there were Han, Manchurian, Mongolian, Muslim people who were categorized as “Chinese,” Russian émigré and other nationalities categorized as “other ethnicities,” Korean, and Japanese in Manchukuo’s census during 1932-1942. Multiethnic Chinese population increased from 29 millions to 43 millions in this decade. Both Japanese and Korean population reached 1 million, while “other ethnicities” were 0.72 million by 1942. 5 My discussion of Manchukuo’s cultural formation is informed by Raymond Williams. Formations are recognizable in the matter of conscious literary or artistic tendencies. These formations may not be in accordance to formal institutions (such as the major communication systems, family, and education). Their formal meanings and values can sometimes even be placed against formal institutions. Because historical variability largely exists in the relationship between the institutions and formations of a culture, Williams argues that a cultural analysis of formations should focus on their differentiations from a dominant or hegemonic culture (Williams 1977, 118-119). I do not aim at a thorough study of cultural formations in Manchukuo. This dissertation pinpoints the literary and filmic texts that are legally published and thus reach a large population. It includes literary works by Mei Niang·x (1920-2013), Yokota Humiko»Õ£{ (1909-1985), Arseniy Nesmelov (1892-1945), as well as the films made by Manchurian Film Association (Manshū eiga kyōkaiʍ©×YA, hereafter, Man’ei). Doubtless, Japanese imperial culture was hegemonic in Manchukuo. Political and military authorities, such as Japanese Kwantung Army and the Information Department (kōhō ka –pĀ) under the General Management Board (SōmuchōêU‘), reinforced imperialism through cultural institutions like Manchuria Fine Art Institution, Manchuria Photographic Artists Association (Manshū shashin sakka kyōkai ʍPÝE ‚YA), Manchurian Artists Association, and etc. (Culver 2013, 39, 57, 159, and 229). Accordingly, “Five Ethnicities in Harmony” (Gōzoku kyōwa:¤Ya) and “Japanese- Manchukuo’s Friendship” (Nichi-Man Shinzen ¦Êþe) that promoted Japanese imperial project became the dominant meanings and values in the propaganda 6 (Yamaguchi and Fujiwara 1988: 30; Kawashima 2004). Despite the imperial hegemony in Manchukuo, multiple groups and communities, such as female intellectuals, Japanese immigrants, and Russian émigré, voiced their claims of nationhood and modernity within Japanese imperialism in both similar and diverse ways. Because of the hegemonic Japanese imperialism, and the complex geopolitical competition in Manchukuo area, Manchukuo and its culture are emergent but not completed. The contradiction between Japan’s domination and Manchukuo’s longing for independence jeopardized the development of a unified definition of nation. This dissertation reveals that certain cultural production in Manchukuo weighs up a “relatively mixed, confused, incomplete, or inarticulate consciousness of actual men in that period and society” (Williams 1977, 108). In this consciousness, a notion of cultural identity is in formation, and transnationalism and multiethnicity are its indicative features. Cultural identity, according to Stuart Hall, is not a fixed thing. Rather, what we describe as cultural identity attempts to capture how people are positioned and how to position people within the narrative of the past. The cultural identity of the colonized, Hall argues, is “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being,’” which in Raymond William’s language is “emergent” (Hall 1990, 225). Manchukuo’s cultural identity is mediated by a cluster of cultural productions. The following chapters will analyze Manchukuo’s multilingual literatures of different ethnic groups, as well as the films that demonstrate Manchukuo’s multicultural society. These texts might easily be generalized as Japanese imperial propaganda, but when contextualizing them in the specific historical and social conditions, one can see they are actually aesthetically dynamic and ideological diverse. Speaking to ordinary people, these films and literatures represent people’s shared 7 diasporic and displaced experience, and also envision the egalitarian society that Manchukuo is becoming. Collective consciousness is evident from these cultural productions. They describe how to position these multiethnic people in the present and in the past. These cultural productions may not resist the hegemonic culture, but their differentiation and variability are distinct. Their distinctive enunciation of ethnic, class, and gender equality signals an emergent culture in formation, which, to a certain extent, is more substantial than Manchukuo’s political sovereignty. Indeed, Manchukuo is not a modern territorial state constituted by citizens’ collective sovereignty. The nation-state is the imposition of Japanese colonialism and its territorial demarcation upon the historical region of Manchuria. Unlike Korea or Taiwan, the other two colonies of Japan at the time, “Manchukuo,” “the nation of Manchuria” translated literally from the Chinese, is an intractable contradiction between sovereignty and coloniality. The literature and films of the Manchukuo era provide scholars and students of its history and geography with fertile ground upon which the complexity and the contradictions of the Manchukuo nation’s formation could be meaningfully apprehended. These important cultural texts also reveal the incongruity of colonialism and nationalism within Manchukuo’s distinctive “colonial modernity” (Barlow 1997). While Manchukuo (the nation) and its cultural productions are part of Japan’s imperial project of “the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” (J: Daitōa kyōeiken ôƚ]‰ Ơã, C: dadongya gongrongquan ôE\‰Ʌá), inevitably serving Japan’s colonialism, the way in which Man’ei manages its organization and constructs its market can be said to deterritorialize nation-building and facilitate transnational identification. In this manner, Manchukuo’s film industry anticipates the characteristics of 8 transnationalism in the twenty-first century. This dissertation analyzes the cultural representations of working women and multiethnic communities to illustrate how the subjects of colonial modernity are made in the contested space of semi-sovereign Manchukuo. Rather than burying these cultural productions, in the manner of Wang Meng’s attempt of burying Ri Kōran, this dissertation brings together the multiethnic and multilingual literature and film produced in Manchukuo and studies how they conceptualize the nation and claim its cultural sovereignty. I. In order to discuss Manchukuo the nation and its sovereignty, it is necessary to first look into the formation of the nation. Before the establishment of Manchukuo in 1932, Manchuria was primarily a geographical concept in pre-modern Chinese history. Known as Manzhou ǐÅ in Chinese, the name referred to the Northeast provinces of China. In modern history, the geographical region became a place of complex geopolitical rivalry among Russia, Japan and China. Competing national powers exerted their influence on Manchuria, complicating its sovereignty. Through the eighteenth century, in order to protect its home base, the Qing Empire secured political control of Manchuria and imposed its cultural isolation, thus for the first time generating a sense of a separate territorial entity. In doing so, Manchurian people established their ethnic Manchu identity as well as a sense of ethnic autonomy. This cultural distinction was referenced by Japan in the twentieth century as they attempted to turn Manchuria into Manchukuo. Back in 1902, however, the Qing imperial court decided to relax the ban on Han immigration to Manchuria, in order to curb Russian and later Japanese expansionist endeavors in this region. Nevertheless, this immigration and anti-colonial policy did not work out as the 9 Qing court expected. Because of the “Twenty-One Demands” in 1915, Japan acquired economic privileges in Manchuria and managed its leased territories by developing the railway, agriculture, business investments, and the export trade. With accumulated economic colonization in Manchuria and its expanding military power, in 1932 Japan manipulated Pu Yi, the last Qing emperor into establishing the Republic of Manchukuo. In short, Manchuria was transformed from a component of the Chinese nation to a Japanese colony and eventually an ambiguous nation-state, which made it a contested borderland where China and Japan competed with each other (Duara 2003: 41-51). Under the pressure of Japanese colonialization, Manchukuo encountered unprecedented impediments to claiming its political sovereignty; thus, the desire for national culture became ever so urgent in this nominal nation-state, because a national culture can describe and also justify “the actions whereby they have joined forces and remained strong” (Fanon 1963, 168). For the multiethnic and multilingual groups, such as Russian, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese who settled down in this area, national culture (and the cultural sovereignty promised by it), became the most crucial means of legitimizing their identity. Because national culture justifies the claim to a nation, national cultures of the colonized are usually oppressed and otherized by colonialism. The construction of national culture in the colonized countries, such as in Africa, thus, is premised by a detachment from colonial logic before an establishment of their own culture. According to Frantz Fanon, national cultures in Africa evolved through three phases. The first was the native intellectuals’ demonstration of their assimilation of the metropolitan states’ culture. It resulted in the intellectuals’ search for reconnecting with their people again in 10 the second phase. Then, in “the fighting phase,” the third stage, great men and women “feel the need to proclaim their nation, to portray their people and become the spokesperson of a new reality in action” (Fanon 1963, 158-159). We can see that these three phases are compressed in Manchukuo’s fourteen years’ history. Propaganda that assimilates to Japanese imperialism, publications of resistance forces, as well as films and literatures that focus on the ordinary life in a multicultural society, simultaneously appear in Manchukuo. These filmic and literary production speak to their nation in the way of depicting the shared experience and feelings of the diasporic, the marginalized, and the dislocated, despite diversity in languages and ethnicities. They define a nation that answers to people’s longing for belonging. Manchukuo’s formation of a multiethnic culture finds its parallel in multiethnic Yugoslavia. Here, culture also plays a preeminent role in the formation of a Yugoslav nation. Yugoslavia was also a place where multiethnic groups resided, and geopolitical powers competed. The Yugoslav nation, according to Andrew Wachtel, was the vision of the South Slavic community as an essential unity despite differences in language, religion, and historical experience. In the history, a multicultural concept of Yugoslav culture emerged several times for facilitating a Yugoslav nation building (Wachtel 1998, 5-13). Like Yugoslav culture, the multiethnic and multilingual concept of Manchukuo culture, distinguishes a Manchukuo nation among other regional and nation formations in East Asia. While Japan submits to imperialism and China is entangled in national salvation, Manchukuo’s modernity is so transcendent that it foregrounds gender, ethnic, and class equality, and highlights personal independence. Such an aspiration conjures up an image of a sovereign nation that is fundamentally opposed to the Japanese imperial 11 project, yet not apparently resistant. Unfortunately, this transcendent vision perished in the aftermath of Manchukuo’s downfall. Manchukuo fell as abruptly and rapidly as it rose. Its emergence was a consequence of Japan’s imperial expansion in East Asia, and Japan’s eventual defeat in the WWII also led to its doom. Manchukuo’s ephemerality and ambiguous sovereignty exemplify how Charles Baudelaire’s conception of modernity, “the transient, the fleeting, [and] the contingent” (Baudelaire 1972, 403). However, Manchukuo’s modernity was manifest to Manchukuo’s people in a more tangible way. The previously agricultural Manchuria was forced into becoming a modern nation-state. A modern government was established, universities and schools were introduced, infrastructure and industrialization were developed, and men and women were made citizens. Meanwhile, the nation and its people also had to negotiate sovereignty and independence alongside the simultaneous presence of Japanese army, colonization, and surveillance. The project of Manchukuo’s modernity crystalized in a very intricate way. In Jürgen Habermas’s view, Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth-century map out “the project of modernity.” This project consists of “their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic.” Enlightenment philosophers want to “utilize this accumulation of specialized culture” “for the rational organization of everyday social life” (Habermas 1983, 9). Science also enables people to control natural forces. This project, at that time, promises human liberation from the irrational religion and superstition. However, according to David Harvey, this optimism is dissolved in the twentieth century. In light of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Harvey argues that “the lust to dominate nature entail[s] the 12 domination of human beings” (Harvey 1990, 9). It is true that industrialization in Europe is followed by the imperial powers’ global expansion. Western modernity came to East Asia in the form of colonialism and imperialism. The countries and peoples in East Asia accordingly had to fight against such invasive “modernity,” while claiming “modernity” in their own languages and for their own societies. Among the responses of Asian nations in the heyday of Western imperialism, Japan’s was the most distinctive, for Japan was convinced that an imitation of Western imperialist and militarist ways was the only path towards its modernization. After the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912), Japan became a formidable imperialist power and aggressively expanded its efforts to colonize East Asia. The installation of Manchukuo in 1932 was part of Japan’s imperial project, which complicates the general understanding of what constitutes a nation-state, and what is at the heart of Manchukuo modernity. The concept of modernization, according to Jürgen Habermas, Refers to a bundle of processes that are cumulative and mutually reinforcing: to the formation of capital and the mobilization of resources; to the development of the forces of production and the increase in the productivity of labor; to the establishment of centralized political power and the formation of national identities; to the proliferation of rights of political participation, of urban forms of life, and of formal schooling; to the secularization of values and norms; and so on. (Habermas 1997, 2) Anthony Giddens further describes modernity as “a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation by human intervention,” “a complex of economic institutions, esp. industrial production and a market economy,” “the political institutions, the nation-state and democracy” (Giddens and Fierson 1999, 94). What we can derive from Habermas and Giddens is that modernity is a twofold project. It is concerned with both the sovereignty of a nation and the sovereignty of an individual. In 13 the face of Japan’s colonization, emerging as modern becomes a crucial problem for the people of Manchukuo. They begin to scrutinize the idea of being modern in the areas of industrialization, nation-building and national independence. They also begin to practice how to be modern men and women in “modern” times. This dissertation examines Manchukuo’s modernity in these two aspects, and I will begin with the discussion of the concept of the nation. The “nation” is primarily a concept that arose during the two most recent centuries (Hobsbawm 2012; Gellner 2006; Wimmer and Feinstein 2010). To Eric Hobsbawm, a nation is a social entity only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the nation-state (Hobsbawm 2012, 9). The nation is the political expression of the body of citizens whose collective sovereignty is articulated in a state form (18-19). Ernest Gellner’s understanding of nation is very similar to Hobsbawm’s, although he highlights the importance of an educated society with unified cultures in the formation of a nation. Gellner’s concept of nation is hegemonic, which is “the only kind of unit” that men willingly identify with (Gellner 2006, 54). Hobsbawm and Gellner’s perception of the nation-state is at radical odds with the fact of Manchukuo’s emergence. Manchukuo was installed by the colonizer without collective consent. Japan occupied a certain area of Manchuria inside of Chinese sovereignty and claimed it on behalf of Manchu people. Pu Yi, the former Manchu emperor of China, was chosen to be the puppet head of Manchukuo. Consequently, Manchukuo, the nation, had to learn how to be a modern nation, and claim its sovereignty against Japanese colonialism within the territory of a recognized Chinese nation-state. 14 For Gellner, nation-building begins with a state’s control and mobilization of high culture, and the imposition of the homogenous culture onto the entire population (54). Gellner’s perspective, according to Hobsbawm, addresses nations and its related phenomena “from above,” “in terms of political technical, administrative, economic and other conditions and requirements.” For Hobsawm, nation “cannot be understood unless also analy[z]ed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist” (Hobsbawm 2012, 10). In this sense, my dissertation performs an analysis of Manchukuo “from below,” investigating the ideas, opinions and feelings about the concepts of nation, sovereignty, and modernity through scrutiny of Manchukuo’s literary and filmic production. While people in Manchukuo are propelled to be independent men and women in the quasi-national society of colonial modernity, these visual and textual archives reveal that history, geography and ethnicity make the conception of modernity and sovereignty in Manchukuo particularly ambiguous and challenging. One of the challenges lies in Manchukuo’s historically multiethnic reality. The Qing government mobilized mass Han immigration to Manchuria beginning in the nineteenth century, and it lasted for more than hundreds of years. This great motion of people resulted in a mixture of Han culture, Manchu culture, and Mongolian culture. Along with this increase in the multiethnic population, literatures and films depict and represent the multilingual and multicultural life of the land. Media forms what Benedict Anderson regards as “the embryo of the nationally imagined community.” According to Anderson, the rise of “print capitalism” is the means of imaging the nation. In this sense, magazines, newspapers, music, and cinema in multiple languages reach a great mass of 15 people in Manchukuo, connecting shared experiences and disseminating an alternative enunciation of nationalism that is not necessary in accordance with Japanese imperialism (Anderson 1991, 44-45). Though competing national powers projected their own demands onto Manchukuo, its culture displayed a unique multiethnicity and hybridity. This complexity is at the heart of Manchukuo’s ambiguity, held between sovereignty and coloniality. Partha Chatterjee agrees with Anderson that nations are existences imagined into being in Europe, but he criticizes the theory of “imagined communities” for reinforcing the concept that the West is the model that the rest of the world must follow. He also criticizes Anderson for implying that postcolonial countries can only be the consumers of modernity (Chatterjee 1993, 5). In order to scrutinize the areas that Western theorists somehow ignored, Chatterjee provides with his framework of “domain of sovereignty” another means to study anticolonial nationalism in India and Africa. Anticolonialism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains—the material and the spiritual. The material is the domain of the “outside,” of the economy and of statecraft, of science and technology, a domain where the West had proved its superiority and the East had succumbed. In this domain, then, Western superiority had to be acknowledged and its accomplishments carefully studied and replicated. The spiritual, on the other hand, is an “inner” domain bearing the “essential” marks of cultural identity. In fact, here [the spiritual domain] nationalism launches its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a “modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western. If the nation is an imagined community, then this is where it is brought into being. In this, its true and essential domain, the nation is already sovereign, even when the state is in the hands of the colonial power. (Chaterjee 1993, 6) The way that Chatterjee understands “the spiritual domain” resonates with Hobsbawm’s analysis of “nation from below,” and both focus on the significant role that culture plays 16 in nation formation. Ordinary people’s engagement and willingness are also essential in nation building. On one hand, the West provides the modern concept and knowledge of economic systems, statecraft, science, and technology, which reshape people’s understanding of history, nation, and sovereignty from above; on the other hand, people in the anticolonial areas such as India, Africa, and Manchukuo are not passively imitating the West. Rather, the colonized peoples are actually able to develop nationalism inside the colonial system by claiming “the domain of the spiritual its sovereign territory” (6). In the case of Manchukuo, literature, film, and music are the areas through which people painstakingly declare Manchukuo’s sovereign territory. Although Japanese imperialism and the colonial government of Manchukuo intervene with the construction of Manchukuo’s national identity, this dissertation demonstrates that the contradiction between imperial intervention and Manchukuo’s increasing autonomy creates a space for people to imagine a collective community that harbors multiethnic groups and welcomes cultural plurality. Multiethnicity and multiculturalism are salient features of Manchukuo’s cultural sovereignty. Similar to Chatterjee’s “spiritual domain,” Prasenjit Duara’s study shows Manchukuo looking for its sovereignty through the construction of native place and womanhood. Duara’s approach is an analysis of literature, social organization, and the role of women, which seems not far from Chatterjee’s examination of Bengali culture. However, it is not historically accountable if Duara attempts to claim Manchukuo’s sovereignty by his invention of “the regime of authenticity.” For Duara, from the eighteenth century on, the circulation of world culture and the conception of nation-state made linear history the essential means of sustaining nationhood and the rights of a 17 nation. However, the constant anxiety of connecting the past to the future compels people to look for “an anchor for identity in modern histories and a foundation of the symbolic regime of nation-states” (Duara 2003, 27). Thus, “a representation of timelessness,” authenticity, becomes crucial in claiming national sovereignty (27). However, if the “authenticity” in Duara’s mind means “the essence of the past” and “purity,” this contradicts his argument of the historical hybridity of ethnicities and cultures in Manchurian area (43). In addition, in the Manchukuo era, the Japanese, Korean, Russian, Mongolian, Taiwanese, Jewish, and Chinese diasporas constituted the people of Manchukuo. These multiethnic peoples are subject to the ongoing play of history, culture and power. The way they can position themselves within narratives of the present and the future is the identification with a Manchukuo of hybridity, because, “the diaspora experience is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity” (Hall 1990, 235). If there is anything that consists of “the essence of the past” of Manchuria and the later Manchukuo, multiethnicity and multiculturalism are the authentic saliences of Manchukuo’s cultural sovereignty and constitute Manchukuo’s colonial modernity. Multiethnicity and multiculturalism are the foundation of Manchukuo literature. While Japan enforced a so-called “national policy literature” (kokusaku bungakukç£ ) in Manchukuo to promote the Japanese national policy of imperial propaganda, multiethnic writers in Manchukuo narrated their own stories of displacement, and aspirations of autonomy in their multilingual writings. Unfortunately, previous scholarship either regards Manchukuo literature as imperial propaganda or studies it as an extension of Chinese or Japanese national literature, ignoring its multiethnic and 18 multicultural essence (Smith 2007; Kono 2010). Okada Hideki‡Õó¼’s Wei manzhouguo wenxue pǐDžàŴĈ (Fake Manchukuo’s Literature) is the first study that pays attention to the multilingual aspect of Manchukuo literature (Okada 2000). He argues that Manchukuo literature represents the unique lifestyle, language, culture, and values of Manchukuo, thus, he suggests reading Manchukuo literature as a national literature. Okada’s argument is invaluable, but it is solely based on his examination of male writers in Manchukuo. The exclusion of female subjectivity shows Okada’s ignorance, which fails to fully exhibit Manchukuo’s literary landscape. For me, the distinctive characteristic of Manchukuo literature is its representation of marginalized groups in diaspora and its inclusion of cultural diversity. The profound sympathy among different ethnic groups, and the shared suffering of dislocation connect every individual together and constitutes the imagination of a collective community. This longing for a community for all is generated inside Japanese colonization of Manchukuo, but deviates from Japanese imperial ideology. Manchukuo’s multiethnic writers, such as Mei Niang and Liang Shanding ƣĠ< (1914-1997) writing in Chinese, Yokoda Fumiko writing in Japanese, and Arseniy Nesmelov writing in Russian, exemplify the marginalized and deterritorialized minority in Manchukuo, who stand in opposition to Japanese imperialism. The literary works they produce are minor literature compared to “national policy literature” that is supported by the official discourse. This multilingual and multiethnic literature of Manchukuo resembles to the “minor literature” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s definition of Kafka’s German writing in Prague, the Jewish city of what is now the Czech Republic (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). For me, Manchukuo’s 19 literature is a pluralistic minor literature, which constitutes a national literature in formation. This dissertation studies Manchukuo “from below,” examining its “spiritual domain” not only in the area of literature but also in film. The representation of multiethnic community and construction of working women within multilingual and multiethnic literature is a locus of Manchukuo’s sovereignty. According to Chatterjee, family belongs to the spiritual domain, which is a domain of sovereignty and continuity existing prior to Western colonialism. Therefore, both modernizing nations and colonial powers are invested in the reform of the family and of women (Chatterjee 1993, 6-9). In the case of Manchukuo, the colonial government of Manchukuo and the Japanese empire attempt to transform the inner domain of Manchuria in support of Japan’s imperialism. Writers and filmmakers, on the other hand, struggle to defend the spiritual domain by providing their own interpretation of the new family and the new woman for the new modern nation-state. The contest of power between the Japanese imperialists and Manchukuo’s intellectuals defines the distinctive complexity of Manchukuo’s colonial modernity. This complication stands out in Manchukuo’s cinema and literature and finds its most prominent image in the creation of a “new woman” to embody the “new nation.” This is not surprising, because women have been used as a representation of as the essential truth of a nation throughout modern history. Duara defines the official conception of the woman’s image in Manchukuo as “tradition within modernity” (Duara 2003, 131). This image actually corresponds to the Japanese ideology of “good wife and wise mother” that is propagated by its imperial expansion. “Good wife and wise mother,” xianqi liangmu ɼ 20 wñÂ, is in fact a pre-modern Chinese gender norm from Confucianism introduced to Japan long ago. In the 1930s, however, it was transformed into Japan’s national model of feminine virtue in service of its imperial expansion. As a Confucian conception of womanhood at the heel of the Manchu Qing dynasty, “good wife and wise mother” connects the premodern ethics of gender with the needs of contemporary nationalism in Manchukuo. Japan promotes this female image to contest Western gender norms and mobilize people in Japan and in Manchuria towards the consolidation of the empire. At the same time, the image of the “modern girl” also emerges in Japan, China, Korea and other East Asian countries. The “modern girl” announces her defiance through her unconventional sexuality, autonomy, and consumption within the urban space; however, she still suffers from the predicament of subordination in capitalist economy and is usually portrayed as the victim of modernity by mass media (Barlow 1994; Sato 2003; Sang 2008). Unlike the image of “modern girl,” who is defiant yet still encumbered by the rules set up in a patriarchal society, in Manchukuo’s literature and film, modern women are not victims, but feel comfortable in the new nation and proactively participate in nation building. The development of capitalist economy and the massive infrastructure necessitate women’s education and employment. Both Manchukuo’s nation-construction and Japan’s imperial war need female labor; thus, an unexpected space is opened up for women to claim their economic independence and personal sovereignty despite Japan’s promotion of and Manchukuo government’s submission to the ideology of “good wife and wise mother.” The intellectuals who produced Manchukuo’s cinema and literature tended to contest official womanhood and insisted on creating a model woman of independence and health. She is submissive to neither the patriarchal family nor the 21 dominant father/husband. The image of working women in Manchukuo literature, film, and magazines provides an alternative representation of modern Manchukuo women, who seem to have the mobility to access both the domestic domain and the public domain, thus challenging gendered divisions of labor. Wendy Brown points out that the sexual divisions of labor confine women in the household through family obligations, family needs, and caretaking. Women lose “subjective sovereignty” and “the capacity to desire or choose” (Brown 1995, 154). The significance of modern women in Manchukuo’s literature and film is their empowered desire and choice. Women’s struggle for economic independence (and their aspiration to find romantic love and create a nuclear family in texts and films) embody national sovereignty at a personal level, which clashes with the official construction of the traditional image of women. The image of workingwomen is as prominent in Manchukuo’s literature as it is in its film production. In 1937, Manchurian Motion Pictures Association (Manshū eiga kyōkai ʍ©×YA, hereafter, Man’ei) was established with financial and political support from the Japanese Kwantung Army in China, the South Manchurian Railway Company (Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha Zʍďċ¶•Aá, hereafter, Mantetsu), and the Manchukuo government. While Man’ei is the primary (and only) film institution in Manchukuo, its complicated political background causes it to be misunderstood as an agent of Japanese imperialism, and the complexity of workingwomen created by Man’ei film has been ignored in previous studies. Critics are inclined to view Manchukuo’s film as merely part of Japanese film history or the propaganda of Japanese imperialism. Because most of Man’ei productions were not accessible after World War II, previous scholarship on Man’ei cinema mainly examines 22 the joint-productions between Man’ei and major Japanese film studios; thus, Man’ei is usually simplified as an exceptional fragment of the Japanese film industry. These studies also tend to focus on the propaganda function of its most famous star, Ri Kōran, as well as Man’ei’s president, Amakasu Masahiko ÓèÀ˜. Scholars usually ignore the representation of Manchukuo society and people in the actual texts (Satō 1985; Yamaguchi 1989; Stephenson 1999; High 2003). Meanwhile, Chinese film historian believes that Man’ei is the agent of Japanese imperialists, culturally enslaving local peoples (Hu and Gu 1999). With an emphasis on transnationality, Michael Baskett contextualizes Manchukuo’s film industry as an integral part of Japanese imperialism, soliciting the people of Japan occupied East Asia to actively participate in the Japanese imperial enterprise (2005). The Man’ei study by Furuichi Masako]ē{ in Peking University is the most recent Chinese language scholarship, which, reiterates the theme about Man’ei cinema’s propaganda imperatives (Furuichi 2011). Even Ri Kōran’s film image is invariably read, in the multilingual scholarship of Manchukuo cinema, through the lens of Japanese imperialism. As the scholarship situates Manchukuo’s cinema and film star within Japan’s imperial project, it fails to scrutinize the film forms’ and genres’ contributions to Manchukuo’s modernity. Man’ei’s film musicals, which are unique in their audio-visual effects and character construction, have been inexcusably overlooked. The overemphasis of the propaganda function of Manchukuo’s film also does injustice to the representation of working women, who constitute a subject of Manchukuo’s modernity. The contradiction between this cinematic and literary “narration of the nation” on the image of Manchukuo women, and its official counterpart of Japan and the puppet 23 government, is a topic that I shall explore in depth. As I see it, this contradiction pertains to Manchukuo’s unique “colonial modernity.” By “colonial modernity,” Tani Barlow suggests “a speculative frame for investigating the discursive powers that connect to globalizing capitalism” (Barlow 1997, 6). For Barlow, when all regions in the world are undergoing a remapping in “extranational” or “multinational” ways, current postcolonial language may not be adequate or sufficient to examine specific local history, such as the complex histories of East Asia. The framework of “colonial modernity” challenges the binary of the East and the West but addresses question of “how our mutual present came to take its apparent shape.” For Barlow, historical context is not only defined by nation states, stages of development, or civilization, etc.; rather, it is “a complex field of relationships […] of material that connect multiply in space-time and can be surveyed from specific sites” (7). Andrew Jones further defines “colonial modernity” as a transnational frame, which highlights the “temporal simultaneity” of modern Chinese cultural history and imperialist encroachment (Jones 2001, 9). Barlow and Jones’ argument of “colonial modernity” resonates with the idea of “multiple modernities,” a concept that focuses on different approaches and expressions of modernities in contemporary world. According to S.N. Eisenstadt, the project of modernity is a “continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs” (Eisentadt 2000, 2). In the non-Western world, specific social actors rather than a universal paradigm from the West carry forward the ongoing reconstruction of family, economy, political structure, urbanization, modern education, etc. Essence of modern idea are an emphasis on human agency in the constitution of the social and 24 political orders, and the collapse of “all traditional legitimations of the political order;” thus, the restructuring of center-periphery relations has always been a primary focus in modern societies. “The construction of the boundaries of collectivities and collective identities” is also a characteristic mode of modernity. As a consequence, tensions between the construction of political boundaries and those of cultural collectivities are intensified in the modern process (5-7). In the case of Manchukuo, Japan’s colonization of Chinese Manchuria ironically enables a Chinese ethnicity to join multiple ethnic groups, and politically declare territorial independence from its historical nation land, as long they do not reject de facto Japan’s control. Manchukuo’s modernity is a consequence of Japanese imperialism and also entails a reconstruction of collective identity. While a nominal nation-state, its nation-building process puts forward the reconstruction of family, economic urbanization, and education. It inevitably envisions independence at both the personal and the national level. The contradiction between Manchukuo’s sovereignty and Japanese colonialism is Manchukuo’s “colonial modernity.” Within the “Greater East Asian Co- prosperity Sphere,” “colonial modernity” transforms Manchukuo into a new space for transnational immigrants, which opens up possibilities for people to claim personal sovereignty and gender equality. In Manchukuo film and literature, the image of modern woman and the enunciation of multiethnic community claim Manchukuo’s sovereignty and anticipate the formation of citizenship. The sense of independence and collective nationalism in the cultural production contradict the ideology of “Greater East Asian Co- prosperity Sphere” that Japan implements in Manchukuo. It constitutes the unintentional effect of Japanese imperialism, and the best that comes from the “colonial modernity” of 25 Manchukuo. Yet another unintentional effect of the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” is its anticipation of “transnationalism,” a concept common for present day scholars to describe the “extending or operating across national boundaries” (OED online). One of the earliest uses of “trans-national” occurs in an essay published in 1916. “Trans- national” is used to describe how immigrants change the definition of “Americanism.” Rather than being assimilated in the “melting pot” of America, the new immigrants proactively cultivate their cultures in their homeland and also bring new values and meanings to American culture. By “transnational,” the writer invokes a kind of multiculturalism and multiethnicity in the U.S (Bourne 1916, 86). In the era of global capitalism today, because “territorial occupation of land for extraction of natural and human resources are rendered both inoperative and cost-ineffective,” the great powers of the world prefer “a transnational convergence of statecraft in managing the world economy” (Li 2013, 165-166). In addition, the media accelerates the deterritorialization of imagining communities by fostering a mediated means in distance. “It helps catalyze transnational identifications (Shohat and Stam 2003, 1). In “transnational,” “trans-” emphasizes the tendency of “across” or “beyond.” Unlike imperialism that develops capitalism through territorial occupation, transnationalism in our time depicts the flow of capital, culture, migration and military power that move between different nations beyond national boundaries. Compared to “globalization,” which more often implies “homogenization or Americanization” (Appadurai 1996, 17). “Transnationalism” today highlights the heterogeneous and collective aspects of economic or cultural mobilization among different regions. 26 Transnationalism, apparently a very recent concept, has actually been central to global expansion of capitalism since Spanish and Portuguese oversea colonization. While the rise of capitalism in Europe promised the European nation-states with national territories, economies, and culture, financial capital, labor, and commodities also concomitantly flowed between and across national frontiers. Stuart Hall notes, the tension between the tendency of capitalism to develop the nation-state and national cultures and its transnational imperative is a contradiction at the heart of modernity (Hall 1993, 353). This contradiction is also at heart of Manchukuo’s colonial modernity. We can say that Manchukuo’s nationalism is in fact a form of the transnational imaginary. This is evident in the way that Manchukuo’s film industry is organized. Man’ei can be said to deterritorialize nation building and facilitate transnational identification. The film studio was financed by the Mantetsu, a Japanese company, and the government of Manchukuo that staffed Japanese immigrants in Manchukuo together with Russian and local people. The transnational film studio created Ri Kōran as the biggest film star of Manchukuo. Her stardom extended beyond Manchukuo and reached Japan, China, and the Japanese colonized Southeast Asia. The transnational film culture promoted by Man’ei enhanced the political power of Manchukuo within Japan’s imperial project. My examination of Manchukuo’s transnational film culture and Ri Kōran’s stardom will reveal the new roles played by women in the formation of new collective communities. II. Appropriated from China by the Empire of Japan, Manchukuo suffered from a question of legitimacy. A sense of illegitimacy troubled Manchukuo’s literary identity and complicated the relationship between nationalism and literature, inviting us to rethink 27 the field of China studies and East Asian studies. Chapter Two examines the symptomatic contradiction between Manchukuo’s sovereignty and Japanese colonialism that stands out in Manchukuo’s literature. The opposing views of Chen Pingyuan ʯĮ·’s “multiethnic literature” and Shu-mei Shi’s “Sinophone literature” form the preliminary challenge to my examination of Manchukuo’s literature. In light of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reading of Franz Kafka’s deterritorialized German writing, I read Manchukuo’s literature as a plural “minor literature,” which complex colonial and local reality shows it as one of multiethnicity and multilingualism. Examining Chinese ethnic writer, Mei Niang, Japanese ethnic writer Yokota Fumiko, and Russian ethnic writer Arseniy Nesmelov, I flesh out their idiosyncratic art, multiethnicity, and multilingualism, while placing Manchukuo’s literary production within the historical field of Chinese literary and cultural studies. Chapter Three focuses on the representation of modern women and the family in Manchukuo literature. Previous scholarship on Manchukuo’s literature tends to focus on works by men or on the question of Chineseness. To correct this oversight, I foreground Mei Niang’s modern woman in Manchukuo using a comparison between Eileen Chang’s modern girl in Hong Kong. The two stories map the various ways in which the achievement of sovereignty in colonial modernity is intimately tied to women's independence. In Mei Niang’s work, women’s subordination and sovereignty are allegories of relations of coloniality. A comparative reading of women's fiction by Mei Niang and Eileen Chang provides a critical window into the diverse conditions of Chinese women and their negotiation with colonial modernity. At the same time, a male author’s novel, Liang Shanding’s Lüse de gu ȩȺǾン (Green Valley), represents the 28 destruction of the patriarchal society through the decline of an extended family in rural Manchuria. My scrutiny of this novel challenges Duara’s argument of Manchukuo’s “authenticity” and reveals a multiethnic and egalitarian society that anticipates Manchukuo’s sovereignty. This chapter reveals how female subjectivity, the rhetoric of intimacy and multiethnicity distinguish Manchukuo’s colonial modernity. Chapter Four analyzes feature films made in Manchukuo. There, both the Japanese imperial power and the local Manchukuo’s government were fervent in facilitating the film industry because of its significant enhancement of national identity. The film institution, Man’ei, is an instrument of the imperial state. Funded by Japanese government, the colonial government of Manchukuo, and the occupying Japanese military (Kwantung Army), Man’ei’s film production cannot but submit itself to Japanese imperialist propaganda. Having been criticized as serving Japan’s “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere,” Manchukuo’s films have not been sufficiently studied. This scholarly negligence is unfortunate because, in my view, besides being forced to suit the need of Japanese colonial control, these cultural productions also reveal the contradiction between Japan’s imperialism and the growing nationalism of Manchukuo. These cultural texts thus open a window for today’s scholars to look into the mode of modern life imagined by people in Manchukuo. The film-viewing experience and the film culture fostered by the magazines and newspapers created a public space, making possible the emergence of a modern community, a sense of citizenship, as well as of individual subjectivity for both men and women. This chapter will highlight Man’ei’s feature films, Ying chun hua ʋƃȽ (J: Gei shun ka; hereafter, Winter Jasmine) and Jie da huan xi ǿ ôƬÖ (All’s Well that Ends Well) concomitant with the examination of film magazines. 29 An in-depth analysis of films and publications will demonstrate that the narrative cinematic arrangements have made these films the unwitting stories of Manchurian modernity and gender equality. The genre of the musical is a test case for the definition of national cinema, as far as Manchukuo’s cinema is concerned. Given Hollywood musicals’ worldwide prominence in the 1930s, many different national cinemas have tried to emulate it. However, as recent scholarship on film musicals notes, there is a “tension between local and global elements.” Hollywood’s practice is not the only golden standard, while local musicals can “claim their own cultural specificity, traditions and stylistic uniqueness in a national realm” (Creekmur and Modad 2012, 2). Chapter Five situates Manchukuo’s film musical within the history of film musical, comparatively studying the tension between local and global elements, centering on Ri Kōran’s stardom. Previous scholarship on Ri Kōran only focuses on the propaganda imperative of her films. Such simplified interpretation hinders the complexity of Ri Koran’s transnational stardom, overlooking the complex relationship between Ri Kōran’s star image, Manchukuo’s localization of film musical, and Japanese imperialism. Through a thorough study of Manchukuo’s musical culture and a scrutiny of Ri’s star image, this chapter demonstrates the essential role that film musical plays in the construction of a Manchukuo national film. Manchukuo film musical innovatively incorporates European style music into its film narrative and challenge Hollywood binary structure by foregrounding the female protagonist played by Ri Kōran. Ri’s star persona underwent a transformation from a submissive and docile Chinese woman to an independent and capable woman; however, she has never been a real songstress, but rather a workingwoman in Manchukuo’s film musical. Ri’s operatic 30 singing in multiple languages embodies Manchukuo’s cosmopolitanism. Her on-screen persona resonates with her star image created by mass media, and betrays a sense of independence, sexual sovereignty, and physical mobility; however, the construction of an independent woman conflicts with the logic of imperialism from time to time. This conflict reveals Manchukuo’s ambiguous sovereignty. III. Women, migrants, and the nuclear family are subjects of modernity in Manchukuo’s literature and cinema, although they have historically been the most marginalized groups in East Asian societies. Through the construction of workingwomen, the depiction of nuclear family, the destruction of patriarchal family, and the formation of a multiethnic society, Manchukuo’s literature and cinema interpret modernity as equality and independence of different gender, ethnic and social class. Traditionally speaking, women and migrants are socially subordinate groups that do not receive adequate political or scholarly attention in East Asian societies. In Manchukuo’s literature and cinema, the new nation-state is created as a harbor of modernity, equality, and independence. Despite its progressive representation of modernity, however, Manchukuo’s literature and cinema are understudied due to the complex geopolitics and ambiguous sovereignty of this nation-state. The unevenness between Manchukuo’s existing body of work and critical negligence of its cultural production is analogous to the contradiction of Manchukuo’s colonial modernity. As an imposed nation-state inside of Chinese territory, Manchukuo has to fight for its national independence while subject to Japanese colonization. 31 Through an elaboration of colonial modernity as my interpretive framework, and in- depth textual analyses of literatures and film, my dissertation shows the conflict between sovereignty and coloniality in Manchukuo. For me, colonial modernity manifests as multiethnicity and multiculturalism in Manchukuo’s cultural production, which anticipates the traits of transnationalism in the twenty-first century. My study of Manchukuo’s literature and cinema is necessarily comparative in that it situates the specific cultural texts of Manchukuo alongside such adjacent geopolitical and cultural counterparts in Japan, China, and Hong Kong. In this manner, it at once highlights the distinction of Manchukuo and its differentiation with other national or regional cultural formations, thereby enriching the “national” and “transnational” understandings of what constitutes modern Chinese literature and cinema in particular and what it may say about Asian Studies in general. 32 CHAPTER II MULTIETHNICITY AND MULTILINGUALISM IN THE MINOR LITERATURE OF MANCHUKUO Ostensibly a nation-state for fourteen years (1932- 1945) with its own government, territory, and citizenry, Manchukuo was a colony of the Empire of Japan appropriated from China and suffered from a lack of political and cultural legitimacy. While this anxiety troubled Manchukuo’s literary identity, the competing political powers of Japan, China, and Manchukuo also contributed to an unexpected literary and cultural flourishing for the nominal nation-state, providing unique possibilities for imagining national identity and East Asian modernity. Manchukuo literature could be considered a short-lived national literature without a unifying single national language. Unlike classic English literature or French literature, where the vernacular language signifies the national identity, Manchukuo literature incorporates Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Korean languages. This multilingual distinction of Manchukuo cultural production is a fact yet to be sufficiently addressed, for it challenges the general concepts of national or ethnic literatures and major or minor literary movements. In his important work on Chinese women writers in Manchukuo, Norman Smith challenges the simple binary between “resistance” and “collaboration” by stressing Manchukuo writers’ “essential Chineseness.” Influenced by Prasenjit Duara, Smith generalizes about multiethnicity to imperialist “ethnic harmony;” thus, he argues that “ethnicity is muted” in Manchukuo’s texts, and claims them as Chinese literature (Smith 2007, 138). In his influential book, Sovereignty and Authenticity, Duara reduces the entire body of Manchukuo literature to “native place literature,” exemplified by his 33 reading of one novel, Lüse de gu ȩȺǾン (hereafter, Green Valley) (Liang 1987). Duara’s desire to promote a regenerative “authenticity” based on “native place” overlooks not only the history of Japanese colonial encroachment into Manchukuo but also its multiethnic community “sustained” (in his own words) by “a hybrid culture” (Duara 2003, 232, 43). If there is anything authentic in view of Duara’s claim, it should be the native place’s “multiculturalism.” This is a fact that Kimberly Kono recognizes well. However, her study of interethnic romance in Manchukuo regards Japanese writers in Manchukuo as enacting further colonization through literary production; therefore, she argues that this kind of writings is an extension of Japanese literature (Kono 2010, 142). These important studies, in their inclusion and exclusion of Manchukuo literature into existing critical categories, do not take into full consideration the historical and global reality of Manchukuo. Smith’s incorporation of Manchukuo’s texts into Chinese literature, Duara’s uncritical celebration of Green Valley as “authenticity,” and Kono’s classification of Japanese immigrant writing as part of imperial Japanese literature fail to provide students of Manchukuo literature a complete and concise account of its distinctive formation. To highlight Manchukuo literature’s locational significance and linguistic diversity, this chapter focuses on the complexity of multilingualism and multiculturalism in Manchukuo literature and its role in constituting the nation and its modernity. Examining stories and novels by Chinese, Russian, and Japanese writers of the region, I explore how different ethnic writers, both native and immigrant, imagine sovereignty and modernity in Manchukuo. These imaginative acts are necessarily in accordance with or in opposition to the historical fact of Japanese colonialism in 1930s and 1940s Manchuria. Even though 34 the territory of Manchuria itself has been historically multiethnic, with Chinese, Japanese, Manchurian, Mongolian, and Russian influences, the most recent gathering of different ethnicities in Manchukuo is the result of an imperialist expansion into a historical geopolitical territory. Apart from the occupation and the partition of Chinese territory, Japan also aggressively promoted the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” an imperial fantasy, of which Manchukuo was an essential part. How writers of different ethnicity implicitly wrote for or against this narrative of Japanese imperialism in their imaginative construction of an emergent Manchukuo nation will be the focus of this chapter. I. One of the most fervent discussions in recent Chinese studies has been the distinction between “Chinese literature” and “Sinophone literature.” In his essay about multiethnic literature, Chen Pingyuan of Peking University argues that Chinese literature is determined by culture rather than race. China is historically a multiethnic and multicultural community. The Han language, the lingua franca of China, disseminates its shared culture and tradition among a plurality of Chinese ethnicities. Because Chinese literature is not exclusively the literature of the Han people and is open in its composition and reception to all ethnic groups in China, the relationship between the Han and other ethnic groups is not one of the center and the margin, or of the colonizer and the colonized. Because of nineteenth-century Western colonialism, a discussion of Chinese literature and culture since the Opium War cannot be divorced from the history of Western imperialism. Modern Chinese literature begins to foreground Chinese nationality and ethnicity in order to claim its cultural autonomy from the West. The declaration of 35 Chinese nationalist independence has led to an oversight of the complex multiethnicity in Chinese literature (Chen 2015, 6-9). While Chen Pingyuan wishes to advocate a pre-colonial Chinese notion of literary history for the restoration of a postcolonial multiethnic canon, Shu-mei Shih intentionally sets Chinese-speaking communities outside China against ones on the mainland and interprets the relationship between the Han and other ethnic groups there as a colonial relationship. Thus, her framework for “the Sinophone” highlights “the value of difference and heterogeneity” of the settlement community and the diasporic community (Shih 2007, 5). According to Shih, Chinese literature is limited to the Han culture and is exclusively located on Mainland China, while Sinophone literature refers to literature in Chinese language produced outside Mainland China. Shih’s hypothesis contradicts the historical fact that only after the Opium War did conceptions of nation-state, and ideas about race and nation begin to affect the writing of Chinese literary history. By racializing Chinese literature and limiting it to geopolitical China alone, Shih is able to exclude China and Chinese literature from her framework of “Sinophone literature.” In her Chinese/Sinophone opposition, China becomes a cultural empire, colonizing the East Asian world and popularizing Chinese language, culture, and literature. Even the existence of kanji in Japanese, and hanja in Korean become evidence of Chinese cultural colonization (28). By making China the colonial metropole, “Sinophone” privileges itself as a self-affirming margin. It empties Sinophone of the foundational meaning of “China” and “Chinese-speaking.” “Sinophone” conjures up an ahistorical colonial relationship of cultural hegemony. It excludes the interactions and intertexualities mobilized by Chinese language dispersal in diasporic locations. As a 36 consequence, “Sinophone” severs the dialogical relationship between literary production of Mainland China and that of the ethnic Chinese or diasporic Chinese (Shih 2011, 709). In contrast to Shih’s more exclusive framework, Chen Pingyuan’s multiethnic literature suggests a more meaningful approach to comparative Chinese literatures, emphasizing the dialogues between different Sinophone regions and communities. Chen’s inclusive framework resonates with the studies of diasporic literature in the Japanese occupied areas of China (Lunxianqu Wenxue ƿʴ©ŴĈ), an accepted school of literary scholarship practiced in contemporary Chinese academia (Liu 1993, 140). The opposing views of Chen’s multiethnic literature and Shih’s Sinophone literature form the preliminary challenge to my examination of Manchukuo literature. Since Sinophone literature intentionally excludes China, it cannot address, for example, Taiwanese writers’ activity in Beijing during World War II, even though the primary objective of the Sinophone is to endow Taiwan with its own centrality. Zhang Quan Ĺǂ notes how competing powers between Japan and China brought about an identity crisis for Taiwanese writers in Beijing, because they were colonized subjects of Japan while also being immigrants in Beijing (Zhang 2011, 91). In my view, language choice also became a problem because the majority of Taiwanese writers were colonially educated in Japanese, but chose to compose in Chinese. The “national” language of colonial Taiwan, Japanese, conflicted with Taiwanese writers’ choice language of Chinese. Shih’s Sinophone proposal cannot adequately account for the literary production of Taiwanese writers in Beijing, nor can it be included in any other established literary categories. Zhang Quan’s reading of colonial Taiwanese writers resonates with the more concise theoretical formulations of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Focusing on the 37 Jewish writer Franz Kafka writing in German in Prague, Deleuze and Guattari propose a “minor literature” that foregrounds “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 18). A minor literature does not come from a minor language but is constructed by a minority writing subject within a major language. Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of “minor literature” does not suggest a dichotomy between “the minor” and “the major.” Rather, the new category of minor literature “allows one to dispense with dualisms and rifts . . .that have ultimately constituted a sort of vulgate” (xv). Minor literature describes the “literature machine” that has been affected by indistinct materials entering and formalizing it by varying degrees (7). In this context, the “deterritorialization of language,” central to the formation of “minor literature,” has meant simply dissolution of a pre-colonial integrity of land, language, and lineage. Because of the “irreducible distance” between Prague Jews and “their primitive Czech territoriality,” Kafka has to adopt the German language as his means of expression, though he cannot help feeling “excluded from” the German population in Prague (16). The “deterritorialization” of language thus speaks of a writer’s condition of estrangement and marginality; yet, it also lends itself to “collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation.” For Deleuze and Guattari, finally, “the writer in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community” has more possibilities to “express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (17). If we recall Benedict Anderson’s analysis of print culture’s role in the narration of the nation, the function of Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature in 38 connecting every individual, fostering a collective community, and eventually imagining a new nation seems at once clear and convincing (Anderson 1991,45). The deterritorialization of language that Deleuze and Guattari theorize was at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, and became a world-historical condition of colonization. In Manchukuo, the territory known as Chinese Northeast, the indigenous people, as well as the diasporic Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Russians, and Mongolians, were writing about their experiences with the land, a land that had been re-territorialized. Although Manchukuo assumed a nominal political sovereignty, the multiracial and multiethnic make-up of its citizenry defied Japanese demographic domination. No single ethnicity could claim a political majority, while the multilingualism inherent with a multiethnic population was commonplace. These political and linguistic conditions of literary production corresponded to Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion of a minor literature as “every literature within the heart of what is called great (an established) literature.” “Even he who has the misfortune of being born in the country of a great literature must write in its language,” Deleuze and Guattari resume, “just as a Czech Jew writes in German, or an Uzbek writes in Russian” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986,18). Manchukuo literature could be conceived of as a minor literature in Deleuze and Guattari’s general sense because it was not an established literature, but an emergent one. It was a minor literature in opposition to Japan’s Kokusaku bungaku àț Ŵĉ (National Policy Literature). The minor literature of Manchukuo did not abide by the imperial propaganda and even seemed to resist it from time to time. Even in the preface to Manshūkoku kakuminzokus sōsakushu ǍĦàÂƶź uʺ (An Anthology of Short Stories by Multiethnic Manchukuo Writers) written when Japan had expanded 39 its invasion into China and Southeast Asia in 1941, editors Kawabata Yasunari ĥȘķř and Kishida Kunio Ģdzàï noted that Manchukuo literature was not an extension of Japanese literature (Kawabata and Kishida 2000, 4). It was refreshing that Kawabata and Kishida used “multiethnic” to describe Manchukuo writers, to which I have added “multilingualism” as their distinctive medium of enunciation. For me, multiethinicity and multilingualism formalized the unformed heterogeneous, and diverse contents and expressions of an emergent nation. Finally, Manchukuo literature qualified as a minor literature because the expression of the displaced, marginalized, and colonized communities could not find a home within the established categories of national literatures, be they Chinese, Japanese, or Russian. The complex colonial and local reality along with the multiethnic and multilingual condition of articulation also made Manchukuo literature a minor literature because Manchukuo writers did not have, in the same way Deleuze and Guattari rejected binary oppositions, the aspiration of becoming a major literature. Manchukuo literature was at once the formation of an emergent literature inside the domain of Japanese imperialism but its multiethnic, multilingual, and pluralistic desire for sovereignty also contradicted and complicated the conventional understanding of a “national literature.” Having set up the framework of Manchukuo literature as a minor literature, I now turn to ethnic Chinese writer, Mei Niang, ethnic Japanese writer Yokota Fumiko, and ethnic Russian writer Arsenii Nesmelov.3 This reading is not meant to be representative or exhaustive, only 3 Mei Niang is the pen name of Sun Jiarui ćØǮ. Sun was born in Vladivostok in 1920, the daughter of a concubine in an influential comprador family in Changchun (later was Xinjing, the capital city of Manchukuo). Her first novella was published in 1936. Then, she adopted Mei Niang, Sun Minzi ćůą, Minzi ůą, Fangzi Ⱦą and some other names as her pen name, among which Mei Niang is the best known one (Zhang 1998). 40 illustrative of ways in which to approach Manchukuo literature. I will flesh out the writers’ treatments of multiethnicity and multilingualism in their idiosyncratic art, before concluding with some further thoughts on Manchukuo literary production’s possible place within the historical fields of Chinese literary and cultural studies. II. Mei Niang, the most important female writer of Chinese in Manchukuo, first published her short story, “Qiao min” {ƶ (Migrants) in the major literary magazine, Xin manzhou ŸǐDž (New Manchuria). “Migrants” tells the story of a Manchurian migrant’s encounter with a Korean migrant couple in Osaka. In her “misty feminist” perspective, notes Zhang Quan, Mei Niang aspires to “personal independence and sovereignty” in the colonial state with yearnings for “gender equality” (Zhang 1997, 56).4 Though “Migrants” was composed in deterritorialized Chinese while she was an international student in Japan from 1937-1941, Mei Niang’s rendition of migrants’ marginal experiences in the metropolitan state also could be conceived of as a fictional figuration of colonial relations in her native Manchuria. The story’s depiction of gender dynamics and colonial relationships not only probes the assumption of identity by an oppressed people but it also anticipates the formation of a collective community through cultivation of an inter-ethnic consciousness and sensibility. The story employs stream of consciousness and like the “I-novel” popular in Japan and in the May Fourth period of China, the narrator is nameless. The Manchurian female “I” protagonist feels alienated and disdained in Osaka, the second-largest city in imperial Japan. On an express train to Kobe for the weekend because of a prior good experience 4 My translation. 41 there, she worries that her looks could betray her Manchurian identity to her fellow Japanese passengers, though she is an educated woman with a job much more prestigious than most ordinary Japanese. Her anxiety shows not just her insecurity about herself but also reveals the instability of the sovereignty of Manchukuo. Though propped up by Japan as an independent state, the nation and its citizens were subject to Japanese imperialism, both politically and psychologically. Her anxiety is relieved when another couple of ethnic Korean origin unexpectedly yields their seats to her. Surprised at first because both Koreans and Manchurians were colonized people in Japan, she soon realizes that she must have been misidentified as a Japanese woman because of her cosmopolitan clothes and demeanor. The Korean migrants’ projection onto her of an imperial subject status transforms the narrator’s inferiority into a master’s pleasure, bringing her instant feelings of hitherto suppressed supremacy. In Japanese critic Kishi Yoko Ģʶą’s reading, “The Korean man’s willingness to submit himself in the position of the slave could be a portrayal of Mei Niang, the author” (Kishi 2007, 159).5 The characters of the story and its author are of ethnic equivalence; their acceptance of colonial hierarchies has made them interchangeable. Although I do not think Kishi’s equation between the narrator and author is accurate, I think that the narrator has unconsciously internalized the colonial hierarchy and feels a surge of power as a want-to-be Japanese imperial subject. In this sense, the narrator’s sudden ascension to power could be Mei Niang’s evocation of the real historical situation and her implicit interrogation of colonialism. One could even read 5 My translation. The original Chinese translated from the Japanese is from Kishi in Kangzhan wenhua yanjiu šśŴ§Ȍも (Cultural Studies of Anti-Japanese War) 1, 2007. 42 here the delight of Pu Yi, when he assumed the Manchukuo throne under Kang De Emperor in 1934. Regardless of the lack of actual power, the nominal supremacy must have brought him fantasies of autonomy, despite the reality of being merely a puppet head of the state (Aisin-Gioro 1965, 275). However, the narrator’s pleasure of presumptive power is overtaken by her sympathy for a shared identity with the colonized. Her shame of having to wear a man’s watch (for lack of money) and her realization of the Korean man’s shame of not even having one connect the bourgeois Chinese woman to the Korean man of a lower class. She cannot help gifting her own watch to him in order to relieve his feeling of inferiority. Another thought soon catches up with her, however, when she anticipates the incongruity between his dress and the watch. Finally, the man’s chauvinistic attitude towards his wife completely offends her, frustrating her efforts at community building. For Mei Niang, a collective community not only meant interracial and interethnic equality but gender equality as well. “Migrants” can be read in three narrative movements, first, the narrator’s pleasure at being misidentified as a Japanese imperial subject; second, her empathy towards the marginalized members of a different ethnicity; and third, her resentment of gender inequality. The narrative movements in stream of consciousness reflect themes of colonial hierarchy, multiethnic community, and gender equality and serve as an aesthetic mediation of the historical contradictions caused by Japanese imperialism. Here, Osaka as a Japanese imperial center of industrial capitalism, just like London as the cosmopolitan center of the British Empire in James Joyce, is contrasted with the peripheral city of Shinking Ÿa (now, Changchun ʦƃ) in Manchukuo or Hanseong in 43 Korea. According to Terry Eagleton, Joyce’s Ulysses exhibited “the conflict between international circuits of capitalism with their correlative cosmopolitan centers of culture in London, Berlin, and New York, and the older national formations or cultural traditions that are being increasingly outmoded” (Eagleton 1990, 35). Joyce’s novel showcased the consequences of the international expansion of capitalism, not only in reshaping the traditions and cultures of pre-industrial society, but also in reconstructing the way that a new collective community could form. In Mei Niang’s story in Osaka, the express train, the streetcar, the fashionable watch and stylish attires epitomize industrialization and consumerist cultures in metropolitan states. The Manchurian and Korean migrants’ ceaseless feelings of alienation in this environment reveal a contradiction between the imperial subjects and the marginalized people of the colonies. Social contradiction is also shown through gender and racial inequality, which, as Mei Niang demonstrates, is different from the social contradiction of the old national formation, based on indigenous people in bounded territories. In light of Eagleton’s analysis of Ulysses, we can say that Mei Niang’s story of migrants in Japan addresses “an exhilarating estrangement of such clapped-out national lineages from the powerfully distancing perspectives of exiles” (35). Mei Niang did not have much of a clear national lineage to begin with; she invented instead, her own aesthetic form to describe the dispossession of belonging to a land no longer her own but dominated by Japanese imperialism. Her story, then, appears as both an anticolonial act and a minor literary enunciation that would join those of other multiethnic writers to call Manchukuo literature into being. “Migrants” is one among a host of Manchukuo stories that explore the subjects of interethnic brotherhood, interracial marriage, cross-class sympathy, and gender equality 44 as a means to imagine the collective community of Manchukuo and its cultural sovereignty. Besides “Migrants,” “Liu Qi” Ɵǫ a short story by Zuo Di ĨɎ in 1942, and Mei Niang’s “Xie” ɘ (Crab) and “Bang” ú (Clam) in 1943 come immediately to mind (Zuo Di 1986, 391-99; Mei Niang 1986, 158-216). In “Bangwan de xiju” €ƈǾÖ  (The Comedy at Dusk), a short story by Mei Niang published in 1940, she creates an image of a Korean boy who is sympathetic towards a fellow Chinese boy. In the story, both boys’ lives have been dislocated by Japanese imperialism and they end up in a Manchukuo barbershop. As the most senior apprentice, the Korean boy tries his best to protect the younger Chinese “brother” from being abused by their master (Mei Niang 1997, 1-12). In Dan DiBy’s “Andi he ma hua” ĊʓÎˋ¬ (Andy and Ma Hua), an interethnic bond is formed against the backdrop of Japanese imperial expansion in 1940 when a Chinese woman, Andy, and a Eurasian man, Ma Hua, get married (Dan Di 1986, 242-302). While an interracial conjugal union could be presumed as possibly serving the imperial propaganda of the Gōzoku kyōwa/Wuzu xiehe Zź­Î (Five Ethnicities in Harmony), the stories that make up “Utsukushiki banka” Ȭ1ťƭ(Beautiful Elegy) by the ethnic Japanese writer in Manchukuo, Yokota Fumiko, prove otherwise. Grouped under the collection “Beautiful Elegy,” Yokota’s three short stories, “Kaze” ˆ(Wind), “Koibun” ŎŴ (Love Letters), and “Kurisumasu no monogatari” . 6050!ǟɨ (A Christmas Story), deal with interethnic interactions in Manchukuo under the shadow of Japanese colonialism.6 They are composed in Japanese and set in 6 “Wind” and “Love Letters” were published in the magazine Manchukuo Administration (Manshu gyōsei ǍDžɚŮ) in the winter of 1938 and spring of 1939 under “Beautiful Elegy.” The third story “A Christmas Story,” a sequel to “Beautiful Elegy,” was 45 Kuanchengzi, a mixed neighborhood of Russian and Japanese in Xinjing. Following the Russian-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) that spawned Russian migration to the Chinese city of Harbin as early as 1898, the Japanese-controlled Southern Manchurian Railway (hereafter, Mantetsu) also brought Japanese laborers and families to Manchukuo. Engineers, bureaucrats, students, exiled intellectuals, and people from every walk of life—from Moscow, Vladivostok, Warsaw, Beijing, Taiwan, Tokyo or Osaka— encountered one another in the Pristan district in Harbin (now Daoli ʘʠ), Aobacho/Qingyeting ʾɋǶ in Fengtian øõ or Kuanchengzi đéą in Xinjing, bringing in a variety of cultures and languages. It was from this historical condition of multiethnicity and multilingualism under Japanese imperialism that Yokota’s short fiction about diaspora and displacement arose. Unlike her contemporary Ushijima Haruko ǜģƃą, another famous female Japanese writer in Manchukuo who focuses on “the Japanese pioneers” in “the frontier,” the hardworking bureaucrats or policemen in Manchukuo, Yokota Fumiko cares about the marginal group, the poor, the young, and the disabled. “Love Letters” is an elegy of aborted love affair between a young Manchurian/Chinese man and a married Japanese woman. Although interracial romance is usually a metaphor for colonial relationships with the male colonizer as conqueror, who not only conquers the land but also the indigenous woman, in this story, the young man’s love cannot be consummated because of his identity as the colonized Manchurian, and the woman’s as the Japanese colonizer. published in Manchukuo Administration during the fall of 1940 and the spring of 1941.The version of “Wind” that I draw on is from Yokota Fumiko, the Person and Her Works (Yokota Fumiko hito to sakuhin »Õ£{<Ec) (Yokota 1993). The translation from Yokota’s Japanese story into the English citation in this text is mine. 46 “Christmas Story” depicts the friendship between a young Japanese man and an old Russian lady, who share temporary interethnic solidarity and sympathy on Christmas Eve. Among the three stories, “Wind” is the most artistically and theoretically accomplished. It depicts a small dispute among Russian and Japanese children on a windy afternoon. The principal characters are two Japanese boys, Toshi in woolen haori (the traditional Japanese jacket) and Kei in green woolen sweater pants, and two Russian boys, Slovochka in an old velvet suit and the disabled boy Wassily. With the children’s play, Yokota tackles the challenges of Russian and Japanese identities, mixed cultures and languages, and sentiments of sadness and loss when diverse geopolitical powers compete for domination in Manchukuo. While the colonial government promoted a “National Policy Literature” that glorified Japanese colonization in Manchukuo, “Wind” highlighted the inequality and oppression in the colony that different powers competed with each other. The story begins with an assurance that “there was plenty of time until dusk,” yet it soon claims “sunset was early in the autumn.” The ominous sunset foreshadows the short life of the newly established nation-state, whose colonial hierarchy is evident in the exclusion of the Manchurian/Chinese children from other children’s play. The Kuanchengzi neighborhood was a high-end neighborhood initially settled by the Russians and then preferred by Japanese migrants. Surrounding this desirable residential area was a Japanese military base and a Russian cemetery, a colonial buffer zone against the local Manchurian and Chinese. The presence of the Japanese military base in “Wind” came to 47 symbolize both Japanese colonial power in Manchukuo and the political pretense of Manchukuo’s sovereignty. The story of “Wind” describes a children game centered on the prize of a bird. Yokota uses Japanese words like arasoi V and tatakahi Ŝ$, meaning “battle” and “fight”, to describe the competitive struggle for a new Manchukuo, symbolically carried out by the children in their struggle for a bird. I read “Wind” as an allegory, with the Russian and Japanese children standing in for their original nations at war, whose trophy, the bird, is ultimately Chinese Manchuria. From 1898-1945, Russia, and then the Soviet Union, and Japan struggled to control the resources there. After being defeated in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), China was forced to pay 200 million taels of silver as indemnity and ceded Liaotung Peninsula. Russia formed an alliance with China against Japan and coerced Japan into giving up Liaotung Peninsula. Along with other concessions from Japan, Russia won rights to extend the Trans-Siberian Railroad across Chinese Manchuria. However, with the victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), Japan became the first Asian power in modern times to defeat a European power. Japan reclaimed Liaotung peninsula, turning it into Kwantung Leased Territory, established the Kwantung army there to exercise its extraterritorial power which eventually paved the way for the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 (Kowner 2007, 14-36). At the time of the publication of “Wind” in 1938, no power in East Asia had been able to win a fight against Japan. The narrator’s remark about Toshi’s “unknown superiority to everything” is indicative of Japan’s supremacy in Asia. Not only does the capture of a little bird inflate Toshi’s ego, it also brings Toshi, an ordinary boy of five or 48 seven, a great advantage over his rivals. Although all the children had been displaced by the war, Toshi and Kei came to Manchukuo as the children of the colonizer, while Slovochka and Wassily were exiles from the defeated nation-state of Russia. Toshi’s “unknown superiority” had its known historical origin in Japan’s triumph over a European imperial power. Japanese imperialism had a perverse effect on the formation of Manchukuo. Although Kei and Toshi are compatriots, they do not band together to fight against the Russian, Slovochka. Rather, Kei fights against Toshi and Slovochka to win the trophy for himself. This competing relationship is indicative of both the strife between Japan and Russia and the conflict between the Kwantung army in Manchukuo and the imperial government in Tokyo. Contrary to the “Five Ethnicities in Harmony” in Manchukuo, “Wind” reveals the topography of Manchukuo’s “colonial modernity” (Barlow 1997, 3). On the one hand, the new nation-state provided multiethnic people of different origins with a place to settle down, establish families, and develop careers. On the other hand, the seemingly harmonious land of multiethnicity and multilingualism was haunted by Japanese imperialism and the Japanese military. In the capital city of Xinjing, none of the children of Manchurian/Chinese or Korean descent make an appearance in Kuanchengzi. Even though the Russian children wear Japanese wooden clogs while the Japanese children wear Western sweaters, the children of Japanese descent claim unquestionable superiority. For Yokota’s narration, multiethnicity and multiculturalism in Manchukuo did not preclude Japanese colonial hierarchy. Eventually, Toshi, Kei, and Slovochka abandon the dead bird while Wassily, the disabled boy, remains. They leave with no reluctance or regret, although they have fought 49 so hard for the little bird. With this description of attitudinal change, the story invites the reader to think through the meaning of death and warfare. Next to the grassland where these children are playing is the Russian cemetery. On the other side is the Japanese military base, Only Wassily stayed on the grassland with the dead bird. In the dusk, the little boy looked out to the vast and empty grassland. His gaze was passionate yet sad in the cold wind. He looked like a person who was waiting for an old friend’s arrival. He also resembled an orphan who was longing for his mother. The narrator resumes, It was unknown whether there was anybody who was waiting for Wassily at home. However, it was not important. Wassily felt happy for now because of a dead bird’s company. (Yokota 1993)7 In spite of his isolation, Wassily feels a sense of belonging that seems to reflect the inner state of all the dislocated people that Manchukuo embraced. “Wind” blows over everyone in the world regardless of one’s social status. Though the bird suffers from a terrible death due to the ferocious fighting among the possessive children, its dead body is now under the care of the disabled and gentle Wassily. The disabled and the dead form a close companionship with each other as if forming a conjugal union of the nation and its citizenry. Yokota’s “Wind” performs a national allegory of a new Manchukuo, which was to arise from the deaths occasioned by the imperial war and the wounds of ethnic and class strife. It was to imagine a sovereignty derived from the condition of disability and dislocation. 7 My translation. 50 While their stories illustrated how the colonial hierarchy permeated different social classes and ethnic groups, both Yokota and Mei Niang believed in the potential of realizing a multicultural national society and of Manchukuo’s sovereignty. The Russian émigré writer, Arsenii Nesmelov, however, did not share this uplifting vision. His use of deterritorialized Russian for the rendition of the Manchukuo experience, ironically, has contributed a great deal to the multiethnic and multilingual literary imagination.8 Like Mei Niang, Nesmelov was keen on probing the processes of mental colonization beyond the ravages of war and dislocation. In his 1933’s short story, “Following the Trace of Love,” Nesmelov uses an old Armenian man’s voice to show how the stateless migrants in Harbin are regarded as a spectacle at an expo, detached from the local people (Nesmelov 2002, 246-57). In describing a Russian prostitute’s exploitation by a multiracial clientele in Manchukuo after her escape from Vladivostok to Chinese Manchuria, “Red-hair Lanca” expresses Nesmelov’s deep suspicion about the prospects of multiethnicity as a condition of a new egalitarian society in 1933 (2002, 212-22).9 A 8 My understanding of Nesmelov’s original Russian story and poem is made possible by Heghine Hakobyan and Professor Roy Chan. I thank Heghine for her translation. The poem “Lamoza” was first published in 1940. The version on which I draw in this essay comes from Nesemelov’s anthology, Bez Rossii, published in the US after World War II (Nesmelov 1990); the short story “Lamoza” is included in Nesmelov A Collected Works (Nesmelov A. Sobranie sochinenii) (Nesmelov 2006, 2). 9 Nesmelov’s stories are included in Nichi-Man-Ro zaiman sakka tanpen senshū¦ÊĖ nÊE‚ßëČĔ(An Anthology of Short Stories by Japanese, Manchurian and Russian Writers in Manchuria) and An Anthology of Short Stories by Multiethnic Manchukuo Writers that was published in Japan in the 1940s. As a diasporic writer in Manchukuo, Nesmelov was embraced in his lifetime by a Japanese readership as well and considered a representative of Manchukuo’s multiethnic culture. The work of Nesmelov conscientiously mediates the immediate history that precedes the establishment of Manchukuo. Russians led a relatively comfortably life in their mini-colony of Harbin, a city built largely by Russians at the beginning of the twentieth century (Bakich 2000, 54). Until 1932, three generations of Russian migrants and émigrés lived there, transforming 51 comparative interpretation of Nesmelov’s poem and short story under the same title, “Lamoza,” will help to illustrate his pessimism. Lamoza is a pidgin word coming from the Chinese laomaozi (laomaozi Ȯƴą) that displaced Russians in Manchuria would understand. Literarily, it means “the old hairy one,” a pejorative reference to Russians. Nesmelov’s “Lamoza,” in both the poem and short story versions, centers on a Russian orphan in a Manchukuo village, who speaks Chinese, thinks of himself as Chinese but is not fully accepted by his Chinese peers. In both versions, Lamoza’s personal identity crisis reflects the collision between national identities, which finally destroys the poor boy. The poem “Lamoza” hinges on a Russian-speaking narrator’s unsuccessful communication with a Chinese-speaking Russian orphan in a Chinese village (Nesmelov 1990).10 Unlike the relative harmony between the Japanese and the Russians in Yokota’s stories, Nesmelov’s “Lamoza” highlights the incongruity of different ethnicities and cultures. For the narrator, the Russian boy’s unrevealed origins and his secret displacement are crime-related. The criminal origins symbolize the illegitimacy of Manchukuo’s birth. The poem begins with Harbin into the biggest cosmopolitan city in the region with Russian churches, factories, restaurants, and hotels in a city without military occupation (Li 2004). They had the privilege of keeping their lifestyle, traditions, and language on Chinese land. The founding of the Soviet Union compelled tsarists and Russian aristocrats in Harbin to seek Chinese citizenship for safety, while, by the early 1940s, nine years after the Japanese creation of the nation-state of Manchukuo, the government also mandated that Russian emigrants learn Japanese. With a large Russian population exodus to Shanghai, New York, South America and Australia, Harbin Russians in Manchukuo became “aliens among aliens” (Bakich 2000, 63-64). 10 My understanding of the poem in English benefits from Heghine Hakobyan’s translation from the Russian original. 52 a description of the Russian boy and a Chinese fanza. Fanza is another Sino-Russian pidgin word, which means “fangzi” in Chinese and “house” in English. In Harbin Russian, it specifically refers to a Chinese cottage, in contrast to a Western-style house (Bakich 2011, 28). The boy is blue-eyed and fair in contrast to the more rustic Chinese fanza behind him. His adoption by Chinese parents is seen as abduction and his poor Russian a sign of his inferiority. He is unable to comprehend his biological mother’s murmurings to him in a dream and does not even know his Russian name. From the narrator’s point of view, this loss of Russian lineage and tongue is almost a symbolic castration of Russia. Conversely, the boy is a foreigner to the Chinese as well, forever a lamoza with blue eyes and fair hair, “With yellow sea you cannot merge / Blue-eyed Russian creek.” In the boy’s abandonment by both national communities, Nesmelov seems to consider migration to Manchukuo a death to both Russian and Chinese ethnicities. The story version of “Lamoza” articulates a distinctive Manchukuo nation formation (Nesmelov 2006, 2, 509-17). Unlike a nation-state that emerges from the revolution against an old kingdom, or a colony that wins independence through anti- imperial movements, Manchukuo is a Japanese colonial regime under apparent Manchurian sovereignty. While the establishment of Manchukuo temporarily suppresses the political competitions among Russia, China, and Japan, Nesmelov’s story shows the challenges of actually building a multiethnic and multilingual nation. The reading of this unique situation may, however, benefit from Edward Said’s work on imperialism and culture. As Said notes, post-World War II decolonization enables the birth of post- colonial countries, which often turns nationalism into a new state ideology of 53 modernization and development that subjects postcolonial states to the logic of a world system or capitalism. Because the tension between modern nation-states and the lingering power of imperialism cannot be resolved in the world system of global capitalism, imperialism lurks within postcolonial nationalism (Said 1994, 265-67). “Unless national consciousness at its moment of success was somehow changed into a social consciousness,” Said states, “the future would hold not liberation but an extension of imperialism” (267). If eliminating the dependency on global capitalism is the essential step towards the post-colonial countries’ independence from imperialism, Manchukuo, mired in colonial history in its short life, exhibits a similar inability to resolve the tension between its own sovereignty and Japanese imperialism. In this sense, “Lamoza” could exemplify Manchukuo’s dilemma between sovereignty and coloniality. The story “Lamoza” reveals deeper conflicts between cultures, ethnicities, and identities than the poem. The conundrum of colonial modernity is reflected in the boy Wang Xin-te’s personal dilemma, an adopted son with Russian features in a Chinese family in a Chinese village. Wang’s life is divided into three parts, before he was seventeen years old, when he meets his lover Margarita at seventeen, and his adult life after Margarita’s death. In his childhood, Wang did not know what he looked like, lacking a mirror in the family, though all the children in the village called him “Lamoza.” Name-calling made Wang realize his ethnic differences, despite his wish to be completely Chinese. Things improve by seventeen. With his maturity as a young man, his physical strength and intelligence win him respect from his fellow Chinese villagers. He is not only treated as a “citizen” in the town, but also regarded as the heir of his adopted family. Clearly, Wang’s Chinese identity is constructed by society’s recognition rather 54 than by blood or culture. He is culturally Chinese, a hardworking young man, but addicted to opium. Wang’s identity as a Chinese man is undermined by his encounter with the Russian concubine of a rich Chinese merchant in the village, Margarita, who resembles the mother-figure in Wang’s dream. Her fair skin and blond hair give a clue as to the mysterious language in Wang’s dream and draws him to her. Wang is seduced not just by Margarita’s female beauty but by the Russia she personifies. However, the hardship caused by their illegitimate relationship and by Wang’s struggle to save for their passage back to Russia proves too much for Margarita to handle and she commits suicide. Wang’s emotional attachment to a woman of his kind is dashed, and so is his affiliation with Russia. From then on, he becomes a person with no identity. Wang joins a group of Chinese bandits and soon becomes the legendary “Captain Lamoza” in Manchuria. However, after they are ambushed by Russian mercenaries, Wang’s fellow bandits abandon him on suspicion of his betrayal. Rejected by the Chinese, he is slaughtered by his Russian compatriots on the battlefield. While Nesmelov’s story is time ambiguous, it is meaningful for us to correlate Wang’s short life to two periods of Manchurian history, the first being the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922; and the second being 1932-1939, when Chinese Manchuria was turned into Japan-instituted Manchukuo. The turmoil caused by the Soviet Russian Revolution could be the reason for Wang Xin-te’s involuntary separation from his biological parents and adoption by the Chinese couple. His upbringing in the region is marked by the waning of Russian influence and waxing of Japanese colonization. In “Lamoza,” the Chinese father and the Russian son are both subjects of the new Manchukuo nation. Theoretically speaking, the father-son adoptive relationship 55 exemplifies an interethnic formation of new allegiances, according to Said, “by social and political conviction, economic and historical circumstances, voluntary effort and willed deliberation” (Said 1983, 24-25). The Chinese father and the Russian son relationship also demonstrates the possibility of Manchukuo as a multiethnic affiliation with political solidarity, though Manchukuo itself was initially a colony installed by Japan. Unfortunately, Nesmelov’s narrative suggestion of what Said defines as “affiliation” is soon overshadowed by the logic of “filiation,” by which allegiances are considered natural, either by “birth” or “nationality” (25). Nesmelov reworks the Chinese father and Russian son relationship through Wang Xin-te’s romantic relationship with Margarita, a token of national and ethnic filiation. It is through his affair with Margarita and their abortive return to Russia that the language of blood and belonging is reintroduced as the fountain of identity—individual and national. Unlike Mei Niang and Yokota’s positive visualization of a multiethnic imagination, the progressive concept of a modern nation dissolves in the work of Nesmelov. In the eyes of the Russian or Chinese driven by emergent nationalism, there is no possibility of a Russian becoming a citizen of Manchukuo. The promise of non-biological affiliation is dismissed as an impossibility and the old forms of nationalism, integrity of racial origin and national belonging, are reasserted. III. Nesmelov’s earlier stories exhibit a more optimistic view of multiethnic co- existence, especially the beneficial power of multilingualism as part of a Russian émigré’s daily life in Manchukuo. In “Following the Trace of Love” (1933), the multilingual Bibikov easily reconnects to a female compatriot on the train from Paris to 56 Harbin (Nesmelov 2002, 246-257). Multilingualism ensures the Russian restaurant owner in “On the Other Bank of the River” (1936) to cater English customers, who bring the biggest business to Harbin in the summer (233-246). Unlike the absence of communication in “Lamoza,” multilingual people in these stories dissolve the boundary between ethnic groups and cultures. In these stories, Nesmelov seems to anticipate Werner Sollors who argues that language helps people to understand different culture beyond racial identity. In the case of the U.S, multilingual education is believed to provide the opportunity to establish voluntary affiliation and create an inclusive definition of the “we” (Sollors 1998, 3). In the age of transnationalism, the U.S has to reposition itself to a globalized economy and an increasing immigration at home. “Multilingualism prepares [American] students better for world citizenship.” It also promotes the communication between the historically English majority and the new coming linguistic minorities (3-4). Recent linguistic research shows that high levels of multilingualism also corresponds with higher levels of cultural empathy (Dewaele 2012, 363). It also shows that multilingual strategies in daily conversation can help speakers to maneuver between social groups and construct their identities in local contexts and beyond (Chen 2008, 73). It is important to recall, multilingualism was the foundation of multiethnic and multicultural Manchukuo. Manzhouguo jianguo xuanyan ǐDžàĸàĎマ (The Declaration Commemorating the Foundation of Manchukuo) in 1932 claimed, [A]ll the residents in the new nation are treated without racial discrimination or social hierarchy. In addition to the original Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Japanese ethnic and Korean populations, people of other nationalities who are willing to 57 permanently reside in Manchukuo will also enjoy equal rights and benefits, as well as the equal protection of their rights and benefits. (Wu 1989)11 For the colonial authority, multiethnicity was not only the base of the new nation-state but it was part of its progressive modernity. The protection of multiethnic groups includes the protection of their linguistic rights. Manchukuo’s educational policy mandated that multilingual education was from elementary school in the small town to the graduate school in the capital city (27-48). Xiehe yu ­Îɴ (J: Kyowago), the mixture of Japanese and Chinese, and Harbin’s Sino-Russian Pidgin (SRP), were two examples of multilingual mingling in Manchukuo. Manchukuo’s local code-switching pattern is “insertional,” in which individual ethnic lexical items are inserted into a base language of Chinese, Japanese, or Russian at an “intra-sentential level” (Chen 2008, 60). For instance, in “Lamoza,” the words like “fanza/house,” “khodia/shop assistant,” and “dzian’dzuin/military general,” which are fangzi/ŝą, huoji/nɪ, and jiangjun/ėŒ in Chinese, are woven in the narrative to give Manchukuo’s life some authenticity. In addition to nouns, Harbin SRP has specific verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and measure words that are different from original Russian. The syntax of Harbin SRP is also Chinese, following the order of subject, predicate and object in a sentence (Bakich 2011, 28). The interplay of languages, identities, and ideology helps to establishing social networks, and self-repositioning in the multiethnic nation. 11 My translation. Original text is “åŸàĐ˄äP‹ĝsȯ8ǿŻȓźPưɣ8 Ę®P‘š,ʳ·ƎPƻźǐźデź¸żƒƐˍÂźñ8³Šgàc8ŕʦ Nĝsȯ8^ń`ĮȚPŃʗ8}ʸŠijńPƖ™8]wŠƎFƵP|Ŧ.” 58 Theoretically speaking, use of Kyowago and SRP can be understood as “code- switching,” a conversational strategy used to establish or destroy group boundaries (Chen 2008, 58). Code switching in daily conversation repositions the speaker to a new social group. In Liang Shanding’s Green Valley, we see an example of its usage. To persuade her baby to go to the city with her, the mother says, ʃþþʀ8þþȥvS “²ブ.” (Go with mom, mom will buy you ‘kashi.’) Here, the widowed mom is encouraging her boy to leave the village and to relocate to the town with her and her new husband. Instead of using Chinese word for “candy,” tang ら, the speaker chooses kashi, a Japanese reference. Though the loan word is a minor part of the sentence, the boy understands it without any confusion. This leads the reader to conclude that Japanese expression has replaced the Chinese one, and kashi has turned out shared term of multiethnic groups. The insertion of Japanese word repositions the mother and her boy to Manchukuo’s linguistic mixture. As is also seen in Yokota Fumiko’s “Wind,” the Russian boy Slovochka speaks a mixture of Japanese and Chinese. When he attempts to prevent Toshi from giving the bird to Kei, he yells, ˊの(2:14/7! (Don’t! You can’t!) The first part, ˊの/damedayo is Japanese but 2:14/7 is a typical Japanized Chinese, ni de buxing/vǾ]ɚ.12 Although the boy cannot tell Japanese from Chinese, his multilingual ability allows him to establish the social network with his Japanese buddies. In this instance, multilingual practice in Manchukuo’s daily life reveals the potential of decreasing cultural friction to a certain extent. Kyowago is popular among 12 The grammatically Chinese expression should be bukeyi ]¿j. 59 Japanese ethnic writers and Chinese/Manchurian writers in Manchukuo. Okada Hideki notes that the representation of Manchukuo’s daily life through Kyowago in Japanese ethnic writings underscores the unique distinction of Manchurian culture, custom, and “language.” It prevents a conflation of Manchukuo’s national literature with Japanese literature (Okada 2000, 179). Needless to say, Manchukuo’s multilingual pidgin practice is caused by colonialism. Both Olga Bakich and Odaka Hideki argue that the birth of Kyowago or Harbin Sino-Russian derive Japanese and Russian people’s historical disdain for Chinese, a language of the colonized they do not care. The prevalent presence of Chinese in Manchukuo, however, compels their linguistic accommodation. Kyowago and SRP demonstrate that Manchukuo’s multilingualism is still haunted by Japanese imperialism. Although Manchukuo authority never officially defines the national language, in the period of Manchukuo’s political and cultural evolution, the kind of Kyowago and SRP dominant in multiethnic writings on Manchukuo were in reality suppressed just as the use of Japanese became more official, thus precluding the kind of multilingual literacy and the imagination of harmonious multiethnic formation of a modern nation to truly flourish.13 Nesmelov’s negative vision of multilingual and multiethnic Manchukuo seems not far from reality after all. * * * Though a colonial state installed by the Empire of Japan at the height of its imperialism, Manchukuo is also a literary and cultural construct, imagined by the people 13 See Liu Xiaoli ”ƇM’s “Dongya zhiminzhuyi yu wenxue” E\ƲƶLOAŴĈ (East Asian Colonialism and Literature), the introduction to Weiman shiqi wenxue ziliao zhengli yu yanjiu cong pǐſƑŴĈɽŶųさAȌもD (Liu 2017, 3). 60 within its geopolitical boundaries in opposition to colonial domination. As I have demonstrated so far, the multiethnic and multilingual narration of the nation, be it in the language of Chinese, Japanese, or Russian, has functioned both to contest the official discourse of Japan’s imperial “Co-prosperity Sphere” and to articulate an emergent nation through interethnic and multilingual affiliation. While Manchukuo as a historical instance of colonial modernity and ambiguous sovereignty seems to pass, the literary and cultural production of the era continues to inspire an imagination of social solidarities beyond nation and ethnicity. 61 CHAPTER III REIMAGINING WOMAN AND FAMILY THROUGH SOVEREIGNTY AND COLONIALITY In the previous chapter, we have witnessed how writers of different ethnicities use deterritorialized languages in Manchukuo to construct a literary nation distinct from the dominant discourse of Japanese imperialism and its imposition of the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.” This chapter continues this critical examination while taking a different perspective. Manchukuo political sovereignty under Japanese colonialism is gendered. The ways in which Manchukuo’s writers created new models of womanhood and family are inseparably related to their effort to imagine national independence. It is through this integrated lens that I now turn to a reading of Manchukuo’s unique modernity. The notion of “being modern” casts such a challenge to Manchukuo—the nation, and its people—because the contradiction between the reality of Japanese domination in Manchuria and the Manchukuo people’s longing for sovereignty complicates our general understanding of what would constitute a nation-state, and therefore what is at the heart of Manchukuo modernity. As I have argued before, what Western modernity brought to East Asia was colonialism and imperialism. In order to fight against invasive “modernity,” people in East Asia, especially in Manchukuo, strove to establish their own definition of “modernity.” According to Anthony Giddens, modernity is a twofold project, with the sovereignty of a nation on the one hand and the sovereignty of an individual on the other (Giddens and Fierson 1999, 94). Thus, Manchukuo had to learn how to be a modern nation and claim its sovereignty against Japanese colonialism within 62 the territory of a recognized Chinese nation-state. In this moment, people in Manchukuo were propelled to be independent men and women in the quasi-national society of colonial modernity. For Manchukuo’s people, the mission of modernization at a national level is a fight against feudalism and imperialism and the formation of a nation-state based on collective consent. At the personal level, for the individual Manchukuo citizen, modernization is the achievement of personal independence. While personal sovereignty is essential in the construction of national identity, “women as a social category never had a place on the state agenda” and remained a private and invisible identity (L. Liu 1994, 41). As Wendy Brown points out, “liberalism addresses a social ontology imagined to be divided naturally into state, economy (civil society), and family,” but “reinforc[es] subordination of women in the spheres of family and economy” without “democratizing the family, childrearing, and housework” (Brown 1995, 138, 142). Because the woman is naturalized in the domestic domain, and her identity is split from the public domain, the female Chinese writer and activist, Qiu Jin Ȓ ǯ (1875-1907), was forced to abandon her identity as a woman and cross-dressed to access the public domain in the 1910s (L. Liu 1994, 42-43). Compared with Qiu Jin, the family and women constructed in Manchukuo’s literature of the 1930s and 1940s constitute a noteworthy difference and contrast. The destruction of the inter-generational patriarchal family, the formation of the nuclear family, and the imagining of working women with the mobility to move between domestic and public spheres, extraordinarily characterize and define Manchukuo’s modernity. In the pages that follow, I will consider one male author, Liang Shanding, and two female authors, Mei Niang and Eileen Chang, in order to show how the relation between the literary constructions of the family and the 63 (literary and literal) construction of the nation resist and revise Manchukuo official discourse of proper womanhood. The comparison shall throw new light, I hope, on the particular gendering of Manchukuo’s modernity, its family formation, and the progressive dimensions of each when framed against the background of 1930s-1940s Japanese imperialism in Asia. I. The best-known Manchukuo novel, Lüse de gu ȩȺǾン (Green Valley), by Liang Shanding ƣĠ<(1914-1997) serves as an excellent introduction to this period’s literary depiction of the destruction of patriarchal family structure and traditions.14 Depicting the transformation of the Lin clan and the devastation of their village, Langgou, Green Valley demonstrates how Japanese imperial expansion destroyed both the traditional family and the primitive village in Manchuria. In order to circumvent the harsh Japanese censorship in Manchukuo, Green Valley was set up on the eve of Manchurian Incident in 1931. In this manner, the chaos and darkness in the novel was ostensibly not the result of the establishment of the nation in 1932. The novel centers on the decline of Langgou village. The speculation and the expansion of railway forcibly convert the farms in Manchuria into construction sites or factories. The novel depicts local peasants who lose lands become bandits, raping and vandalizing local villages. Acting simultaneously as imperial 14 Green Valley was first serialized in Datong Bao ôÄţ, a local Chinese newspaper in Manchukuo, from 1941-1942. When Ōuchi TakaosOđĒ, an influential Japanese literary scholar and translator in Manchukuo, noticed the first two chapters, he was very interested and translated it into Japanese without Liang’s consent. Ōuchi’s synchronic translation was serialized in Harbin nichinichi shinbun ÐǚǕżżŸȴ(Harbin Daily Newspaper), a Japanese newspaper. The paperback was published in 1943. In 1987, it was revised and reprinted in Shenyang (Liang 1987, 225-228). My close-reading is based on the 1987 version. 64 instruments and also as the instruments of modernity, capitalism and the upcoming railway construction demolish Langgou’s traditional peasantry and its familial values. While Langgou is under siege by capitalism and the bandits, the head of this village, the Lin family, collapses. Being raised up in the city and having received a modern education, the only heir to the Lin family, Xiaobiao, refuses to resume any responsibility for his inherited farmland. Confucian familial order, filial piety, and morality are in decline when the village is also on the wane. At the end of the novel, Manchurian Incident happens, which converts the Lin family, Langgou, and all the land of Manchuria into a Japanese colony (Liang 1987). Green Valley receives elaborate critical attention in Prasenjit Duara’s influential book published in 2003, Sovereignty and Authenticity. Duara reads the novel as his primary example of “native place literature,” and with it he makes his claim for Manchukuo’s authenticity by arguing that the “native place” symbolizes a kind of “authenticity” central to Manchukuo’s sovereignty. For him, the bandits are the “human agents” of the forests, “who live outside of social time but are necessary to justice in the community, to the forces renewing life against those corrupting and destroying it.” So, outlaw is interpreted as the defiant power that does not conform to social order. The bandits’ violence is also justified as a primitive energy that fights against corruption. The poor village folk, in Duara’s perspective, seems not have liberty to desire or choose but passively accept anything that nature brings to them. They “lead a life built around the natural, agricultural rhythms, and this mode of life has a close relationship with that of the primeval forest; they depend on the power and virtue of the forest for justice and renewal” (Duara 2003, 229-230). Because of the intimate relationship between the people 65 and the “native place,” the tenants in Langgou and the bandits in the forest embody Manchuria’s “authenticity,” according to Duara, “an authenticity that emerges from the acceptance of the cyclical time of natural regeneration and is recognizable in simplicity and a capacity for suffering” (232). In the other words, Manchuria’s authenticity is passivity, simplicity, and primitivity. For Duara, the bandits’ violence is authentic because it is outside of any social order. The village folk also represent “authenticity” because of their passivity. What Duara fails to realize is that the pastoral life generated by the so-called “cyclical time of natural regeneration” is already disrupted by actual historical time, including the events of Japanese colonial encroachment. Old Grandma Yu laments that her whole life is suffering from death and hunger caused by bandits and imperialists. “Six persons [of Yu’s family] have died in this house. I will be the seventh,” she tells the family history to her granddaughter, “My first son died when we fled from calamity of Russo-Japanese War. He was not even one years old. My second son died because of the drought. Your father is my third son. My fourth and fifth child all died because of food shortage” (Liang 1987, 141). The “bandits” Duara appreciates, instead of being defenders of justice, destroy Old Grandma Yu and her family. The bandits are part of the “social time” of the local people they raid, and they do not follow Duara’s “agricultural rhythms.” In order to prevent her only granddaughter from being raped by the bandits, Old Grandma Yu advises the young girl to cover her face with ashes to disguise her gender, beauty, and identity. The old woman’s “capacity for suffering” does not bring about her natural revival. Like her late husband, she will die in sorrow. Japanese colonization of Manchuria aggravates the tenant farmers’ situation as well as destroying the land-owning Lin family. The railway construction seizes and destroys their 66 farmlands. Without land, peasants like Big Bear Paw must join the bandits in the forests for survival, bullying even more vulnerable people or robbing from what remains of the landlords’ property. Thus, neither the folks in the village nor the bandits in the forest can represent or embody the “human agent” of natural power enabled by the “native place.” Clearly, Langgou is not the authentic “native place” Duara makes it out to be but rather is a liminal space held in tension between capitalist modernity and agricultural tradition. While the expansion of railway aborts the tenant farmers’ “cyclical time” of agricultural reproduction, the patriarchal family structure and tradition in Langgou also dissolve when the last Lin heir aspires to join with the tide of modernization and embrace its elimination of class inequality. Having had a modern education in the city, Xiaobiao is fascinated with the conceptions of free love, equality and revolution; thus, the landlord and tenant relationship, as well as the Confucian ideology, become the enemy institutions that he fights against. In his efforts to modernize himself and his society, Xiaobiao’s idealistic decision of giving up his property and dividing it among his tenants formally terminates the legacy of the Lin family and all that its traditions represent. The novel Green Valley introduces a complexity of historical forces in order to show how the forces have not only contaminated but also devastated the “authenticity,” innocence, as well as the feudalism, of the “native place.” If “authenticity” means a pure, simplistic, and timeless past in Duara’s perspective (43), the crumbling “authenticity” in Green Valley can only reflect the challenge of Manchukuo’s claim to its sovereignty. Duara’s argument depends on a construction of Langgou outside a linear history of capitalism and western modernity. For him, “this [Langgou’s] time of the locality is directly opposed to the linear time of capitalist, urban modernity, and the novel tracks the 67 corrosive and destructive power of the latter upon both the valley and the forest” (Duara 2004, 232). As I have shown, the novel is a story about capitalist and colonial occupation of Langgou, its land, and its people. As early as the Russo-Japanese War (1905), the village has already become the victim of competing imperial powers. It is contradictory to talk of Langgou’s authenticity while bracketing and setting aside relevant historical events. Duara’s reading contradicts his own interpretation of Manchurian “hybridity.” In the “interpretive history” section of Sovereignty and Authenticity, Duara argues that Manchuria was made up of “the Mongol nomads of the west, the hunters and gatherers of the mountains and forests, the agricultural communities of Chinese to the south, and rice- farming Koreans to the east,” and was “sustained [by] a hybrid culture” (43). If there is anything authentic to Manchuria in line with his argument above, it should be its historical “hybridity” and “multiculturalism.” In this sense, Manchuria and the later Manchukuo’s authenticity is the historical coexistence of diverse ethnic groups and cultures rather than the primitive purity that Duara romanticized. In Duara’s reading of Green Valley, Langgou has begun to embody a Japanese imperialist stereotype that regards Manchukuo as an unspoiled, poetic, and rural space, waiting for civilization to arrive. A colonizer intends to render the colonized as perpetual “others,” and in doing so, the colonizer can legitimize its action of conquest and exploitation as liberation. This narrative strategy is also seen in other colonial literature. For instance, when Seamus Deane talks about Irish literature and culture, he points out, “[i]t was only when the Celt was seen by the English as a necessary supplement to their national character that the Irish were able to extend the idea of supplementarity to that of 68 radical difference” (Deane 1990, 13).15 Green Valley serves as a pointed counter- argument against the stereotype of native place. We would greatly benefit if we interpret the novel as a critical allegory about Manchukuo’s pre-history and its tragic destiny. The decline of the patriarchal land-owning family, the struggling tenant farmers, and the surrounding bandits holding on to land and forest slated for colonial development, all foretell the coming conquest of Japanese imperialism, bent on subjugating Manchukuo through its railroad company or its military. As such, Green Valley implies the loss of insular purity represented by the peasantry. Above all, it condemns the colonial control of Japanese Empire that was dated in the move to an era prior to the founding of Manchukuo but is in reality a contemporary reference to its current political governance. At a more local level, the decline of the Lin family epitomizes the loss of local autonomy at the founding moment of Manchukuo’s political sovereignty. II. While the decline of a patriarchal family is one trope that Manchukuo literature used to depict the consequence of Japanese imperial expansion, a nuclear family of equality embodies people’s aspiration for sovereignty. The institution of family is important in the claim of nationality and sovereignty, both modernizing nations and 15 The image of native place is also a recurring motif in Manchukuo’s mass media, school textbook, literature and cinema. Manchukuo, including its vast land, forests and exotic culture is created as virgin land that is waiting to be conquered and assimilation. The songs that the elementary school students have to learn describe Manchukuo as “Mongolian wind constantly blows over the place where apricot flowers blooming. Spring is vibrating in the blue sky. Manchurian land is bathing in the sunshine” (ö]‹ !`é  ±!ò!b,, ė$äª"¢+ L"Ć*ʍso -R)õ Q*The first article in the supplemented reading book for elementary school also highlights the “spacious” and “beautiful sky” of Manchukuo (Nomura 1991, 14-17). 69 colonial powers are invested in the reform of the family. As Partha Chatterjee notes, in colonial Indian society, material and spiritual domains govern social institutions and practices. The spiritual domain refers to the inner and essential marks of cultural identity, which are fundamental to anticolonial nationalism. This is a domain of the sovereignty existing prior to colonialism that remains within colonial society in its political battle against imperial power. The idea of the family belongs to this inner domain of national culture and sovereignty (Chatterjee 1993, 6). In Manchukuo, whose colonial condition is similar to colonial India, the government (which is largely controlled by the Japanese Empire) had an interest in transforming the inner domain of Manchuria in support of Japan’s imperial project. In contrast, local elites struggled to defend the spiritual domain by providing their own translation of the new family and the new woman for the new modern nation-state. As soon as Manchukuo was established, the government began to construct a new image of woman, expecting the new woman to embody “the Way” of Manchukuo’s civilization. Presenjit Duara defines the official conception of the woman’s image in Manchukuo as “tradition within modernity” (2003, 131). Duara’s “tradition within modernity” is not dissimilar from the Japanese “good wife and wise mother” ideology in the way in which this construction serves the aim of imperial expansion. “Good wife and wise mother,” Xianqi liangmu ɼÿȹƳ, is originally a pre-modern Chinese societal morality derived from Confucianism and introduced into Japan long ago. Japan promoted this female image to fight against Western ideology and mobilize men and women both in Japan and in Manchuria for the expansion of the empire. 70 The official image of women served a similar role in the emerging nation of Manchukuo. Pu Yi, the last emperor of China turned the first head of Manchukuo, declared in his “Proclamation of the Chief Executive,” “Morality and benevolence are the principles on which our country is founded, and with the removal of racial discrimination and international strifle it will inevitably become a paradise of the Kingly Way. I hope that all my people will endeavor to achieve this.” Here, Pu Yi exhorts his people to realize “Kingly Way” (Ōdō Rakudō Òċºm), a Japanese propaganda phrase that means “a paradise of benevolent government” (Aisin-Gioro 1965, 255). For the sake of constructing this “benevolent government,” Manchukuo’s policies and official ideologies also promoted the establishment of women’s organizations all over the nation. By 1934, Fengtian province had 33 women’s organizations (J. Liu 2010, 53). State-funded media interpreted the image of the new woman as a liberated Confucian woman: “Now, Manchukuo of ōdō (benevolent government) has come, so has the true liberation of women. What this official ‘women’s liberation’ means is the cultivation of the self and regulation of the family. Once this is accomplished, both men and women will have reached the ‘Paradise of benevolent government’” (Shengjing Daily, 1937).16 As indicated by this citation, “women’s liberation” is not a goal in itself but rather an adjunct to the desire of creating a viable citizenry for men. Because educated and healthy women can better manage the household and relieve men’s burdens, men can then make full use of their talents and abilities in the public arena. In light of this, the state’s gender construction is but a revised modern patriarchy of both Japanese and Chinese origins. My Translation. The original Chinese text is “Ǧå‘ǥʘ’ǾǐDžàʰIT ČKýù ɥŭǾſ„,Şɺýùɥŭ8Ƅ~Šʅ8˕ŠĐ8だùʞåǥʘǾQÞʠ” (Shengjing Shibao, 1937) 71 Manchukuo writers’ response to the state’s promotion of acceptable family formations and gender roles are complex. They range from stories about the historical decline of patriarchal family to the emergence of “the working woman.” In traditional Chinese political culture, family is linked to state order. “The state was the family writ large. Well-governed families meant a well-governed state, and vice versa” (Rowe 1998, 381). Thus, the immoral or absent patriarch and the chaotic family in Manchukuo literature generally symbolize either Manchukuo’s submission to Japan or its political illegitimacy. In Xu Yuan îÞ (Ruined Garden) (1943), an incomplete novel by Wu Ying Èǭ (1915-1961), the father is not capable of managing the household nor can he find a job. All family property, its farmland, real estate, and luxury furniture are sold for survival. The ruin of the once-splendid garden foreshadows the family’s destiny of destruction (Wu Ying 1987). In Mei Niang’s Bang ɖ (Clam), the father figure is an irresponsible opium addict. His daughter becomes the only hope of a hopeless family. As an educated young woman, she dares to fight against gender inequality to win her independence. She also realizes that only economic independence will make it possible for her to claim her personal sovereignty (Mei Niang 1997). Wu Ying and Mei Niang’s treatment of family change and gender transformation resonate yet depart from similar considerations by May Fourth intellectuals and writers. As part of the May Fourth “New Literary Movement” (Xinwenxue yundong ŸŴĈʌ ¤, May Fourth writers believe that the construction of a modern woman can facilitate China’s modernization. Scholars and writers encourage women to leave the feudal family to seek self-independence (Tsu 2005, 141). Contemplating the materialization of woman’s independence in Ibsen, Lu Xun ˌʉ (1881-1936) asks “What should Nora do 72 after she leaves home?” The implicit answer to Lu Xun’s rhetorical question is that women must find a space of economic self-sufficiency. For Lu Xun, economic power is very important in modern society. “First, a family should achieve gender equality; second, man and woman should enjoy equal rights in the society” (Lu Xun 2013, 5:238).17 In China, an alternative answer to Lu Xun’s question can be found in Eclipse Trilogy (“ネ”=ʝƉ) by Mao Dun Ƀは (1896-1981) which proposes the communist revolution as a replacement home for Chinese woman, but which also implies the intellectual’s contradiction between nationalism and individualism (Mao Dun 2008). Xiao Hong Ɋȟ (1911-1942) takes another position. Her novel The Field of Life and Death (Shengsi chang そƱç) reveals that national revolution and nationalism are merely another form of patriarchy that subordinates Chinese women (Xiao Hong 1935). In 1942, a year after the publication of Mei Niang’s “Zhu’ru FJ” (Dwarf), Ding Ling <ǧ (1904-1986) criticized the patriarchal oppression of woman in her famous essay, “Sanba jie you gan” =†ȼƎŔ (Reflection on March 8th ). The problem of gender equality and female liberation cannot be resolved even in Yan’an, the holy land of Chinese communist revolution (Ding Ling 1989). Eileen Chang’s colonial romance set in Shanghai and Hong Kong shows that the simple transplantation of the western concept of modern life doesn’t work in colonial China. Even women who have education and lead a cosmopolitan life are still subject to patriarchal power. 17 My translation. 73 Against these diverse constructions of modern Chinese womanhood, Manchukuo literature’s creation of the working women appears especially refreshing. If the corrupted family and the emasculated patriarch embody Manchukuo’s coloniality, the image of the independent young woman represents Manchukuo’s distinctive modernity. In general, a feudal family’s oppression is dissolved in the fiction by the imagination of a nuclear family, which provides the modern woman a possible space to claim her independence. The archetypal plot of extended family’s decline and the young woman’s rise is discernable. In Mei Niang’s incomplete novel, Xie ɘ (Crab), the father who brought wealth and fame to the family by collaborating with Russia in WWI dies and the family legacy is shattered. While Russia’s power in Manchuria declines, Japan becomes the new colonizer. The father’s two brother are an opium addict and philander, respectively. Though thinking of collaborating with the Japanese, they are unable to bring prosperity to the family. The young girl, Ling, understands that collaboration with the Japanese is another form of submission to patriarchy and her uncles’ dependence on the Japanese cannot revive the family. She plots her escape from the family in order to find a job. Although the novel does not have an ending, Ling’s lot as a working woman in the new Manchukuo seems inevitable (Mei Niang 1997, 111-193). Writers such as Wu Ying and Mei Niang focus on gender as indexical to the condition of modernity and coloniality. The patriarchal oppression that the woman wants escape is analogous to colonial domination. To better understand the problem of gender, sovereignty, and coloniality in Manchukuo, we now turn to Mei Niang’s story, “Zhuru” y‚ (Dwarf). “Dwarf” was first published in 1943. This is a first-person narration written in the voice of a young married woman. In this story, “I” lives at a quadrangle house in a city of 74 Manchukuo. Generally speaking, people in the lower classes tended to reside in ordinary quadrangle housing. What makes the narrator’s identity unique among her neighbors is the fact that she is a schoolteacher with a college degree. Although this courtyard is small, it has its own ecology: the landlady occupies the top of the social hierarchy, the landlord, his apprentices, and the renters have to obey the landlady, but the female protagonist, the schoolteacher, is the exception to this chain of authority. Because of her good education and white-collar occupation, everybody in the courtyard respects her, including the landlady. There is a teenage boy in the quadrangle who is bullied and abused by the landlady, because he is a developmentally disabled “dwarf” as well as the illegitimate son of the landlord. The young female narrator sympathizes with the boy’s suffering. Tradition dictates that a woman should not touch a man if there is no familial relation between them. The “I” narrator, however, shows kindness to the boy by expressing her care for him, wiping the blood from his forehead with her fingers and providing food for him. Unfortunately, the boy can hardly comprehend her kind gestures because of his disability. When her husband returns from a business trip, the narrator shares with him her experiences with the developmentally disabled boy. Being a loving person, he decides to help his wife rescue this boy from abuse and send him to a child welfare service. However, before they are able to realize their rescue plan, the poor boy dies from a mad dog’s attack (Mei Niang 1997, 193-210). When transmuted into the idea of the family, modernity expresses itself as gender independence, equality, and domestic intimacy. The “I” narrator in “Dwarf” symbolizes the ideal of women’s independence. First of all, she is not a dependent of her family or society. Her departure from her birth family and the absence of an extended family has 75 meant that the “I” narrator is free from patriarchal rule. In her nuclear family, she is equal to her husband, contributing to both household income and chores. When he is away for business, she manages the household at home without feeling lonely. This demonstration of emotional independence is in sharp contrast to the image of woman both in classic novel like Dream in the Red Chamber (Honglou meng¹¸) (Cao 1972) and the May Fourth novel like The Diary of Sophie (Shafei nüshi de riji ɆɈùïǾżɬ) (Ding Ling 1989). In the public sphere, she is a schoolteacher, and as such she educates the next generation for the nation. Her sympathy for others and her endeavor to “save the children” partake the formation of a collective consciousness from which a national identity could emerge and echoes Lu Xun’s famous call in “The Madman’s Diary” (Lu Xun 2013). Mei Niang’s figuration of the “I” narrator couples ideal womanhood with the modernity of the Manchukuo state. The image of this female narrator represents and reflects an image of an ideal modern citizen. As a woman, the “I” makes significant contribution to both her family and society, no less than a man. The husband of the “I” is not a dominant power, either. The couple’s intimacy reflects the husband’s understanding of his wife and his respect for her intelligence and strength. When the young wife describes the disabled boy as her “lover,” the husband appreciates her humor, simultaneously recognizing her “loving” benevolence and encouraging her assistance of the disabled boy. Such narration of gender equality, gender independence, and domestic intimacy can hardly be found in any other stories in China from that time period. This companionate couple and the nuclear family serve as Mei Niang’s literary personification of Manchukuo’s modernity and sovereignty. If patriarchal parents are tantamount to colonial power, their absence in Mei Niang’s story suggests a nuclear family’s 76 independence, both economically and ideologically. By situating her story specifically in Manchukuo, Mei Niang also makes a bold statement about the possibility of a colonial modernity, which is anti-colonial and anti-masculinist. While modern Chinese literature in the early twentieth century did provide examples of conjugal union based on free love and domestic intimacy, hardly any writer imagined gender independence and equality in the way Mei Niang accomplished. Married women were usually limited in the domestic space, rearing children or doing housework; in addition, society did not provide equal opportunity for professional women. Even Lin Huiyinµši (1904-1955), the most well-known female poet and architect, complained to her American friend that she could only be an assistant to her husband, because the Chinese university did not provide a position that matched her academic training and capability (Shih 2001, 209). In “Dwarf”, the “I” narrator has cultivated a comfortable space both at home and at work. In the quadrangle, she wins respect through her strength and intellect. Even the cruel landlady expresses her respect by addressing her as “female teacher” (nü’xianshenguKÔ). Xiansheng, “mister,” is used to address an educated man or an educator in the Chinese tradition. To call a woman as “female teacher” shows not just the landlady’s admiration of her but is also a direct acknowledgement of the “I” narrator’s achievement of gender equality. Elsewhere, the narrator is also valued for being a “female college graduate” (nü daxuesheng usÔ) (Mei Niang 1997, 194-200). She is appealing in the landlady’s eyes because of her education and intelligence rather than her physical beauty. In the fictional home for the Chinese Nora, women feel comfortable and able. The fact that such a home, offering the possibility of gender equality, is located in Manchukuo highlights Mei Niang’s distinctive 77 imagination of Manchukuo modernity as significantly constituted by the idea of gender equality. This imagined space is ideal but not perfect in “Dwarf.” On one hand, the absence of the narrator’s extended family indicates a lack of patriarchal control. The young couple must create their own history. On the other hand, there is no future either, because the nuclear family does not have a child. The only indication of a next generation in the story is the developmentally disabled “dwarf”, who is illegitimate and dies prematurely. The issue of illegitimacy reflects the ambivalence of the colonial society at that time. People who lived in the Japanese occupied area were anxious about their national identity after the establishment of Manchukuo because they did not know which country they belonged to. This was not only Manchurian/Chinese people’s concern, but also a concern of Japanese people in colonial China. Nishimura ShinichirōブƘひ;ʜ, a journalist for Manshū Fujin shinbun ǍĦĄcŸȴ (Manchurian Woman News) from Dairen ôʒ (hereafter, Dalian, a Japanese leased territory from China) described the city as an illegitimate child, a product of Japan’s “raping” and colonization of China (Okada 2000, 4). Nishimura’s comment reveals the colonial subject’s confusion between its indigenous identity and allegiance to an imperial identity. Manchukuo, though a self-claimed nation- state, has an ambivalent identity as Dalian. Located inside China’s historical geography, Manchukuo is born like an illegitimate child, a product of Japan’s “raping” and colonization of China. Just like the disabled “dwarf” in Mei Niang’s story, who stands for a maimed individual subjectivity, Manchukuo, the newly declared nation-state, is stymied in its effort at political independence because it remains under the military and ideological control of Japanese imperialism. Through the “dwarf” image, Mei Niang 78 articulates her take on the colonial state as well as her anxiety about its future. Content with her status as a high-profile woman writer in Manchukuo, she finds comfort in gender equality, but the Japanese colonization of her homeland worries her. In its declaration of sovereignty, Manchukuo belongs to neither Japan nor to China. This declaration of national independence seems to have no future, just like the “dwarf” character. Mei Niang’s story about mental and physical disability finds fascinating resonance in “Jasmine Tea” by her southern rival in Shanghai, Eileen Chang. Like “Dwarf,” “Jasmine Tea” was also published in 1943. It takes place between a mentally disturbed college boy and a modern young girl in Hong Kong, and reveals a different kind of colonial modernity at work. The 1940s saw the expression of “nan Ling bei Mei” °ǧ¨ Ƥ in which “Ling” referred to Eileen Chang (1920-1995) in Shanghai, South China while “Mei” indicated Mei Niang of Manchukuo in the North. People believed that Eileen Chang and Mei Niang were the two most influential writers, who were popular among Chinese readers and well known in Japanese colonies in China. These two legendary women writers never had a chance to meet in person, though they were still regarded as “twin stars.” As revealed in a 1980s essay, Mei Niang recalled her brief glimpse of Eileen Chang in 1940s.18 Remembering the crowd of men hanging around Eileen Chang, Mei Niang wrote that “[her fragile beauty] is beloved by Chinese men” (Mei Niang 1997, 600). This comment is critical because Mei Niang did not approve the 18 Doubts about the authenticity of “Nan Ling Bei Mei” exist in Chinese academia. Some scholars believed that it was merely the advertisement strategy of the bookstores in 1940s. More details see Zhang Quan’s “Goujian lunxianqu jiyi de fangfa—yi Mei Niang weili” Ɯĸƿʴ©ɬŇǾŹ、 jƤ…Kx(On Mei Niang, How to Construct the memory of the Occupied Area) (Zhang 2013, 65-75). 79 kind of fragile feminine beauty embodied by Chang. She seems to suggest that men in China tend to prefer delicate feminine women, whereas men in Manchukuo do not. Mei Niang’s comment conveys the underhanded suggestion that Eileen Chang became a famous Chinese writer not because of her writing but because of her physical beauty, whereas Mei Niang had to work hard to earn acclaim. To define a woman by work is mark of the new modern woman. In posing herself against Chang, and thus Manchukuo’s superiority over Shanghai, Mei Niang is asserting Manchukuo’s cultural sovereignty. Such cultural sovereignty is best evidenced in the representation of women characters and gender relations. Eileen Chang’s “Jasmine Tea” serves as a strong example, especially when paired against Mei Niang’s “Dwarf”. The storyline of “Jasmine Tea” focuses on a reserved boy by the name of Nie Chuanqing, who relocated to Hong Kong with his wealthy family upon the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the 1940s. Like the developmentally disabled dwarf boy in Mei Niang’s “Dwarf,” Chuanqing is also physically and emotionally abused by his chauvinist father at home. A girl in his class, Yan Danzhu, wants to help him assimilate into local social life. When Chuanqing learns that her father is the respected professor Yan Ziye in his college, and is his deceased mother’s first lover, he cannot help but project his distorted desire onto Yan Danzhu. Chuanqing envies Danzhu’s happiness. In contrast to his decadent feudal family, Danzhu has a well-educated father, a loving family, and many friends. Chuanqing, on the other hand, believes that his misery is the continuation of his mother’s tragic love. If his mother successfully ran away with Yan Danzhu’s father, she would not have died of depression and Chuanqing himself would have become a mentally and physically healthy man in a loving bourgeois family. A 80 fantasy gradually forms in his mind, either he is to fall in love with Danzhu and enjoy her father’s love as well, or he is going to kill Danzhu and replace her for her father’s love. Chuanqing’s bad performance in class invites the anger of Professor Yan, who humiliates him in front of the whole class with the same language that his biological father uses at home. This disaster pushes Chuanqing to confront reality: Ziye is not an embodiment of the ideal father but The Father, who is patriarchal, dominant, and oppressive. The disillusion of the fantasy leads Chuanqing to beat Danzhu. The story concludes with his endless anxiety and self-hatred. “Jasmine Tea” shares several similarities with “Dwarf”. Both stories take place in Japanese colonies in China, and both star a strong and healthy female sympathizing with an emasculated male. The good will of the women protagonists in both stories is wasted on the weak male characters. Not surprisingly, scholarship on Eileen Chang’s “Jasmine Tea” often focuses on Chuanqing’s abnormal psychology. C.T Hsia argues that his quest for “self-identity,” “his impotent rage against home and father,” and “his envy and detestation of bourgeois happiness” make Chuanqing a typical protagonist of modern western fiction, such as Stephen Daedalus (Hsia 1999, 412-13). In Edward Gunn’s analysis, Eileen Chang’s delicate description of her character’s premature aging, hearing impairment, and morbid mood become signs of the protagonist’s entrapment within feudal family and colonial society (Gunn 1980, 227-29). The male character constitutes perhaps the most extraordinary example of modern malaise in Chinese literary history. Because of their fascination with Chuanqing, both Hsia and Gunn neglect the female protagonist, Yan Danzhu, and her father, Yan Ziye. For these critics, Danzhu seems like a minor character in the story, whose “wholesome” life and “naïve” personality serve “only 81 to sound the depths of his [Chuanqing’s] sickness” (Gunn 1980, 227). This critical negligence not only fails to do justice to the female character but also to her father in this story. Danzhu’s health and Ziye’s intellectual authority are not a mere contrast to Chuanqing’s sickness. By situating Chuanqing with Danzhu and Ziye, Eileen Chang the author has constructed a far more intriguing picture of colonial modernity. Between the seemingly modern Danzhu and the seemingly liberal Ziye, the obviously abnormal Chuanqing has become a failed subject of modernity. Compared with the “I” narrator in Mei Niang’s “Dwarf,” a modern working woman who is independent and capable, Ziye’s veiled chauvinism and Danzhu’s dependence on her family demonstrate that they actually are not qualified to be Chuanqing’s model of modernity. The unsuccessful modernization of China in both colonial Shanghai and colonial Hong Kong jeopardizes their modernization. This unsuccessful modernization is displayed in the contrast between Chuanqing’s family and Danzhu’s family. Chuanqing’s family exhibits a residual feudal tradition while Danzhu’s family seems to represent western modernity, a conjugal family with a daughter. This contrast in the two families represents a fragmentation of Hong Kong within Chinese culture, and such fragmentation, according to Shu-mei Shih, is a significant feature of semicoloniality. Shih defines the multiple, incomplete and fragmentary nature of China’s colonial structure as “semicolonialism” (Shih 2001, 34). “Jasmine Tea” could be read as a depiction of an incomplete modernity, in which colonial cultures both British and Japanese intrude upon indigenous culture in Hong Kong. Though living in the apparent cosmopolitan space-time of Hong Kong, Chuanqing’s family seems frozen in the feudal world. Their domestic space is packed 82 with old Chinese furniture, such as the dusty embroidered Chinese screens and a marble table. Though the home is a modern style house, the tennis court is used for airing opium on a sunny day. Similarly, while the father seems like a “modern” father in other people’s eyes, who supports his son’s college education, he is completely a feudal parent, constantly abusing and humiliating his son at home. Chuanqing’s longing for warmth at home is forever frustrated. In the contrast, Danzhu’s family represents modernity in Chuanqing’s mind. The father is a scholar, and the mother comes from “southern nations” (nanguo °à), a space of congruence with the East and West, a contact zone of cultures. Brought up in an environment of western liberalism, Danzhu embodies free love while Chuanqing cannot. Danzhu is adored by her parents and grows up an athletic and happy young woman. Her healthy body, optimistic mind and her popularity make Chuanqing jealous. Chuanqing and his family seem like fossils of a feudal world whereas Danzhu and her family are immersed in modern life. The contrast between Chuanqing and Danzhu, as well as the juxtaposition of their families exemplifies the fragmentation of Hong Kong’s semicolonial culture. Comparing these two families with the nuclear family in “Dwarf”, the difference in the modernity between Hong Kong and Manchukuo is clear. If Manchukuo’s modernity hovers between a contradiction between sovereignty and coloniality, the fragmentation of Hong Kong culture reveals its semicoloniality. As a professor of Chinese literary history, Yan Ziye could be Eileen Chang’s figure of a successor to the ideal of a May Fourth enlightenment thinker. Responding to imperial invasion in China, he relocated his family to Hong Kong. There, he becomes a self-appointed cultural critic of colonial Hong Kong and a vanguard of Chinese culture in the colony much like his predecessors in May Fourth movement. In contrast to his 83 predecessors in the Enlightenment movement who embrace total westernization, Ziye believes Chinese tradition and culture can sustain Chinese identity, saving its people from colonization. However, the dominant and subordinate relationship between Ziye and the young generation transforms him into a patriarchal dictator and a mirror-image of a Western imperialist. In this sense, both Ziye, the father, and Danzhu, the daughter, can hardly be regarded as fully modernized characters; and this scruple makes Eileen Chang’s fictional creation pale in comparison with Mei Niang’s character. Putting Danzhu side by side with the young woman in “Dwarf,” one can immediately notice which female character has real agency. Without her parents’ love for her at home and men’s affection for her, Danzhu has no means to realize her value. Her identity is constructed by her vanity—Chuanqing’s love for her makes Danzhu satisfied and whole. In spite of her westernized manners, she remains as a dependent traditional woman. Even Chuanqing sees that Danzhu is no different from common Chinese women because she has to marry anyway. Eileen Chang shows that family and marriage determine women characters’ life. Danzhu is not independent and the society does not provide her with the opportunity to develop. In the final analysis, Eileen Chang makes clear that both Ziye and Danzhu are flawed models of modern subject.19 Eileen Chang’s “Jasmine Tea” and Mei Niang’s “Dwarf” delineate two kinds of colonial modernity. Hong Kong is dominated by Britain and is nostalgic of China but does not have sovereignty of its own. British colonization enforces Hong Kong’s Westernization, in response to this patriarchal imposition the deeply rooted local culture 19 My analysis of Yan Ziye benefits from the discussion with Clay Chou, my cohort. I thank him for his contribution to my project. 84 taps into its traditions but is unable to rid itself of its patriarchal influences. “Jasmine Tea” is Eileen Chang’s critique of Hong Kong’s gender question. Women are still subject to the patriarchal family and are shackled by marriage. Hong Kong society does not provide women with equal opportunity in the space of work but continues to judge them by their sexuality. In contrast, “Dwarf” presents readers with an independent woman’s image, and with it imagines Manchukuo’s modernity in terms of gender equality and the new nuclear family. Women are not subordinated to fathers or husbands but are capable to control their lives and construct a better society. While the disabled “Dwarf” symbolizes Manchukuo’s predicament under Japanese colonization, the sympathy to others connects every individual in the community and facilitates a national identity in Mei Niang’s imaging of the emergent Manchukuo. In my parallel reading of ““Dwarf”” and “Jasmine Tea,” it seems certain that Mei Niang’s narration of colonial modernity in Manchukuo is far more optimistic and idealistic than the realistic Eileen Chang, whose Hong Kong remains mired in the unending history of western colonialism and Chinese feudalism. 85 CHAPTER IV WOMEN’S MOBILITY AND AUTONOMY ON MANCHUKUO’S FILM SCREEN Chapter Three argues that the independent woman and the nuclear family are the locus of imagined national sovereignty in Manchukuo literature. Resonating with the image of the independent woman in literature, the new woman with autonomy and mobility is also central to Manchukuo’s films. This chapter talks about a woman’s mobility in terms of her social advancement, as well as a woman’s freedom to move between the domestic and public spheres. A woman with mobility has the liberty of social, geographical, and physical movement. The core of her autonomy is the strength and will of making decision for herself, and the desire of what she longs for.20 This 20 There is extensive scholarship on women’s autonomy and women’s mobility. In light of Joel Feinberg and Gerald Dworkin, Kathryn Abrams argues that an autonomous individual is a self-directed person, but he/she is also conditioned by mutual dependence, social influence and disparate opportunities (Abrams 1999, 809-812). In terms of women’s autonomy, Abrams agrees with Diana Meyer that autonomy is a kind of competency, or a set of ‘introspective, imaginative, reasoning, and volitional skills’ that makes it possible to act in a self-aware and self-directed fashion” (815). A UN report assesses women’s autonomy in the aspects of women’s control of their own sexuality and reproductive rights, women’s access to job opportunities, women’s supportive organization, and the sense of self-respect and their right to self-determination (Medel- Anonuevo and Bochynek 1995, 67). I understand a woman’s mobility as her desire and aspiration of self-fulfillment and self-achievement. She is motivated by herself and by the society and utilizes resources, such as education and job opportunity, to claim her personal sovereignty. According to Susan Hanson, mobility means the movement from one place to another, including the personal travel for work, recreation, socializing, and shopping (Hanson 2010, 6) So, women’s mobility concerns their economic, social, physical, and private activities in the daily life. At the turn of the century, women’s role and gender identities were reshaped by the undergoing industrialization and urbanization. Women’s mobility played an important role in literatures to negotiate the nature of modernity and women’s place within it (Parkins 2008, 2-3). 86 chapter examines Manchukuo film and investigate how the image of such an independent woman personify Manchukuo’s cultural sovereignty. While the official idea of womanhood in Manchukuo promulgates “good wife wise mother” in accordance with Japanese imperial propaganda, in Manchukuo’s reality, industrialization demanded female labor in the work place rather than wives or mothers in the domestic sphere. Industrialization turned agricultural labor into proletarian labor, and modern transportation made migration and mobility possible. The car, train, and steamship also enabled women to commute between home and work and sent them to the metropolis and out to the world. In Japan’s imperial project, Manchukuo’s industrialization provided material resources for the empire and supported its imperial war in East Asia. At the same time, industrial capitalism facilitated Manchukuo’s own urbanization and precipitated the formation of new notions of womanhood, family, and emotion. The new nation’s establishment needed new citizens for nation building. In Manchukuo film, the image of the new citizen is constructed through the new woman, liberated from male domination and striving for independence and equality through her hard work. From 1937 to 1945, Man’ei produced hundreds of feature films focus on the representation of women in the city.21 The new nation-state is portrayed as a multiethnic “paradise” in terms of gender equality and class equality, one where women can claim her personal sovereignty. Thus, perhaps unwittingly, cinema indicates a direction for an alternative social solidarity despite its overall haunting imperial propaganda. In this chapter, I will examine 21 Although most of Man’ei films are not accessible now, according to Furuichi Masako’s data, existing films and film synopses reveal that majority of Man’ei’s feature films (Furuichi 2011). 87 Manchukuo films with a focus on their depiction of woman’s autonomy and mobility, scrutinizing her relation to Manchukuo’s modernity. Women and women’s image in films are intimately tied to the concept of East Asian modernity. In the early twentieth century, the modern girl, moga in Japanese, was connected to sexual and economy autonomy by the mass media and regarded as a threat to Japan’s patriarchal society. This fear/resentment toward moga, according to Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, has represented Japan’s anxiety about Westernized culture and modernity (Wada-Marciano 2005, 15-24). The working woman in urban space was also seen as “the perfect accompaniment to a metropolitan atmosphere.” As Barbara Sato comments, even the male intellectual saw “women as accessories rather than as individuals in their own right” (Sato 2003, 120). In China, the varying images of the Modern Girl were subject to the coming of capitalism and imperialism. In her essay, “The Failed Modern Girl,” Tze-lan Sang demonstrates that this image in modern Chinese literature and film reflected the shifting definition of the modern and the nation in early twentieth century. Because of her “unconventional sexuality” like that of a Japanese moga, Chinese mass media also portrayed professional woman as the decadent modern girl. More important is that the tragedy of “the failed modern girl” in popular novels revealed the stagnant class mobility in urban China. “[T]he Modern Girl is not just a new gender but also a new class category.” It is “an identity so thoroughly defined by socioeconomic privilege,” and “is impossible to inhabit for those with lesser means” (Sang 2008, 200).22 22 Sang argues that the “failed modern girl” is usually a lower-class urban girl who is seduced by the alluring images of the bourgeois Modern Girl but her attempt of ascending to middle-class status is always in vain. 88 While the autonomous woman who dared to declare her desire and longing was deemed as a decadent woman, and could hardly obtain the opportunity to achieve social mobility in China and Japan, in Japanese occupied Korea, woman’s relation to modernity was also complicated by Japanese imperialism and Korean nationalism. According to Young-Sun Kim, Korean women, although they were emancipated from the Neo- Confucian family and won the opportunity to get an education and to work, were still subordinated to male-centered nationalism and Japanese imperialism. Kim’s discussion of Korean women and Korean colonial modernity points out that Korean colonial modernity was shaped by the conflict between the conspiracy of male-centered nationalism and Japanese colonialism. In order to fight against the cultural politics of colonial assimilation, the nation was constructed as a homogeneous “pure-blooded” family. Korean nationalists appropriated Japanese imperial discourse of “good wife wise mother,” and assigned to women the role of keeping “pure” blood of the nation within the family. In the contestation and negotiation between Korean nationalism and Japanese colonialism, Korean women were still confined to the domestic sphere by capitalistic gendered division of labor (Kim 2009, 205-233). Colonial modernity did not promise Korean women with the opportunity to realize their ambitions. Korean women could not have a space in the society either. Women’s encumbrance and confinement were explicitly depicted in East Asian film. On the screen, the woman in the modern city tends to be either a consumer with no restraint or an object of sexual consumption, as if the modern woman is almost always a helpless victim of modernity. In Japanese film, she can be a successful actress who has to give up her child and family for professional development in Hollywood (No Blood 89 Relation, Nasanu naka.?, directed by Naruse Mikio ÍŽfÖ, 1932), or an “office lady” in a pharmaceutical company who is constantly harassed by her boss (Osaka Elegy, Naniwa hika LJɇŒƭ, directed by Mizoguchi Kenji ǎ¼W, 1936). In the Korean film, Sweet Dream (Mimong 미몽, directed by Yang Ju-nam, 1936) tells a story of a middle-class housewife who destroys her own life and her family. In Shanghai film, neither the educated professional woman in the New Women (Xin nüxing Ÿùō, directed by Cai Chusheng ɐƦそ, 1935) nor the single mother in the Goddess (Shennü ȏù, directed by Wu Yonggang ÈƸ–,1934) can escape from poverty and gender inequality; these characters have to sell their bodies in exchange for their children’s well- being or education, eventually committing suicide (New Women) or being thrown in jail (the Goddess). These films portray women’s autonomy and mobility as stigmas because the patriarchal society is not ready for autonomous women. Women remained as the “other” in East Asia culture. “No positivity, no universal woman independent of man could exist under the terms of the recoded Victorian sex binary” in modern Chinese culture, according to Tani Barlow, because the modern notion of woman, nüxing, only exists as the “other” to Chinese man in order to assert the male self (Barlow 1994, 264-267).23 In Japan, the image of modern girl in “woman’s film” also functions as a Western Other that assists Japanese audience to assert a Japanese national identity (Wada-Marciano 2005, 24). This opposition of self/other and masculine/feminine 23 According to Tani Barlow, “the term nüxing (literary, female sex),” as a discursive sign, was populated in the 1920s. Male intellectuals, rather than woman writers, manipulated the definition of nüxing, using it in literature and feminist writings to fight against the languages of the Confucian canon. It was “one half of the Western, exclusionary, essentialized, male/female binary,” and eventually receded to a “Western” sign that represented an object of consumption (Barlow 1994, 265-268). 90 are coded in the West’s representation of the West/East. In her essay “Seeing Modern China: Toward a Theory of Ethnic Spectatorship,” Rey Chow points out that Julia Kristeva’s apparent favoring of China is actually sexualized, “China is counterposed to the West not only because it is different,” but also because it is “feminine.” Kristeva’s feminization of Chinese culture resonates with Bernardo Bertolucci’s film, The Last Emperor. Rey Chow’s reading of The Last Emperor evinces that, by feminizing the space and the spectacle associated with Pu Yi, the last emperor of Qing Empire and the late monarch of Manchukuo, the film perpetuates China as “a timeless ‘before’”—and forever “the other” to western modernity (Chow 1991, 18). Sang’s “failed modern girl,” the victimized women in modern East Asian films, and the feminization of Chinese culture in contemporary western film all demonstrate an interpretation of women’s relationship to modernity, in which Asian women are subject to capitalism and imperialism instead of feudal patriarchy. As Sang points out, stagnant social and class mobility prevent women of lower class from ascending to the middle class. Sato, Wada-Marciano, and Kim’s studies also reveal that a still patriarchal society does not provide equal opportunity for women to participate in public sphere. This is why professional women in China, Japan and Korea are usually depicted as decadent modern girl by magazines and tabloids or portrayed as victims of industrialization and urbanization on the screen. Rey Chow further reveals that not only Chinese women are otherized to western modernity but also China and Chinese culture are otherized through feminization. Seeing women’s obstacles in the 1930s, the Jiangxi Soviet, a fugitive regime that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established inside the Republic of China at that time, 91 promoted women’s empowerment in order to mobilize peasant women in the war against Kuomintang regime. Their policy helped “the peripheralized sign of woman” to realize its own independence by making women into “a category of political praxis” (Barlow 1994, 270). Using funü/woman to replace nüxing/woman, the state’s political practices designated funü/woman to have a more democratic position “through democratic rhetoric within a renovated statist family.” Even peasant women “achieved revolutionary transformation through social production” (272).24 While CCP’s utopian experiment politicized the reconstitution of the rural family in the purpose of resolving gender inequality, cultural production in Manchukuo, the experimental regime installed by Japan inside of Chinese territory, also aimed at women’s empowerment for the sake of nation building. Manchukuo cinema resonated with its magazines and newspapers, creating an image of autonomous woman who was not abided by feminine norms. She joined the capitalist working force and moved freely between the domestic and the public spheres. She was embraced by the modern city and culture, and gained respect by her ability and competence. Unlike the image of modern girl in China, Japan, and Korea, this image of modern woman is no longer the modern economy’s victim. The independent working woman contradicts the image of “good wife, wise mother” that Japanese imperialism imposed onto Manchukuo. Official gender policy in Manchukuo demanded women’s subordination. The “Women’s Association of 24 For Chinese Marxist, nüxing represented the category of bourgeois women. Female intellectuals, such as Xiang Jingyu tied the term funü/woman to European revolutionary heritage. funü/woman denoted “Euro-Marxist notions of production/reproduction,” “state/society binarism,” and “woman’s universal, international referentiality” (Barlow 1994, 268-269). 92 Manchukuo’s National Defense” ǐDžààʫýùo called for women to “champion women’s virtue. In the domestic sphere, [women] should maintain the virtue of Oriental women for the purpose of facilitating family life. In the public sphere, [women] should be loyal to the emperor and the country for the purpose of supporting national defense” (Shan 2013, 16).25 In contrast to this imperial promotion of “good wife wise mother,” intellectuals in Manchukuo argued that men and women should share equal responsibility in both the domestic and public spheres. Since men and women were equally independent citizens in the society, they appealed for “good husband wise father” to achieve gender equality (Xu 1944, 38). Apparently, this appeal for gender equality was meant to defy official versions of womanhood; nevertheless, the image of independent women was allowed because Japan’s imperial expansion in East Asia relied on Manchukuo’s industrial and agricultural production, thus needing Manchukuo’s female labor. However, seeing the working woman on the screen leaves room for Manchukuo audience to imagine sovereignty, from the personal level to the national level. One might consider this image as too ideal and think, to borrow Siegfried Kracauer’s analysis, that such an image “disguises the sites of misery in romantic garb so as to perpetuate them” (Kracauer 1995, 295). Yet, Manchukuo was not Weimar Germany; the contradiction between its own longing for sovereignty and Japanese colonialism also makes it different from Korea or Taiwan, Japan’s other two colonies. As a newly established nation-state, the people of Manchukuo have to construct their own nation and define their national identity, and this national identity is not necessarily Japanese. In this circumstance, an enunciation of 25 My translation. Original text in Chinese is “ºşýùȬŅ8‹•ƒɶEŹýùßƎ PȬŅ8jƹĐĶそdžPŬÕ8ñ•ƒɶʼnÇいàPʂŽ8juàʫPðũ.” 93 independence and personal sovereignty in Manchukuo’s cinema constantly deviates from the dominant imperial discourse. Usually, in film this enunciation is tied to a woman, who is an autonomous individual with the liberty to choose and desire. Education and job opportunity facilitate the autonomous woman’s movement between the domestic domain and the public domain, as well as social advancement. In this sense, Manchukuo film creates an image of independent woman who is able to claim her personal sovereignty. Independence and sovereignty personified by working women betray the intrinsic paradox of Japanese imperial policy in Manchukuo. On one hand, the imperial power strives to consolidate its domination in the colonial state; on the other hand, the empire is determined to legitimize its colonization of Manchuria through the installation of a nominal nation-state. This contradiction is also reflected in the establishment of Manchukuo’s film industry. As a “national policy company” of Manchukuo, Man’ei encounters a dilemma of allegiance. A “national policy company” in Japan indubitably serves Japanese national policy, which is Japan’s expansion in East Asia. As a “national policy company” of Manchukuo, Man’ei is supposed to champion Manchukuo’s national policy, which includes the construction of Manchukuo’s national identity and the promotion of Manchukuo’s national independence. Funded by Mantetsu, Man’ei is compelled to serve Japan’s imperial interests.26 Meanwhile, Man’ei is also the “motion 26 Funded by the Manchukuo government and Southern Manchurian Railway Corporation (aka. Mantetsu), the Japanese “East Indian Company” in Manchuria, Man’ei is, however, subject more to Japanese imperial power than to colonial Manchukuo. In addition, the appointment of Amakasu as the second president of Man’ei was the decision from the Ministry of General Management (Sōmūcho) and Kwantung Army, which demonstrated the extent that Japanese imperial power influenced in Man’ei (Kobashi 2015,136). 94 pictures corporation of Manchuria,” “to produce films for Manchukuo’s people” (Yamaguchi 2006, 132-133).27 To make film for the Empire of Japan or to make film for Manchukuo? This is a question Man’ei faces. In this chapter, we will see how the contradiction of allegiances unexpectedly allows the image of working women to become the cultural representation of Manchukuo’s “colonial modernity.” If Korea’s “colonial modernity,” like what Young-Sun Kim argues, is a collusion of Japanese imperialist and Korean nationalist, Manchukuo’s “colonial modernity” is the contradiction of sovereignty and coloniality. It is colonial because it is the conceptualizations of gender equality, personal sovereignty, and alternative community that are burgeoning inside Japanese colonial domination, yet, which are not necessary to be the resistance to Japanese imperialism. At Japan’s periphery, Man’ei’s film creates an unprecedented space where independent working women are able to personify Manchukuo’s autonomy. This is what makes Manchukuo cinema unique in East Asia at the time. Thus, one productive way of reading Manchukuo’s unique colonial modernity is to approach women’s roles on Manchukuo screen as working women. Their roles as productive workers at once autonomous and mobile in public space best exemplify Manchukuo’s political claims of national sovereignty. Doubtless, Japanese imperialism is a foundational factor of Manchukuo film production. Doubtless, too, is the subordination of women a general fact of imperial enterprise and colonial projects. However, one cannot ignore the fact that, in many Manchukuo films, women enjoy equal liberty as the male citizen. This imagination of gender equality transcends its historical limitations by challenging the sexual division 27 Translation from original Japanese is mine. 95 of labor perpetuated by liberalism as it relates to industrial capitalism. As Wendy Brown points out perceptively in her critique of the hidden gender bias of liberalism, “[women are] bound over time [not only] to relationships they are born to honor and tend, confined spatially to caretaking and labor in the household, but women are also bound symbolically to the work their bodies are said to signify; in this sense, [they] are without the mark of subjective sovereignty, the capacity to desire or choose” (W. Brown 1995, 154). Interesting, as an historic contrast, while Brown is pessimistic about liberalism’s gendered nature, its denial of women’s right to “desire or choose,” the working women in Manchukuo’s cinematic imagination seem capable of taking the opportunity that modern liberal society provides and claiming their personal sovereignty in the film world. On the screen, a Manchukuo woman can appear as a white-collar worker in a Tokyo office (Journey to the East, J: Azumaasobi ki, C: Dongyou ji E」ɬ, directed by Ōtani ToshiosĄGt, 1939), a teacher who saves orphans (The Song of Soochow, C: Suzhou zhi ye, J: Soshū no yoruø!q, directed by Nomura HiromasaĎ²Æ„, 1941), or an athletic and intelligent woman who educates a Japanese young man (Winter Jasmine, C: Ying chun hua, J: Geishunka ćªò, directed by Sasaki YasushiD¯“, 1942). Freed from the domestic domain, these female characters participate in social production as model citizens. Whereas consumer culture has appropriated female desires through commodification and early Hollywood film solicit women as consumers in a way that opens up a space for expressive agency (Hansen 1991,14), Manchukuo’s cinema defines women as producers, rather than consumers of modernity. Japanese cinema in the 1930s and 1940s was also interested in the image of working women. Influential film directors, such as Ozu Yasujirōę。ĊWʜ Naruse Mikio řǖĩÖだ Mizoguchi 96 Kenji ǎ¼W, andKurosawa Akira ˔ǔƀdraw their attention to the working woman in the city, yet their depictions were contingent to the imperial discourse. Below, I shall scrutinize the cinematic construction of women in Manchukuo’s film, situating the making of new gender roles between the processes of Manchukuo’s nation-building and Japan’s imperial project of the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.” One Man’ei’s film, Winter Jasmine (1942), will be a gauge of my comparison of the image of working women in Naruse Mikio’s No Blood Relation (1932), Mizoguchi Kenji’s Osaka Elegy (1936), and Kurosawa Akira’s The Most Beautiful (Ichiban utsukushiku ;つȬ, 1944). Another Man’ei film, All’s Well that Ends Well (Jie da huan xi ǿôƬÖ, directed by Wang Xinzhai ǥņŵ 1942), will be read side by side with Ozu Yasujirō’s The Only Son (Hitori musuko ;cőą, 1937) and form the foci of my reading of women’s mobility and her relation to the nation’s modernity. I. Colonial relations are often coded as gendered. The colonizer assumes dominant power through masculine control, conquering the colonized through physical force, intellectual superiority or charismatic sexuality. The colonized, usually a biological woman, is compelled to devote herself to the colonizer by sacrificing her body, love, and life. This colonial pattern of gender domination and devotion recurs in the storylines of numerous Japanese “national policy film” during the Sino-Japanese War. Ri Kōran, the transnational film star in Japan, China, Manchukuo, Taiwan and Korea in the wartime, won fame in Japan by her performance of the colonized Chinese girl in the “Continental Trilogy”— Song of White Orchid (directed by Watanabe Kunio Njʈʛだ 1939), Night of China (Shina no yoru ūʚ!ó, directed by Fushimizu Osamu mƷ~ 1940) and 97 Vows in the Desert (Netsusa no chikai ǘȋ!ɧ, directed by Watanabe Kunio 1940)—joint-productions between Tōhō and Man’ei. In Night of China, the Chinese girl at first resisted a Japanese young man’s kindness because of her anti-Japanese sentiment but is eventually tamed after she is slapped in the face by her suitor. Though the colonizer’s blatant abuse was well received by a Japanese audience, the Chinese audience was deeply offended. In fact, this film did not get to screen in the first-class cinema in Jing’ansi ʿĊĖ area in Shanghai, because even the Japanese colonial film censor knew that the Chinese market would not buy such power dynamics between men and women, Japan and China (Yamaguichi and Fujiwara 1988, 26). A mere two years after Night of China, however, the joint-production between Shochiku and Man’ei, Winter Jasmine, was released to the public in Manchukuo and Japan. In this Shochiku style shoshimin eiga (middle class film) about ordinary people’s family and professional life in Manchukuo, the gender-power relation is totally reversed. Winter Jasmine is unique in this regard because it draws a contrast between a Manchurian family and a Japanese family, as well as traces the gender dynamics between a Manchurian woman and a Japanese man. The same Ri Kōran plays the Manchurian girl, Bai Li. Submissive in the “continental trilogy,” Ri Kōran’s Bai Li in Winter Jasmine is strikingly superior to the Japanese young man, Murakawa, in every aspect. As an indigenous Fengtian girl, Bai Li assumes the role of a pedagogue. She cultivates, enlightens, and attracts the man from the cosmopolitan center of Tokyo, but eventually turns down his love. In terms of film plot, the gendered colonial relationship central to “national policy film” is radically revised. Also implicit in this narrative revision is the geopolitical relationship of Manchukuo and Japan. Unlike previous productions of 98 Man’ei that eulogize Japanese colonization, Winter Jasmine highlights Manchukuo’s sovereignty by depicting Manchurian woman’s independence and mobility. The film production company’s conflicting allegiances to the imperial Japanese government, the colonial government of Manchukuo, and the occupying Japanese military (Kwantung Army), could explain in part Winter Jasmine’s distinctive representation of gender relation and colonial relations. Although some Chinese scholarship reads the film as colonial romance (Pang and Wang 2010), and others turn new attention to its urban geography (Li 2010, 117-124; Zhang 2010, 140-144), the personal sovereignty of working women in Winter Jasmine and its metaphoric significance for Manchukuo’s colonial modernity remain understudied. What I try to argue with my close reading of this film is the following: Winter Jasmine’s cinematic arrangements have made the film an unwitting story of Manchurian modernity and gender equality, undercutting the directorial intention of promoting the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” and Japanese immigration to Manchukuo. Winter Jasmine focuses on a playful young man’s settlement in Manchukuo. Murakawa, the male protagonist of the film, is a graduate of the most prestigious school in the metropolitan state, Tokyo University. He comes to Fengtian as an engineer working at his uncle’s company in Manchukuo. Like every settler, Murakawa encounters cultural shocks and linguistic problems in a far-flung place, but with the help of a kind and beautiful local woman, a staff member in Murakawa’s office, Bai Li, he soon gets used to the place of his transplantation and becomes a hard-working and frugal man like the local Manchukuo people. Murakawa is attracted to Bai Li, and ignores his cousin Yae’s romantic interest. The triangular relationship resolves by aborting the marriage 99 plot: both Bai Li and Yae turn down Murakawa romantically, resisting the cliché of colonial romance. At the end, Bai Li leaves for Beijing and Yae leaves for Tokyo for career development. Their aspirations of independence inspire Murakawa to stay at Fengtian and work for the development of Manchukuo nation. The interethnic romance and reversed gender roles constitute the two major narrative threads of Winter Jasmine, and Bai Li’s role as a Manchukuo’s working woman is essential to both. As we recall, the film begins with Bai Li playing hockey on the skating rink in the factory. Situating the female protagonist simultaneously in work and recreational locations, Winter Jasmine forcefully constructs the image of a working woman with mobility; she has access to different social spheres. Bai Li is a respectful coworker in her company, a skillful hockey player, and an insightful local woman who feels comfortable in different areas of the city. Her autonomy and mobility enabled by financial and emotional independence allow Bai Li, the working woman, to be embraced by Manchukuo’s modern city. Bai Li’s image casts a huge contrast to its contemporary working woman in Japanese film. For example, Naruse Mikio’s “woman’s film” in the 1930s exemplify the emergence of the modern woman and how she eventually capitulated to capitalist economy and Japan’s rising imperialism. On the contrary to Bai Li, Naruse’s working women are usually encumbered by gendered division of labor. His visual representation of working women’s split identities, between an individual self and a mother/a daughter/a sister, is provoking and intriguing. Such women’s encumbrance and conundrum are also seen in Mizoguchi Kenji, and Kurosawa Akira’s film at the same time. So, it is very necessary for us to compare the image of working woman in Japanese cinema and Manchukuo cinema, and then we can understand how Bai Li’s independence 100 embodies Manchukuo’s longing for independence. Before we get into detail of Winter Jasmine, let us look at the image of working women’s images in Japanese cinema during the 1930s-1940s to get comparative scope for our examination of working women on Manchukuo’s film screen. In Naruse’s No Blood Relation, the professionally success modern woman is stripped off her rights as a mother in the still patriarchal society. When Tamae, the female protagonist, comes back from the U.S as a famous film actress, her daughter has estranged from her. Compared with Bai Li’s mobility imagined in Manchukuo society, Tamae’s tragedy articulates a crucial problem for working women in the 1930s’ Japan, a woman can only choose either her career or the family, but not both. Naruse’s cinematography further reveals that, despite financial and sexual autonomy that a moga (modern girl) seems to obtain, she is still confined to the patriarchal society like a feudal housewife. Throughout No Blood Relation, Tamae is usually surrounded by men and western commodities, looking like being trapped in the patriarchal society. Previous scholarship of Naruse’s silent film is attracted by his innovative uses of fast-paced editing and dynamic camera movement to convey emotional intensity (Russell 2008, 56-58); nevertheless, I am impressed by Naruse’s signature “brusque shot-change,” and “ample movements of the foreground elements,” which, in No Blood Relation, stylistically visualizes Tamae’s confinement (Burch 1979, 190). When Tamae first appears at the film beginning, a disproportionate shot of a man with a camera followed by a shot of two disproportionate cameras abruptly announce the change of scene (Fig.3. 1, P1. I and P1. 2). It adds a touch of anxiety and uncertainty to Tamae’s homecoming. Then, a male photographer’s moving into close-up intrudes the 101 frame as if violence is going to happen (P1. 3). No real violence happens in the following shot, except a man’s shoulder and body aggressively obstructs Tamae’s appearance (P1. 4). Naruse’s unique active foreground movement in the next image visualizes the oppression of women in Japan’s patriarchal society. While both the foreground and the background are occupied by three men’s overwhelming presence, Tamae’s movement is limited to a small portion of the frame (P1. 5). Similar representation of woman’s oppression is seen in the scene of Tamae’s hotel room. The defocused windowpane in the foreground bars her from the outside world. Tamae behind the window looks like a helpless prisoner in a jail, and her greedy brother in the background gazes at her like a guard (P1. 6). The workingwoman’s frustration is so explicitly represented by Naruse’s cinematography. While capitalist economy empowers women, women are still subordinated to patriarchal power. I 2 3 4 102 5 6 Fig.3.1. Naruse Mikio, No Blood Relation The stereotypical tragedy of modern Japanese women in the capitalist economy is also seen in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Osaka Elegy. Ayako, a young woman who works as a telephone operator at a pharmaceutical company in Osaka, is forced into becoming her boss’s mistress. In the working place, the working woman, Ayako, is sexually objectified, and constantly harassed by her boss and other male superiors. The first shot of Ayako at the workplace frames her in the operator’s room. Sealed by glasses, Ayako in a kimono looks like a beautiful flower trapped in a cage (Fig.3. 2 P1. I). The potted flowers on her desk perfectly fit with her identity as decoration in the male-dominant space. A subsequent close-up of Ayako focuses on her beautiful profile and also shows all the male co-workers behind the glass window as the background. While highlighting Ayako’s sexuality on the one hand, the composition of this shot also marginalizes Ayako by placing her profile at the far left of the frame (P1. 2). In contrast to the oppressed Tamae and Ayako, the opening sequence of Winter Jasmine foregrounds Bai Li’s autonomy and competence in the skating rink. In her first appearance, Bai Li’s skillful skating is centered in the frame. A long shot portrays Bai Li’s virtuosity on the ice, highlighting her identity as a good hockey player (Fig. 3. 3, P1. I). In the next shot of a conversation between Bai Li and a male colleague, we hear about her ability (P1. 2). Unlike Ayako who is in a gender-segregated space, Bai Li sits side by 103 side with a male colleague. The image thus represents gender equality in Manchukuo. Comparing Naruse’s Tamae, Mizoguchi’s Ayako, and Sasaki’s Bai Li, we can see clearly the different rendition of working women in Japanese and Manchukuo films. While working women in Japanese are still subject to male supremacy and is judged by her sexuality, Manchukuo’s working women seem to have independence and respect. I 2 Fig.3. 2. Mizoguchi Kenji, Osaka Elegy I 2 Fig. 3. 3. Sasaki Yasushi, Winter Jasmine In sports, movement is not related to work demands; rather, it enhances and preserves the body. What is revolutionary about Winter Jasmine is that Bai Li and Yae’s sportswomen’s bodies represent their liberty and ability to control over their own bodies, which announce their personal sovereignty. The film portrays women’s body not in terms of sellable sexuality but in its capacity and will for work and leisure. Bai Li and Yae’s engagement in the hockey game is especially striking if compared with the “youth sports film” in 1930s Japan, which uses the male body to “disseminate a performance of the physical body as the national body that corresponds to the state’s attempts to instruct 104 people in the ways of citizenship” (Wada-Marciano 2008, 65). Whereas Japanese films of the time showed that men could move and travel, Winter Jasmine represents Bai Li and Yae as being good at hockey. Furthermore, its male protagonist, Murakawa, has a heavy and un-athletic body and he cannot play. With their agility and strength, Bai Li and Yae’s sportswomen’s body and mobility begin to stand for Manchukuo’s modernity. In addition to the “youth sports film,” the Japanese director, Kurosawa Akira’s The Most Beautiful demonstrates how imperialism exploited women’s agility and strength. Made in 1944, The Most Beautiful championed a wartime spirit when Japan was in a crucial moment in the Pacific War. Women’s body and physical strength were then mobilized for devotion to mass production in order to support the empire. Unlike Bai Li’s body, empowered with autonomy and mobility, the female workers’ bodies in The Most Beautiful are subject to patriarchal power. Despite the film protagonist, at the film’s beginning, the female factory workers are ignored and marginalized. Previous scholarship regarded The Most Beautiful as a “humanistic” propaganda film or a documentary of women (Richie 1996, 26; Yoshimoto 2000, 88). However, the beginning sequence showcases the inhuman aspect of mass production in the war. The first two empty shots show the name of the factory and a speaker on a factory building, but neither of them is related to human activity nor female life. Human activity only appears in the third shot, yet here we see male factory administrators who are going to give a speech to all the workers (Fig.3. 4 P1. I). Then, in the fourth shot, the male director in medium close-up appeals to workers to strive harder for the war needs. The ordinary man looks heroic in Hollywood style three-points light (P1. 2). A viewer might almost mistake him as the protagonist of this film, yet the real protagonists, female workers, will not appear till 105 later. The fifth to the eighth shot depict the assembled factory workers, the audience for this mobilization speech, all male, all emotionless and motionless (P1. 3, P1. 4 and P1. 5). In these long shots, the army of workers looks like cluster of highly conforming anonymous dots. Just like the optical products they manufacture that serve the war machine, the anonymous workers are also merely parts of the imperial project. However, even in this sequence that demonstrate the nameless human parts of the war machine, one still cannot see any woman’s presence either. Only in the ninth shot does a very indistinct appearance of female worker emerge at the margin of the frame (P1. 6). Cinematography of the beginning sequence sets up a tone for The Most Beautiful. Women are subordinated to men and are marginalized in the work place, even though they have been emancipated from domestic space. The film immediately implies that female workers will only win recognition and equality when they submit their personal interests, emotions, families, and sportswomen’s bodies to the war. Indeed, for most of the film we see women at work, playing music, or doing sports; they seem to have a lot of mobility. It is noteworthy that women’s activities all take place in the factory compound, and the recreational activity does not aim at preserving their bodies but rather to enhance production. Only when a woman has thoroughly subordinated her personal interest to the empire, toward the end of the film, the image of female worker becomes the heroine of the camera. I 2 106 3 4 5 6 Fig. 3. 4 Kurosawa Akira, The Most Beautiful From Tamae, Ayako, to the female workers in the optical factory, Japanese women’s conformity to patriarchal society is ever so explicitly represented on the screen. Tamae is punished for being a working woman. Her independence and career achievement are at the expense of her family. The Most Beautiful blatantly mobilizes young female workers to scarify their personal life, youth, and health in the sake of nationalism. While patriarchal social order still limits Japanese working women on the screen, the relationship between women and modern society is illustrated as a harmonious one in Manchukuo cinema. The young professional woman can find a comfortable place in the city and at work. If we contrast the opening sequence of The Most Beautiful to that of Winter Jasmine, we can see that the juxtaposition of productive space and recreational space in the opening shot of the Manchukuo film has another vision of women’s role in the new nation’s modernization. With cheerful non-diegetic music over it, a long shot of a smoking chimney in the sky tilts down to the skating rink below (Fig.3. 5 P1. I and P1. 107 2). Labor is intertwined with leisure. It is an image unlike the well-known one of factory work in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), where workers are overwhelmed with labor. In the Manchukuo film, it is assumed that as factory workers produce materials for infrastructural building, sports produce strong citizens. In addition, hockey and skating are shown as healthy revues of entertainment, in contrast to dance and gambling, the more decadent modern pastimes. Through the vehicle of Bai Li and Yae, Manchukuo becomes the place where people build strong bodies and minds for a strong nation. I 2 The rendition of healthy workers and healthy women continues with a narrow focus on Bai Li in the city. Winter Jasmine’s cinematography contextualizes her within public sphere and thus foregrounds the working woman and her relationship to different social settings. As a New Woman in a big city, Bai Li moves freely between the office, the street, the domestic spaces, and the skating rink. Her mobility and confidence make her feel comfortable in each space. The film depicts her skating in the rink four times. Every time, the tracking shot of her movement highlights her sportswoman’s body (P1. 3). In a medium long shot, Bai Li holds Murakawa’s hands and teaches him how to stand straight on skates. Her athletic body looks at ease on the ice, while Murakawa can hardly keep balance (P1. 4). Bai Li is not only Murakawa’s teacher in the skating rink, but also his 108 life coach for his new life in Manchukuo. She tells Murakawa how to save money in the office, and also encourages him to familiarize himself with the city while they eat in a restaurant (P1. 5 and P1.6). In each scenario, a medium long shot places Bai Li at the center of the frame with Murakawa at margin. When Bai Li is talking in confidence, Murakawa either clasps his face between his hands or listens carefully likes student. When Bai Li takes the role as a pedagogue, the power dynamics between the male colonizer and the female colonized are reversed. 3 4 5 6 Fig. 3.5. Sasaki, Winter Jasmine Bai Li takes Murakawa for a tour of Fengtian, she familiarizes Murakawa with both the new shopping district and the traditional Chinese residential area, at once showing her mastery over the city space and Murakawa’s dependency on her. It is in this cumulative sequence that Winter Jasmine firmly flips the role of who is the de facto protagonist. By now, Murakawa’s protagonist status, like the superiority he gets from his birth status as a Japanese man from the imperial center, is thrown into doubt. Usually the composition centers Bai Li, putting Murakawa on the margin in profile. The audience is encouraged to 109 side with Bai Li’s point of view. It is not surprising that Bai Li’s command of the city and her competence in maneuvering the local culture make her a natural teacher figure guiding Mukarawa along. Such a gender reversal is simultaneously a revision of colonial relationships, with the colonizer the master from the metropole and the local inevitably under his tutelage. Inspired by Bai Li, Yae leaves Murakawa and rejects the idea of marriage. This not only challenges a traditional romantic film plot, but it also has its basis the ease with which the women engage with urban life. The harmonious coupling between the working women and the modern city and industry is especially remarkable for Winter Jasmine. For the modern city in East Asian films of the 1930s and the 1940s is always a place of consumption, crime, and sensation (Singer 1995, 72). Only in Winter Jasmine do we see a female protagonist with authority in the hybridity of Manchukuo’s city culture. It is in seeing the compatibility between the women’s sovereignty and the modern city that the audience might well begin to imagine Manchukuo as a progressive modern nation. Winter Jasmine’s extraordinary representation of women’s independence and mobility is shared by Manchukuo’s magazine culture. Kylin Ĝĝ, the most popular Chinese language magazine in Manchukuo, often published talks between female film stars and male scholars devoted to the subject of reading, work, and female independence. In the “Conversation between Miss Yao Lu and Mr. S,” the film star Yao Lu was showcased as an intelligent and hard-working professional woman, who loved reading Ivan Turgenev and Lu Xun rather than shopping and dancing (Zhang 1941, page unknown). The forum singles out the film actress as a “working woman” in the modern society, connecting the image on the screen to the spectators/readers’ ordinary life and 110 facilitating an intersubjectivity between the film actress and a viewer in society. In “Interview with Women on the Frontline of Culture in the Capital City,” readers are shown a host of professional women typical of big cities in the 1940s. These included a female doctor, a radio hostess, a theatre actress, a female journalist, a film star, an office staff, a schoolteacher, and a typist. Each working woman told how well she liked the career opportunity provided by new Manchukuo state. Although their pay varied, the working women all emphasized their economic independence and the satisfaction derived from their contribution to family and society (Zhang 1941, page unknown). Curiously, the working women portrayed in Kylin seem exclusively Manchurian or Chinese. Japanese women in Manchukuo’s mass media continue to conform to the patriarchal tradition. An article in Kylin titled as “Dongfang mei de riben nüren” EŹȬ Ǿżƒùc (Japanese Women with Oriental Beauty) claimed that “Manchukuo’s cuisine, Japanese women, and Western housing are regarded as the best enjoyment in the world.” It not only objectifies Japanese women, but also suggests that obedience and humility make Japanese women the best in the world. Even working women in Japan, the article says, are supposed to obey their husbands, giving up their careers in the productive sphere after they get married (Yong Jiang 1942, page unknown). The expected conformity of Japanese women to patriarchal expectations in magazines could explain in part Winter Jasmine’s portrayal of gender difference between Manchurian and Japanese women. Such an intra-gender and interracial relationship is seen through the director’s representation of domestic spaces. Although a hockey player, Yae is usually confined in the domestic domain. There are two separate scenes in Yae and Bai Li’s living rooms, which showcase different cultural traditions. A traditional 111 Japanese-style living room is the center of Yae’s home, reminiscent of Ozu’s cinematic representation of Japanese family.28 The film director’s apprenticeship to Ozu is here visible. A long shot shows the Japanese architectural divider, a fusuma, separating the Japanese-style room from a more modern Western-style room, while the fusuma also frames Japanese women in the traditional domestic space. The mother in kimono sits in front of the chabudai (Japanese style short table) all the time, wrapping gifts or doing ikebana. Yae, though in Western attire, is always here with her mother, talking about cooking or marriage. Yae’s father Kawashima never steps into the traditional living room throughout the film. Apparently, the domestic space of a Japanese family is constructed as feminine, which is supposed to stand for Japanese culture and tradition (Fig. 3.6, P1. I). Yae’s family and her limited mobility in the domestic space exemplify the gendered division of labor which has had a long life in liberalism, where “the family or personal life is natural to woman and in some formulations divinely ordained; it is a domain governed by needs and affective ties” (W. Brown 1995, 155). Contrary to this more traditional and feminine rendition of a Japanese home in Manchukuo, the Manchurian family in Winter Jasmine does not appear to observe the gendered division of labor. The Chinese woman, Bai Li, has freedom to move between the space of hybrid culture and other spaces in her home. In the scene of Yae’s father’s visit to Bai Li’s father, the Chinese living room is photographed in a diagonal perspective, thus highlights the spaciousness and loftiness of the Chinese house. The living room is a single large space decorated with multicultural artifacts. The doors with 28 According to David Bordwell, Sasaki Yasushi started as Ozu’s pupil in 1930 in Shochiku (Bordwell 1988, 25) 112 “double-happiness” pattern emblem, Ù, and that along with the color-painting beam exhibit the feature of Manchurian local culture. In the foreground of this frame is a set of synthesized European dining table and chairs. In the background, a Japanese doll stands by a Chinese vase. In a home of the local Manchurian family, instead of a space that claims the authenticity of local culture and tradition, competing signs of cultures are integrated within the domestic space, suggesting modernity of many cultural influences (P1. 2). While Japanese domestic space is exclusively occupied by Japanese women, Bai’s living room is for both men and women, Japanese and Manchurian. I.Yae in the living room 2. Bai’s living room Fig.3.6. Winter Jasmine In this scene, Bai Li’s father and Yae’s father, Kawashima, engage in a competition of go, resonating with the love competition between Bai Li and Yae. In both competitions, the Manchurian wins over the Japanese. The film plot offers viewers a moment to imagine Manchukuo’s superiority and it reflects a utopian dream of the colonial and imperial intellectuals in Manchukuo. Although the Japanese government attempted to make Manchukuo as the colony of the Empire, the actual nation builders— such as its intellectuals, engineers, politicians and military officials—participated in the construction of Manchukuo-state for different purposes; they were not necessary the Kwantung Army’s ambition of maintaining its dominance in the colonial state, nor the head of Manchukuo, Pu Yi’s wish to turn Manchukuo into his private kingdom. In Winter 113 Jasmine, Bai and Kawashima represent the Japanese scholars and China experts who flocked to Manchuria in a period of rapid colonial expansion as early as 1910s. For them, the establishment of the state of Manchukuo promised the birth of a new kind of nation that would accommodate Japanese economic imperialism and Chinese nationalism (Young 1999, 243). In more than two decades of its development, this dream seemed to have partially realized in terms of economic and cultural autonomy. The intrinsic contradiction of Japanese colonial policy in Manchukuo, the conflict between the consolidation of imperial domination and the promotion of Manchukuo as a nation-state, unexpectedly opened a space for multiethnic culture and gender equality. Manchukuo’s mass media promoted the image of working women—a medical doctor, schoolteacher, professional writer or office staff—much like Bai Li on screen, or Mei Niang in reality. This image of working woman enjoys mobility like the male citizens who can move between private and public spaces. This image of working women personifies Manchukuo’s sovereignty. The contrast between Bai Li and Murakawa, and Bai Li’s father’s defeat of Kawashima in the go game appear to cinematically illuminate Manchukuo’s autonomy in the game of modernization. II. Winter Jasmine’s treatment of women who do not succumb to marriage and family seem a radical contrast to another Manchukuo film All’s Well that Ends Well, a clear repetition and revision of Ozu Yasujirō’s The Only Son. Ozu Yasujirō (1903-1963) is the best-known Japanese film director to the western world. He began his film career in 1927. Ozu’s early works showed a clear influence of European and American film culture. In the mid-1930s, he gradually established his own aesthetics and style, and they 114 were evident in his unique “low-angle frontality,” and ambiguous narrative structure. Ozu’s films in the 1930s mainly focused on white-collar workers, lower middle-class family, and ordinary people’s struggle (Burch 1979, 154-156). The Only Son was OZu’s first film with Shochiku Ofuna studio in 1936, where the director of All’s Well that Ends Well, Wang Xinzhai, later had his training (Yamaguchi 1995,147). “Ofuna flavor,” the women-oriented melodrama, is creatively blended in All’s Well that Ends Well.29 Both Ozu’s and Wang’s films narrate the passage from the country to the city as experienced by a mother or a grandmother. Ozu’s cinematic language is discernable in Wang’s film narrative. In the scene of the mother’s arrival of Xinjing, Wang takes Ozu’s strategy, exhibiting the magnificent capital city with the shots of cityscape taken from a taxi. Even Wang’s composition of the in-taxi shot is identical to The Only Son (see Fig. 3. 7 and Fig. 3. 8). In The Only Son, Ozu tells the story of an old mother’s visit to her son in Tokyo after her life-long sacrifice for his education. In the midst of the city’s abundance and magnificence of the city, the old working-class mother from provincial Japan and her struggling son in the metropolis remain outcasts of Japan’s modernity. All’s Well that Ends Well also deals with personal striving within a national framework, although Wang’s is a story of satisfaction and Ozu’s one of dissatisfaction. Not cast out of modernity, the peasant mother in Wang’s story is embraced by modern culture after her visit to the Great East Asian Construction Expo in Xinjing (hereafter, the EXPO). A 29 “Since the mid-1920s, Shochiku films within the megagenre of gendai-geki have exhibited characteristics as a group that transcend or engross the personal styles of filmmakers. Critics designated this shochiku studio stytle ‘kamata flavor’ or ‘ofuna flavor.’” “Shochiku became the primary force in shaping the two perennially dominant gendai-geki genres of melodrama and shoshimin-geki. Both genres were excellent vehicles for conveying philosophies about suffering and happiness, tears and laughter, ideals and realities” (Anderson and Richie 1989, 244). 115 comparative reading between Ozu’s The Only Son and Wang Xinzhai’s All’s Well that Ends Well is necessary in understanding how the roles of women and women’s life style indicate as well as a contrast of different modernity and different gender roles, especially when seen in a transnational context. The Only Son constructs a mother figure in metropolitan Tokyo; the context is Japan’s rapid imperial expansion. The mother’s sacrifice and her invisibility in the social sphere foreground the inequality of gender roles that is perpetuated in the gendered divisions of labor. The hard-working silk-mill worker, the widowed mother, would rather sell her land and house in order to support her only son’s education in Tokyo. Though a factory worker her whole life, the mother is a typical woman confined to the familial and reproductive domain, investing her hope in her son’s personal glory. Ozu’s sophisticated opening and closing mise-en-scène in The Only Son bookend women’s confinement in wartime Japan. In the beginning pillow-shot, the opened shoji screen frames a hanging lamp, creating a cramped and still feeling for the family abode, where the mother will later appear (Fig. 3.9, P1. I). Following are shots with a street view, the female workers and the mill machine in the factory, the village view with a Japanese flag in the far back ground, and the return to the domestic space where the mother is grinding flour (see P1. 2 to P1. 6). The organization of this sequence moves from “stillness to movement and back Fig. 3. 7. Ozu Yasujiro, The Only Son Fig. 3. 8. Wang Xinzhai, All’s Well that Ends Well 116 to stillness” (Burch 1979, 178). All the stillness is registered to domestic space, while in public space, on the street and in the factory, movement happens. In the factory, the mother is merely an anonymous figure among the laborers. Only when she appears again at the end of this sequence in the kitchen does her identity become discernable. The contrast between stillness and mobility, anonymity and visibility, reveals gender inequality that is enforced by the gendered divisions of labor. Although the mother has a job in the society like men, she cannot really claim her subjective sovereignty, and her capacity to desire or choose, because familial obligation confines her to the household. Ozu’s representation of the mother protagonist does not rest on personal achievement at work in society but focuses on her encumbrance and feminine duty of making her son a great man in the future. I 2 3 4 117 5 6 Fig. 3. 9. The Only Son In the film’s finale, the mother returns to the workplace, coming back from Tokyo with disappointment. The on-screen diegetic sound of silk-mill machines is high frequency, depicting the high-speed industrialization (Fig.3. 10, P1. I). However, the consequence of technological development is the mother’s loss of position in the workshop. She and her friend appear in the followed shots, kneeing down and cleaning the floor, while the lower non-diegetic sound of drone indicates their exile from the workshop (P1. 2). Then, the shot-reverse-shots depict the mother’s chat with her fellow worker about the trip to Tokyo, the caring and kindness from the other old woman provides a temporary small community for the mother within the public space. This is the time when the film reveals women’s dilemma between private and public domains. Although these two old women participate in social production, they cannot really obtain social recognition in the workplace. Their conversation shows that women can only be recognized by their father’s, husband’s or son’s achievements. It’s why the mother has to lie, claiming her son’s success in Tokyo. She needs a fantasy to sustain her reality (P1.3 and P1. 4). With the voice of her friend’s compliment and the machines’ droning in the background, the medium long shot shows the mother frustration transforming from smile (P1. 5a to 5d). 118 I 2 3 4 5a 5b 5c 5d Fig.3.10 The Only Son Eventually, she cannot bear the lie, retreating outside of the factory building, and wailing, then, a long shot displays the empty courtyard where she is sitting (See Fig. 3.11, P1. I and P1. 2). The openness of this image is a perfect contrast to the cramped feeling in the film opening. While the very first shot of the film seems to trace domestic space as restricted, the emptiness at the end of the film is just as terrifying as the encumbrance 119 (See Fig.3.9, P1. I and Fig.3.11 P1.2). Because the old woman has neither property nor family, she is indentured to the factory. The emptiness is the representation of her poverty and loneliness as a female subject of the Empire of Japan. I 2 Fig. 3.11 The Only Son Made in 1936, when Japan’s on-going war with China was raging, Ozu does not seem to refer at all to the warfare. However, one intertitle at the beginning quietly states that the story begins at 1923, the year when Great Kanto Earthquake happened and drastically impacted on Japanese domestic economy, especially the rural area. The bad debt occurred after the earthquake led to Japan’s financial panic in 1927, in which year the Tanaka cabinet that advocated imperial expansion began to preside over Japan (Shizume 2009, 3; Schencking 2013, 257). From then on, Japanese jingoism rose and drove the country to the war. In this historical context, Ozu’s displaced establishing shot in the opening sequence (the village view with a Japanese flag in the far back ground) seems very purposeful (Fig. 3. 9, P1. 5). Noel Burch notices that this is an unconventional establishing shot but fails in contextualizing it with the film’s historical background, thus, he cannot provide an in-depth reading of this very meaningful shot. Unlike a traditional establishing shot that begin a film or story and sets up the context for the audience, the long shot of village view with a national flag appears as the 7th shot in the opening sequence (Burch 1979, 178). While the faintly stirring national flag at the far edge of the 120 frame indicates that rising jingoism is lurking in people’s daily life, marginalizing the symbol of empire in the image seems like a negative criticism of military intensity. Another intertitle indicates that the mother’s trip to Tokyo is in 1936. On February 26th of that year, an attempted military coup prompted the Japanese government to consolidate its power, pursuing a full-scale military campaign (Cazdyn 2002, 187). This revelation of the specific year puts the woman protagonist in the center of historical time when warped capitalist industrialization pushes Japan further in its imperial colonization and expansion. With this historical awareness, Ozu’s camera enables an understanding of the nameless woman in a film about her “only son.” The empire’s colonial expansion commands a woman to be “good wife wise mother” to support her men in the war. The oppression of patriarchy in feudal times now is replaced by capitalism and imperialism, expansions of which aggravate women’s confinement in the domestic sphere. In a stylistic contrast, Ozu’s subtle critique of imperialism and gender oppression are turned into a utopian comedy in Wang’s All’s Well that Ends Well. This was probably due to Manchukuo’s severe film censorship.30 If the mother’s tragedy in Ozu’s film showcases the increasing gap between rural and urban spaces caused by Japanese imperialism, All’s Well that Ends Well idealistically depicts the incorporation of the country and the city through Manchukuo’s industrialization. This connection between the rural and the urban is reinforced at the film beginning and repeatedly emphasized throughout the whole film. 30 According to the Regulations of Film Production (Eiga hō/Yinghua fa ƂǷ、) enacted in 1937, the prime minister of Manchukuo has the authority to determine the content and subject of film production and he has the authority in the selection of film exhibition and distribution (cf. Article 7). The film exhibition and film distribution are subjects to the ministry of Security’s censorship (cf. Article 5) (Hu and Gu 1990, 226). 121 In the film beginning, dynamic editing and fast-paced soundtrack create a vigorous ambience in the village. A sequence of close ups focusing on a postman’s smiling face, his running body and running legs highlight the village’s vitality (Fig.3. 12, P1. I to P1. 3). Then, a long shot shows the postman travel across the village with a bunch of letters in his hand (P1.4). Foregrounding the postman’s identity and his movement, the film opening shows how modern postal service helps to connect Manchukuo’s village to the nation’s modernization. Then, two registered mails from Xinjing to a peasant woman, Old Lady Wu, specifically demonstrate this connection. In the mail, her eldest daughter in Xinjing invites her to visit the EXPO in the capital city. The urban woman is connected to her rural family and is willing to include her peasant mother in the nation’s celebration and modern achievement. Thus, the traditional kinship, the peasants’ family, the nation, and the EXPO are all connected together. Manchukuo’s modernization does not leave Old Lady Wu, and her village behind; rather, it bridges up the village and the city, and enables the peasant woman’s mobility. I 2 122 3 4 Fig. 3. 12 All’s Well that Ends Well In addition to the registered letter, newspaper is another symbol of modernity that is highlighted here. They are the means that connect together both “the small family,” Old Lady Wu and her children, and the “big family,” Manchukuo the nation. Then, in the living room, the peasant family sitting together on the table, enthusiastically reading the registered mails from Xinjing. Because of modern postal service and mass media, the quaint village is catching up with the outside world. Here, an establish shot shows the whole family forms a half circle surrounding old lady in a Chinese living room (Fig. 3. 13, P1. I). Three medium long shots focus on the circulation of the news of “The EXPO for the 10th Anniversary of Founding of the Nation” (P1. 2). The letter is read and passed down by the matriarch, to the son, the daughter-in-law, and the granddaughter (also an elementary student), and then back to the old lady (P1.3 to P1. 6). The news of the EXPO causes a small sensation in the family, and the dissemination of the news also forms a full circle. Modern mass media not only connects the rural family to the nation but also connects the family together. 123 I 2 3 4 5 6 Fig. 3.13 All’s Well that Ends Well Wang’s most significant deviation from Ozu in All’s Well that Ends Well is his inversion of gender roles prevalent in his time and space. To a certain extent, All’s Well that Ends Well resembles Charlie Chaplin’s “Comedy of Transformation,” exhibiting the immigrant’s conflicting reactions to his own transformation by the host culture (Hug 2001, 215). In the process of Old Lady Wu’s learning urban culture and exploring unfamiliar regions, the audience explores as well the migrants’ assimilation into and resistance to the city. The old peasant mother is not depicted as a stereotypical mother or grandmother who is encumbered by life necessities as cooking, laundry, shopping or 124 child rearing. Old Lady Wu is a woman in mobility who can take the train by herself to come to the capital city, and there she feels at ease with all modern facilities (Fig. 3. 14, PI. 1). Half of the film situates her in the EXPO, walking around in the park, experiencing the excitement of speed in the amusement park, and visiting the exhibition pavilions (PI.2). She is on the move in the city, and this mobility and autonomy all come from her participation in the EXPO.31 The Xinjing EXPO in 1942 in the film temporarily liberates the old mother from a familial domain. Her identity as a farmer and a mother is no longer tied to reproduction or a fixed location in pre-designated space.32 In All’s Well that Ends Well, Old Lady Wu’s passage to the city and her passage to the EXPO enable the peasant mother to move beyond agricultural past and domestic conditioning, getting access to city life, bourgeois future, and nation construction. In this sense, this film can be considered as a “public fantasy.” Such a fantasy, according to Teresa de Lauretis, “perform[s] at the societal level and in the public sphere, a function similar to that of the private fantasies, daydreams and reveries by which individual subjects imagine or give images to their erotic, ambitious or destructive aspirations” (Lauretis 1999, 304). The EXPO, the aspirational narrative of constructing a stronger nation, incorporates the old 31 The EXPO in this film was Xinjing EXPO; it was part of The Great East Asian EXPO (J: Daitōa hakuran kai, C: Dadongya bolanhui ôƚ]±ɠo) in 1942 and also was The 10th Anniversary of the Founding of Manchukuo EXPO (Jianguo shinian bolanhui”k X[ɤA). The other sites of The Great East Asian EXPO included Beijing, Harbin and Nanjing. In Nanjing, it was the Great East Asian Expo of the War. 32 Gender roles in the capitalist era are defined largely through the movement in pre- designated spaces. “Civil society or the economy is natural to man; it is the domain where rights are exercised and individuality is expressed” but life necessity and family obligation confine women in the familial, sexual and reproductive domain(s). Inequality of gender roles is perpetuated in these sets of binary spaces. Man have the liberty to move between public and private domains, while woman can only have either or (W. Brown 1995, 155). 125 woman, as an unconventional figure of modernity, into the production of the nation. The film thus endows her with liberty to access different social spheres. The progressive imagination of women’s autonomy and mobility were unexpectedly enabled by the crystallization of Japanese imperialism, the EXPO. In this sense, All’s Well that Ends Well defines Manchukuo’s distinctive “colonial modernity.” I 2 Fig. 3.14 All’s Well that Ends Well The EXPO also came at the tenth anniversary of Manchukuuo’s establishment. The national “birthday” and the EXPO became a perfect venue for propaganda, through which the colonial government strove to consolidate Manchukuo’s legitimacy. As the only film institution of Manchukuo, Man’ei played an essential role in this campaign. With the representation of the grandiose Xinjing and the splendid EXPO, All’s Well that Ends Well portrays Manchukuo as a cosmopolitan center in the Japanese imperial project that aimed to mobilize all the citizens of the region to construct Greater East Asia. Though relatively unknown in the U.S., this film has drawn Japanese and Chinese film scholars’ attention in recent years. Thus, Furuichi and Ding, two film historians in China, have shown the film’s propaganda imperative through formal analysis, and Ding in particular points out its extraordinary portrayal of the rural space. Unlike the Shanghai leftist films that eulogize country life in contrast to the decadent capitalist culture in the 126 urban space, All’s Well that Ends Well puts both the city and the country in a positive light (Furuichi 2010, 95-97; Ding 2008, 146-163). The first half of the film presents a movement from the country to the city, and then the city is a space where the old lady experiences modernity and modernity’s troubles. Old Lady Wu’s uses of different kinds of modern transportation, and her encounters with all the magnificent architecture in the city epitomize Manchukuo’s achievements of industrialization and modernization (Fig. 15, P1. I and P1. 2). Meanwhile, the peasant lady also comes across the suspicion of her son-in-law’s affair and the second son’s unemployment. While storylines in the first half of the film realistically presents the city and its troubles, the second half of the film provides with a utopian resolution. The EXPO becomes a symbolic and ritualistic resolution to the conflicts people face in ordinary life. Through her passage to the EXPO, Old Lady Wu joins her grandson in the amusement park, appreciating Western music in a concert hall. The EXPO seems to prepare the peasant lady for modern life. Her country wisdom is not despised in the city; rather, her advice to her daughter and her understanding she shows her son bring about harmony in the extended family. The EXPO inspires everyone to construct the Great East Asia, including the old mother. Thus, even the countrywoman becomes part of nation building as the film touts the importance of agricultural labor in the nation-building process. In the film’s nationalistic idealization, Manchukuo’s modernity, epitomized by the EXPO, is theoretically able to resolve the gender contradiction that Wendy Brown does not think capitalistic liberalism is able to resolve.33 33 The formulation of liberty “requires the existence of encumbered beings, the social activity of those without liberty,” argues Wendy Brown, “it is achieved by displacing the 127 I 2 Fig. 3.15 All’s Well that Ends Well Because of the EXPO’s unique role in exhibiting power in the industrial and capitalist world, it is also an essential event during Manchukuo’s 10th anniversary. For many imperialist countries, hosting an EXPO is a demonstration of their power (Bean 1987, 554). For most of the East Asian countries that painstakingly battle against imperialism and colonialism, the participation in an EXPO is a step toward modernization and national salvation. Historians and anthropologists have elaborated the intimate relationship between world fairs, mass media and tourism, especially their collaborative impact on economy and politics. International expositions and world fairs are the venues to flaunt national powers in the areas of construction, industrialization, and scientific technology. They presented new media of entertainment and opportunities for “vicarious travel” in other lands. They aim at “boost[ing] the economic development of the cities and regions in which they were held as well as to advance the material growth of the country at large” (554). The world fairs in the U.S are an integral part of nationalism, imperialism, and modernist economic and political forces that have dominated American society since 1876 (J. Brown 2002, 430). The EXPO in 1942 is embodied, encumbered, and limited nature of existence onto women” (W. Brown 1995: 154-155). 128 Manchukuo’s world debut, which is also a redux of Japan’s 26th centennial celebration. This is, in 1940, before Japan officially encountered the U.S in the war, Japanese imperialism reached its apex in the empire’s 2600th anniversary. The imperial government availed itself of mass media, railway system and consumerist culture to reinforce collective memory and national identity. Imperial tourism and national fairs not only stimulated domestic economy but also facilitated a sense of national pride. Here the 26th centennial mobilized men and women in Japan to devote themselves to the imperial war. In spite of the scarcity caused by the ongoing Sino-Japanese War, Japan’s 26th centennial celebrations created an image of abundance and luxury for its imperial subjects, manifesting its increasing military and economic power (Ruoff 2010, 2-6). With Xinjing EXPO, Japan seized the opportunity of Manchukuo’s 10th anniversary to promote its imperial expansion through the glorification of Manchukuo’s modern achievement. It was also many people’s, especially, women’s, first time to experience the time and place they were in, as well as the new technology and industrialization that Manchukuo had established. A visit to the EXPO allows women who rarely ventured beyond domestic sphere to know that they were also connected to the nation’s modernity and the world. Women’s Magazine in Japanese occupied Beijing published a report about people’s experience at the EXPO’s Beijing site. The report demonstrated a female visitor’s fascination with new technology and industrialization of North China in the exposition, despite that it was enabled by and ultimately served for Japanese imperialism. The complexity of North China’s modernization and Japanese imperial domination is a symptom of China’s colonial modernity (Women’s Magazine 1942, 34-35). 129 The colonial modernity of Manchukuo differed from China’s overall colonial modernity. Manchukuo’s distinctive colonial modernity is displayed in All’s Well That Ends Well in the level of narrative. For the peasant lady, the EXPO is a ritual through which she gets connected to the city and modernity. The EXPO is also the venue where the previous problematic family gets its reunion. One can say personal sovereignty and family integrity are at the core of the film and both are subject to the sway of Japanese imperialism. At this point, it is useful to step back and think historically about what the introduction to modernity might mean to a person’s subject grasp of both the world and themselves. For example, Marshall Berman describes modernity as “a mode of vital experience,” Experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience ‘modernity.’ To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology; in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity; it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ (Berman 1982, 15) It is in this vein that All’s Well that Ends Well exhibits the peasant woman’s first experience of modernity. At the EXPO, she is situated in an environment of excitement, speed and peril, and eventually she goes through her own transformation. The Xinjing EXPO incorporates the peasant lady’s agricultural past into capitalist industry, technology, and the bourgeois future. As an old mother from the “past”, who represents 130 the feudal and agricultural tradition, she is fully embraced by the “future,” the new nation, the modern city and the next generation. The EXPO works as the liminal phase of a ritual, through which new social identification or new social order enacts. Warren Susman is fascinated by the world fair’s ritual function, and proposes its study in light of Victor Turner’s classic concept of liminality. Susman suggests that the twentieth century’s world fairs share several similarities with the medieval pilgrimage. “The modern fair represents [the] liminal stage that Turner assigns to pilgrimage [,]” which prepares the mass with new understanding of collective identity and new conception of social order (Susman 1983, 6). During the “liminal phase” of rites de passage, according to Turner, “the characteristics of the ritual subject are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the third phase (reaggregation or reincorporation), the passage is consummated” (Turner 1969, 359). If the trip to Xinjing’s expo is a pilgrimage to industrial modernity, Old Lady Wu and her family’s participation in the EXPO works as the “liminal phase” of rites de passage, which connects Old Lady Wu (an attribute of Manchukuo’s past), to the metropolitan city and culture (attributes of Manchukuo’s future). Turner notes that liminal condition is “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and the ceremonial.” Liminality is usually chaotic, linking to darkness or wilderness (Turner 1969, 359). The EXPO represented in the film is both wild and chaotic. The sensational stimulus manufactured by the commercial amusement makes everything disorderedly. In the amusement park sequence, dynamic camera movements exhibit a panorama of the EXPO, representing the overwhelming effect. A crane shot in low angle pans from right to left, depicting and 131 highlighting an imposing battleship under the blue sky. Continuing panning left, the shot shows the stirring national flags, and then the camera angle lows a little bit to display a crowd of people in the foreground against the monumental architecture at the background. Then, the camera angle lowers further and zooms in, showing the rotating ships and joyful children. The long take precisely delineates euphoria. The sophisticated mise-en-scène stresses the fast speed, the large scale and the abundance of modern city, stressing on the texture of experience, bringing about visceral tensions. Encountering this manufactured sensationalism, familial order is jeopardized and people get lost. As soon as Old Lady Wu and her grandson arrive the EXPO, the boy is captivated by the amusement park, refusing to obey his grandma any more. The grandma has to follow the boy, riding the rotating planes and ships and even visiting the horror chamber. In fact, he basic fascination with the horrific, the grotesque and the extreme is the typical expression of urban modernity (Singer 1995, 87). In the film, the horror chamber scene not only portrays the “nervous stimulation” and “bodily peril” in the metropolis (Singer 1995, 77), it but also is “linkened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility to darkness,” which “liminality” always associates with. According to Turner, as liminal beings, people at this stage have no status, no positions in a kinship system; they are waiting to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to cope with their new station in life (Turner 1969, 359). Thus, going through the horror chamber, the grandson goes astray, Old Lady Wu loses her way, her son-in-law is separated from his wife, and the wife gets mad when she sees her husband talking to a young woman. People lose directions, identities, sense of security, and their family in the exciting, tempting, terrifying and speeding environment created by the modern ritual. 132 Transnationalism represents another aspect of the limnality of the EXPO, while it also offers the resolution of “reaggregation” concluding the ritual. In the park, the Osaka Pavilion and the Tokyo Pavilion juxtapose with the Nanking Pavilion, which temporarily eliminates the hierarchy between the metropolitan state and the colony. The Forest Pavilion is also placed alongside the exhibition of industrial development, reducing the unevenness between agriculture and urbanity. The Japanese soldiers, the Russian waitress, and ordinary Manchukuo’s men and women mingle with each other at the EXPO, seeming like “being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition…secular distinction of rank and status disappear or are homogenized” (Turner 1969, 359-360). An imagined comradeship and egalitarianism with transnational and multiethnic harmony anticipates a new social order and the ability to cope with the new order—which in the case of Manchukuo is “The Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.” Thus, everything gets “reincorporated” when the ritual of the EXPO is consummated at the end of the film. The family is reunited at the dinner table headed by the grandmother. The country lady magically gets used to urban culture, endorsing free love, forgiving the lying child and even understanding a pre-marital sexual relationship. The family gets renewed in the new social order when she calls for her children to build the Greater East Asia with her. Thus, the ritual of the EXPO not only helps those from an agricultural past to cope with industrial modernity, refreshing the traditional family in the modern society, but also enabling the peasant lady to obtain a new identity in the productive space. Old Lady Wu’s temporary liberation from domestic domain and her mobility in the public domain envision gender equality in the new nation, Manchukuo. 133 This definition of gender and modernity is so progressive that seems to anticipate the feminist debate about gender equality in the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, any radical imagination of gender equality and modernity in All’s Well that Ends Well is subject to Manchukuo’s coloniality. The film foregrounds Greater East Asia rather than Manchukuo through the EXPO. In Old Lady Wu’s visit to the EXPO, many shots capture the imperial soldiers in informal dress, revealing Japanese military’s presence inside Manchukuo. A pan shot of the Japanese kanji, “Demolishing the Brits and the Yankees,” is followed by the third son’s participation in a game while waiting for his mother. Only near the end of the film when everybody gathers at the concert hall, the symbol of Manchukuo, a national flag, is briefly shown as the backdrop. All these haunting images of Japan reveals the contradiction between liberty and coloniality at the core of Manchukuo’s colonial modernity. As Old Lady Wu has illuminated at the beginning of the film, “changchun biande zheyang hao, jiuxiang ge huanghua side.” (ʦƃ»ńʐƢû8ěGɹɳqǾ.) Translating into English, it means, “Changchun has become such a great city. This seems like a lie,” which intensify the irony. She seems to announce that much of what you can see in Manchukuo is a fantastic story, a lie. If so, how dare Man’ei make such apparent criticism of Japanese imperialism? How could the film censors in Manchukuo possibly ignore it? The trick lies in the translation. In Japanese, “jiuxiang ge huanghua side” (It is just like a lie) is read as “Yume mitaida ner$) ,” like a dream. Contrary to its phrasing in English and Chinese, this fixed expression in Japanese is an absolute compliment that describes something as truly wonderful. Thus, the hidden meaning produced in spoken Chinese and Japanese translation tells different story to its 134 multilingual audience. For the Japanese censor and Japanese audience, this line of dialogue speaks of the glorification of Japanese imperialism, while for the Chinese- speaking audience, this line belies the fact that Manchukuo sovereignty is no more than a dream in its actual subordination to Japan. * * * While Ozu’s realistic approach invites his audience to question the relationship between imperial expansion, gender inequality, and urban-rural divide in Japanese society, Wang’s direction of All’s Well that Ends Well serves many more compelling interests. The conflicting allegiances of Man’ei for the imperial Japanese government, the colonial government of Manchukuo, and the occupying Japanese military, as well as the intensifying film censorship in Manchukuo, determine the director’s ambiguous attitude to Japanese imperialism and his subtle representation of Manchukuo’s sovereignty. The old mother has pride not only from the children but also from her passion in building a new nation. The rewriting of women’s mobility in both the reproductive sphere of rearing children and the productive sphere of nation building unintentionally undermines the gendered divisions of labor premised by bourgeois liberalism. Although the old mother is a peasant, her mobility is similar to the working woman, Bai Li, in Winter Jasmine, for they both personify Manchukuo’s cultural sovereignty. Nevertheless, it is the “Greater East Asia Construction EXPO,” the product of Japanese imperialism that offers a utopian resolution of any problems caused by urbanization and industrialization. The EXPO symbolically and ritualistically prepares the Manchukuo mother to be a figure of both tradition and modernity, who is apparently able to negotiate the intricacy of the city while at the same time using her folk wisdom and maternal authority to resolve a series of 135 family problems (Ding 2008,159). The mother’s authority, as well as Manchukuo’s autonomy, is ultimately predicated both by and in spite of Japanese imperialism in Manchukuo. 136 CHAPTER V SINGING A NEW NATION INTO BEING—RI KŌRAN AND MANCHUKUO FILM MUSICAL In 1943, two years before Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, the Japanese director Shimazu Yasujiro ‰ÄH½č (1897-1945) worked with the left film critic Iwasaki AkiraˆŠ« (1903-1981) and the Manchurian film star Ri Kōran to produce a legendary musical, My Nightingale (Watashi no uguisu â!Ě, 1943). This was climatic achievement of film grandeur in Man’ei’s eight years history (1937-1945) with sumptuous European style mise-en-scènes and costumes, as well as Ri Kōran’s virtuoso soprano. Set in Harbin, a cosmopolitan city of mixed cultures in Manchukuo, the film featured Russian artists who found the city as an ideal space to continue their opera career. Focusing on an interethnic family of a Japanese girl, Mariko and her adopted father, Dmitri, a prestigious Russian tenor, My Nightingale imagined Manchukuo as a utopian space where ethnic harmony and artistic creativity can be realized. Despite Shimazu’s artistic endeavor, this film was censored by Japanese film authority as soon as it was accomplished so that nobody was able to see it in the 1940s. In fact, Shimazu reportedly declared that he made the film for the future audience rather than his contemporaries (Yamaguchi and Fujiwara 1988, 191). Why did a director intentionally make a film without the possibility to get screened? The answer was found in 1984 by the assistant director of My Nightingale, Ikeda. According to him, Shimazu had predicted Japan’s defeat in the war when they were employed by Man’ei. He believed that a great art film should be produced as evidence to show the future 137 generation that Japan had made such a masterpiece during the war, not merely propaganda films (192). In 1942, Manchukuo and the whole world had witnessed the consequence of Pearl Harbor in the U.S, Britain, Canada and Australia’s declaration of war on Japan. The once overbearing empire was stepping into decline. Given the fact that the imperial government of Japan issued a specific edict that film production served the war purposes, in addition to the scarcity of film stock and all kinds of resources, Shimazu’s dream of making a “great art film” became impossible in Tokyo. The emergent Manchukuo with advanced technology, abundance of natural and human resources, and its active artists’ community turned out to be his dreaming opportunity. Collaborating with the Chinese and Russian staff and artists from Man’ei and Harbin Symphony, the Japanese director plotted his ideal society in the form of a cosmopolitan Harbin based on inter-ethnic affiliation. Thirty years after its rediscovery in the 1980s and three years after Ri’s death in 2014, we could look at My Nightingale anew with critical insights. The film clearly impresses us with its marriage of music and image, sound and narrative, as well as the representation of multiethnic and multicultural Harbin. In defining Manchukuo modernity Shimazu is able to show his Japanese posterity what a wartime art film could be. My Nightingale exemplifies the significance of film musical in the imagination of Manchukuo’s cultural sovereignty. Shimazu’s choice of musical is not merely an artistic decision; rather, it is predetermined by Manchukuo’s increasingly transnationalized film and music industry, and Ri Kōran’s rise to stardom. It reflects an urge to claim national cinema through the production of film musicals. It also reveals how vulnerable the imagination of sovereignty is in facing of censorship. 1930s-1940s was the high time that 138 Hollywood musical achieved its worldwide prominence. Manchukuo cinema, like many other different national cinemas, tried to emulate Hollywood musical but felt obligated to interpret this genre in Manchukuo’s own film language. Hollywood’s practice is not the only golden standard, as recent scholarship on film musical notes; local musicals can “claim their own cultural specificity, traditions and stylistic uniqueness in a national realm” (Creekmur and Modad 2012, 2). Following Creekmur and Modad’s suggestion, this chapter shall delve into “tension between local and global elements” (2). First, it examines Western music’s influence in East Asia and analyzes the relationship between classical Western music, Manchukuo’s musical and Manchukuo’s national identity. In this manner, we can better understand why musical genre eventually becomes a symbol of Manchukuo’s modernity. By situating Manchukuo’s film musical in the history of film musical and specifically in the transnational film culture of East Asia, this chapter constructs a critical dialogue between local and global musical forms, centering on Ri Kōran’s stardom. Comparing the image of songstress in Chinese gechang pian ¿dÎ ( singing film) and gewu pian ¿ïÎ( song and dance film) in the 1930s-1940s, this chapter demonstrates that Ri Kōran’s star image of a “singing woman” and its transformation between an independent and a submissive woman in her Manchukuo’s film career. This transformed star image resonates with her film image in Manchukuo’s film musical but conflicts at times with her film narrative. It is in the contradiction between the time of the narrative and “the time of the numbers,” the time space created by music and lyrics, that we find Manchukuo’s ambiguous sovereignty (McMillin 2006, 31). 139 I. To understand Manchukuo’s film musical and its relation to Manchukuo’s sovereignty, it is necessary to understand the intimate relationship between music and East Asian modernity. Scholars have argued that the soundscape of East Asia is transformed when Western music arrives with Western imperialism and capitalism. Since the Opium War, the violin’s harmony and the trumpet’s sound of the military band had spread in the Chinese territory with the influx of European merchants, soldiers, and missionaries (Kraus 1989, 3; Jones 2001, 30). The popularization of Western music in China reflected the complex struggle of imperialism and anti-imperialism. In the 1930s, Shanghai entered its “Jazz age.” Jazz music together with Chinese “modern songs (shida qu ſiƉ),” “a hybrid genre of American Jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk music” dominated the soundscape of Shanghai in radio, film, and gramophone (Jones 2001, 1, 6). The flourish of commercial cinema, and the rise of songstress foregrounded popular music in metropolitan Shanghai, linking the spaces of “film theater, nightclub, and dance hall” (Jones 2001, 67; Ma 2014, 5). This kind of Chinese popular music was condemned by Chinese intellectuals, educators and musical composers and deemed as “decadent sound” (mimi zhi yin ˀˀP˂) because it was believed to be able to “seduced citizens away from the pressing tasks of nation-building and anti-imperialist resistance.” Leftist artists like Nie Er ȳȲ (1912-1935) produced new mass music that appropriated “Soviet mass music and European martial music” to call for patriotism (Jones 2001, 8, 126-127). While Peking opera, symphony orchestra, and leftist mass music coexisted with the Americanized popular music, it was the “decadent sound” sung 140 by African American singers and Chinese songstresses that became the symbol of Shanghai’s modernity. Shanghai’s popular music spread all over East Asia, and even across the Pacific by transnational music corporation and transnational migration in the 1930s (Jones 2001, 5). Manchukuo’s musical practice could hardly escape from Shanghai’s influence, though complex politics and ideologies forced Manchukuo to take a different approach into its modernization of music. Fengtian Radio Station began to program “Manchurian New Music” (Manzhou xingequ ǐDžŸƭƉ) in 1932 as soon as Manchukuo was established. Like “Meiji shinkyoku” ƀǀŸƉ in Japan in the Meiji era, the project orchestrated Chinese folk songs and popular music in Western musical instrument or music style to promote the spirit of the new nation, “Five Ethnicities in Harmony” and “Japanese- Manchukuo’s friendship” (Nichi-Man shinzen żǍɡÕ) (Yamaguchi and Fujiwara 1988, 30; Kawashima 2004).34 Yamaguchi Yoshiko, a Japanese girl, who received professional vocal training from the émigré Russian vocalist in Manchuria, became the best candidate for “Manchurian New Music.” Ri Kōran, her adopted Chinese name, and her virtuoso singing became a household name for millions of Chinese through the radio airwaves (Yamaguchi and Fujiwara 1988, 32). While the popular singer in Shanghai, such as Zhou Xuan Ëǰ (1920-1957), sung the “modern tunes” in a Chinese folk song style with unique vibrato, Ri Kōran’s operatic singing style evoked European art songs by her exquisite glissando and distinguished Manchukuo’s popular music from Shanghai and 34 My understanding of “Meiji shinkyoku” is based on Philip Flavin’s essay “Meiji shinkyoku: The Beginning of Modern Music for the koto” on Japan Review no.22 (2010), 103-123. 141 Japanese counterparts. Eventually, Ri Kōran’s voice dominated the aural space of Manchukuo. As Richard Kraus indicated, choirs and bands were regarded as less refine sort and favored by the working class in the early twentieth century, while piano and symphony represented the pinnacle of bourgeois culture (Kraus 1989, 15). In Manchukuo, the dominance of classic Western Music was indicative of Japanese colonizer’s desire of becoming European. While Jazz music was associated with “indigenous,” “marginalized” black culture, European art songs and Western classical music was for the Japanese in Manchukuo representative of a modern and victorious white.35 The rising imperialism and jingoism in japan needed a form that could affirm and improve its position in the international world. Nevertheless, Jazz, as “light music “and “salon music” with African American origin, did not fit this ambition. “Government officials, militarists, agrarian fundamentalists, and advocates of native arts differed in their visions for the nation,” remarked E. Taylor Atkin, “but they could usually reach a consensus that the jazz culture is disruptive to those visions” (2001, 113). Richard Strauss’s Japanese Festival Music (Japanische Festmusik, Op. 84), a large orchestration commissioned by Japanese government for commemorating “the 2600th anniversary of Japanese Empire” in 1940 evidenced the zenith of classic music at the peak of Japanese 35 Unlike Shanghai where the music industry, the film industry, and mass media were sustained by the audience’s consumption, Manchukuo’s mass media and entertainment industry were tightly controlled by the Information Department under the General Management Board (SōmuchōêU‘), the chair of which had substantial power to influence the prime minister of Manchukuo who was either the military officer from Kwantung Army or senior bureaucrat from Tokyo. In this condition, the aural space of Manchukuo was not determined by the musician nor the audience but by imperial Japan (Hu and Gu 1990; Yu and Zhou 2010). 142 imperialism (Kennedy 1999, 328). This privileging of Western classical music also set the tone in Manchukuo. In addition, the large population of Russian émigré musicians in Manchukuo also facilitated Manchukuo’s preference of Western classic music as a symbol of the new nation’s modernity. Many Russian musicians, such as the violinist Georgii Sidordov, the pianist Valentia Belousova, and the world famous Jewish violinist Hellmut Stern developed their career in Harbin. As members of the Harbin Symphony or the Chinese Eastern Railway Symphony, these musicians not only played to multiethnic audience in Manchukuo, they also represented Manchukuo to perform in Japan, Shanghai, and Japanese occupied Korea (Li 2002, 185-213; Stern 2003, 44-78). Such performance provided the backbone of Manchukuo film music. It was small wonder that Western classic music would become the primary music form with which Manchukuo film musicals enunciated their own yearnings for national sovereignty. The operatic sound of Western classical music would help stage a Manchukuo modernity that is aspirational white, though filtered through Japanese colonialism. II. Because of Western classical music’s favored role in Manchukuo’s development of a multiethnic society and multiculturalism, its incorporation into Manchukuo’s film musical becomes inevitable. It helps develop a cinematic sense of national sovereignty and helps Manchukuo’s cinema to define its modernity. A film musical cannot succeed without its leading star. In the case of Manchukuo musical, the figure of Ri Kōran is pivotal. An excellent vocalist of transnational identification, Ri becomes a crucial figure in Shimazu’s “great art film,” My Nightingale. Given the fact the late 1930s and 1940s 143 were an era in which Hollywood cinema was distributed all over the world, representing the emergence of transitional film markets, my reading of Ri’s start text will be rooted in Man’ei’s own version of transnational film markets under Japanese imperialism in Asia. As discussed in previous chapter, Manchukuo’s film studio, Man’ei, is a contradiction between Japanese imperialism and Manchukuo’s emergent autonomy. The conflicting allegiance created an unprecedented space for the film studio to explore its market worldwide.36 The film company’s management demonstrates an early form of transnational corporation. It consists of film professionals from Japan and China, fusing a variety of cultures and languages in its film production. Man’ei usually collaborates with film studios in Japan, Shanghai, and Taiwan, producing transnational joint-production. Unlike other Asian film companies that focus their production locally, Man’ei vigorously invests in Chinese market, and also establishes distribution and exhibition branches in different East Asian countries and regions, constructing a small-scale transnational network in East Asia.37 The expansion of its film studio models after German Ufa demonstrates Man’ei’s global ambition. The first transnational film star in East Asia, Ri Kōran, who fascinates film spectators in Xinjing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Thailand etc. is born in this context. Manchukuo’s film industry and film culture 36 See “Manshu ha seikai ichi no eiga koku ni naru” ʍ"6Ø2!©×l* (Manchuria becomes one of the film country in the world) by Mutō TomioÁ÷ƒÖ, the director of the Information Section at the Management and Coordination Agency of Manchukuo (Mutō 1942, 1-2). 37 In order to monopolizing film distribution in North China, Man’ei invested and established Huabei Film Company ¬¨たĿ‡Á in 1939. Three years later, Man’ei attempted to acquire China Film Company H¬たĿ‡Á, the biggest film studio in Shanghai under Japanese occupation. This acquisition did not succeed given the current president of China Film Company, kitagawa Nagamasa ÖòĥʥŮ’s fiercely resisted (Yamaguchi 2006, 192-193). 144 showcase the embryo transnationalism that is unintentionally produced by Japanese imperialism during WWII. I’m not trying to argue that transnationalism appears way before the globalizing era, but imperialism conditions and reveals Manchukuo’s distinctive colonial modernity in the early twentieth century. Michael Baskett argues that Japan constructs itself as an “attractive empire” through film production in East Asia. “It present[s] the attitudes, ideals, and myths of Japanese imperialism as an appealing alternative to Western colonialism and Asian provinciality.” He uses “the Great East Asian Film Sphere” to highlight Japanese film project in East Asia and its connection to imperialism (Baskett 2008, 3). Baskett’s argument though valid, does no justice to Man’ei because he does not consider Man’ei’s autonomy in developing its transnational film market. Japan’s influence of “attractive empire” stops at the borders of Manchukuo and its film production and dissemination. Man’ei though beholden to Japan’s imperial agenda, also, in its impulse to reach a transnational market, leave space for Manchukuo’s self-imagination, and multiethnic cultural sovereignty. Man’ei’s traffic of capital and human resource, as well as the expanding market have already turned out the characteristics of transnationalism in the late twentieth century. Man’ei, as an example of these early stage transnational corporations is managed like Mitsui and Sumitomo, whose business expands over East Asia through merger, acquisition, and monopoly in its short eight years life. The embryo transnationalism is not only demonstrated in Man’ei’s business practice but also configured by Ri Kōran’s stardom. Ri Kōran’s participation in the entertainment industry is a collusion of politics and capitalism. Her rise to stardom is predetermined by the complex politics and ideologies in Manchukuo. To examine the significance of Ri’s stardom in the film construction of 145 Manchukuo’s sovereignty, we could benefit from Richard Dyer’s work on “the star.” Dyer focuses on the star image and its sociopolitical and semiotic functions. He reminds us, to look into the relationship between stars and other aspects of social structure and values, the meanings and affects the image of stardom embodied, and the star images’ function within film texts. “Star matters because they act out aspects of life that matter to us” (Dyer 1986, 19). “From the perspective of ideology, analyses of stars, as images existing in films and other media texts,” he argues in an earlier study, Stars, “stress … the multiplicity of meanings and affects they embody. The concern of such textual analysis is to determine what meanings and affects can legitimately be read in them” (Dyer 1979, 3). Following Dyer’s reading, I shall approach Ri’s star text as a social and ideological product. Since the work of ideology is, for Dyer, “to deny the legitimacy of alternative and oppositional ideologies and to construct out of its own contradictions a consensual ideology that will appear to be valid for all members of society” (3), I will decode the competing meanings of Ri’s image, exploring what is concealed and what is underscored in her stardom with historical specificity, revealing through my reading of her star text the ambiguity of Manchukuo’s national identity. Previous scholarship on Ri Kōran tends to dwell on her incredible popularity in East Asia in and after World War II, while ignoring the ideological mechanism of Ri’s star image (High 2003; Baskett 2008; Li 2013). Since Man’ei’s production is not easily accessible, these studies of Ri are limited to “the continental trilogy,” three joint- productions between Man’ei and Japanese film studio during 1939-1940. A comprehensive and comparative reading of Ri’s film image and stardom in Manchukuo is beyond the scope of Ri’s earlier critics, who tend to reduce the complexity of her star 146 image and film image to ta simplistic propaganda imperative. Although the relationship between Ri’s film image and Japanese imperial project is well understood, her role in Manchukuo’s transnational film culture is usually ignored, so is the multiethnicity and multilingualism that Ri Kōran’s star text comes to embody. As a result, the significance of her star text in imagining Manchukuo’s modernity is underestimated. Ri’s star image underwent a transformation throughout her career in Man’ei due to the expediency of Japanese imperialism and the demand of cultural sovereignty for Manchukuo’s film world. Her representation of Manchukuo’s national identity also changed in accordance with the shifting representation of “national policy.” Like Japan, Manchukuo adopted the term of kokusaku eiga àțƂǷ to categorize the film production that promotes official ideology. Previous scholarship reads Man’ei’s “national policy film” as propaganda of Japanese imperialism (Hu and Gu 1990; Furuichi 2011). Furuichi asserted that Man’ei’s “national policy film” only “promotes or contains Japanese national policy” (2011, 61). However, this understanding was only partially correct because the “national policy” Man’ei film implemented oscillated between Japanese national policy of imperial propaganda and Manchukuo’s national policy of promoting national independence. The shifting interpretation of “national policy” was seen throughout Man’ei’s history. The conflict between Japanese national policy and Manchukuo’s national policy was also reflected in the film narratives. In the inaugurate issue of Manshu Eiga in 1937, a Japanese language article by an ethnic Japanese government official noted that Man’ei film should help people to better understand “the undivided connection between Japan and Manchukuo.” “It reinforce[d] the necessity of Japan-Manchuria collaboration” (Yazama 1937, 37). According to the Japanese 147 bureaucrat, Man’ei’s “national policy film” was imperial propaganda; thus, Furuichi’s generalization of Man’ei film seemed to secure its historical support. However, Mane’ei’s “national policy film” was also understood as the promotion of Manchukuo’s independence and sovereignty rather than Japanese colonialism. In Manchuria, an English magazine published in Japan, Man’ei regarded its taking over of film production and film distribution in Manchuria from Japanese Mantetsu as a symbol of the abolition of Japanese extraterritoriality in Manchuria, and claimed its film promoting “the spirit of nation building” (Liu 1939, 3). Similar opinion can be seen on Manchukuo’s propaganda magazine, Xuan fu ĎŢ (propaganda and comfort). An article by Man’ei interpreted “national policy” as “the cultivation of citizenry, the promotion of culture, the utilization of film as the weapon in the domestic and oversea propaganda war, and the spirit of nation building,” which did not include the collaboration with Japanese (Publicity Section of Man’ei 1939, 65). The competing definitions of “national policy” reveal historical ambiguity of Man’ei’s “national policy film,” and one can only determine which nation’s policy the film promoted in its textual specificity. An ideological analysis of Ri Kōran’s star image and the contextualization of Ri’s star image in her film and in specific historical period thus become very important in understanding the complex meaning of Ri’s stardom. Below, I tease out the different meanings of Ri’s star image in the different stage of her career in Man’ei. Ri’s life in Man’ei and the transformation of her star image generally consisted of three periods. The first was her debut in 1938-1939, which was also Man’ei’s and Manchukuo’s debut in the world. Ri’s star image in this period was an educated, athletic, and independent woman, who participated in the construction of the new nation. The 148 second was 1939-1940, when she starred the leading character in “the Continental Trilogy” with Tōhō. This was the time when Japan expanded its imperialism and colonialism in Asia. Domestically, it was also a time when Japan was eager to mobilize its rural population to migrate to Manchukuo for lack of economic opportunities in Japan. Japanese “national policy” was ever more reinforced in Manchukuo’s film production. Mass media echoed the film narrative, and transformed Ri Kōran into an attractive and sympathetic Chinese/Manchurian woman with exotic appeal. The third period was 1941- 1943 when Japan was trapped in the war chaos because the Allied claimed war against Japan after Pearl Harbor in 1941. Ri’s star image reclaimed mobility and autonomy, representing an independent workingwoman again. Nevertheless, Ri Kōran’s film works in these three periods more or less involved with musical elements in the film narrative. Ri’s star image was constructed in the aural, visual and discursive world. Her identity as a female soprano necessitated her rise to stardom. Ri Kōran was constructed as an artist with dignity rather than an entertainer of lower class. In Asian culture at the time, the performer and the songstress were regarded as equal to the prostitute or the courtesan, whose sexuality and artistic skills were the commodity for men’s entertainment. In order to promote Manchukuo’s progressive modernity in terms of gender equality, the film studio and mass media proactively made a deliberate effort that Manchukuo’s film actresses should appear as educated and professional women against traditional prejudice. When Amakasu Masahiko assumed the presidency of Man’ei in 1939, he banned the practice of Japanese traditional gender bias. For Amakasu, film actresses were not geisha, so they were not obligated to entertain the visiting high-ranking government officials (Sato 1985, 81). Thus, Man’ei’s treatment of 149 the film actress as a woman with subjectivity and dignity rather than the object of men’s desire is firstly reflected in its workplace. As the major film magazine in Manchukuo, Manshu Eiga differentiated Manchukuo’s stars from their counterparts in Shanghai or Hollywood. Rather than the symbol of consumerist culture or source of tabloid, Manchukuo’s women stars were considered and constructed as model citizens, who were interested in sports, studying, and working. The magazine often published the stars’ writing, ranging from personal journals with reflections on work, short stories, and poems. Ri Kōran had published her journals about her trip to Japan, her communications with her audience, as well as her book reviews. Ri’s comments on Tanizaki Junichiro ン ĤǓ;ʜ’s novels and The Dream of the Red Chamber demonstrated her familiarity with contemporary Japanese novels and classical Chinese fiction, as well as overall intellectual caliber (Ri 1939, 46). Compared to a report of the Shanghai’s film star, Zhou Xuan, which focused on her romantic relationship and leisure life, Ri’s star image was about working and learning (see Fig. 5. 1 and Fig. 5. 2). Her star image resonated with the promotion of working women in the society that we have witnessed in the previous chapter as well on Ri’s star image, an educated and professional woman, came to stand for the female producer and female nation-builder of Manchukuo. 150    Ri’s image represented the coupling of autonomy and independence. On the screen, her filmic characters were always associated with the most advanced technology and means of transportation that enhanced women’s freedom of movement. She was featured in Honeymoon Express (Miyue kuaiche ɗƍŊʆ directed by Ueno Shinji [ʡȆ×, 1939), literally riding on the express train from Xinjing to Beijing. The express train evoked Manchukuo’s “Asia Express,” the fastest train in East Asia at that time. Her sportswoman’s body in Fighting Policeman (Tiexun huixin ʣəŖņ, directed by Yamauchi Eizō†Oó3, 1939) exemplified a new kind of mobility unprecedented for women. In Journey to the East (directed by Ōtani ToshiosĄGt, 1939) Ri was an office staff member in a Tokyo company, who moved with ease between the public sphere and domestic sphere. The female mobility in the visual world resonated with Ri’s Fig. 5.1, Zhou Xuan was in leisure. Stars’ Family§¨‚’. Courtesy by the Makino Collection of Columbia University Library Fig. 5. 2, Ri Kōran worked with a camera on site. Manshu Eiga, volume 3, no.2, 1939. 151 multiple images in mass media. Ri was created as a star who could move between different ethnic groups, different social classes, and different places in the world. Because her multilingual ability and cosmopolitan appearance she performed in public different ethnic roles and social functions (see Fig. 5. 3 and Fig. 5. 4). Radio broadcast made “Ri Kōran” an omnipresent Chinese singer, and mass media also intentionally mystified her identity between Chinese nationality and Japanese nationality. In addition to radio, the booming printing media also increased the awareness of Ri Kōran’s mobility for the public. Shanghai’s magazines depicted her as a star who was always traveling between Tokyo, Shanghai, Xinjing and Harbin for film shooting or recording making (Stephenson 1999, 226). Fig.5. 3, upper left, Ri Kōran in a Chinese qipao. Right, Ri Kōran and Man’ei star, Meng Hong}ɔ in Japanese Kimono. The caption indicated that this was their way to the monument for the Japanese war martyrs on the Chinese New Year of 1939. Manshu Eiga, volume 3, no.1. 152 The ethnic flexibility and mobility configured in Ri’s star image was in line with Manchukuo’s aspiration of national independence and its longing for national cinema. Although Manchukuo’s independence from China was imposed by the Empire of Japan, Manchukuo’s people might not be willing to submit to Japan. The intellectuals were vigilant under Japanese colonialism and attempted national independence in alternative ways. Despite the propaganda of “Japanese-Manchurian Collaboration,” as early as 1933, people in Manchukuo had realized clearly that the relationship between Japan and Manchukuo was a colonial one. “Japanese migration to Manchukuo [wa]s merely a resolution of Japan’s domestic labor surplus.” “Japan [took] Manchukuo as the commodity market and resources supply” (Shu Nong 1933, 8).38 However, it was 38 In text citation in English translation is mine. The original text in Chinese is included as follows “glżƒ ėǐĦļKÒÏǾĪ縷ŶǾzȥæÜKżƒĕhc¼ʊ žǾ¢、]åʱ›c¼Ȱåそ_Ǿí£[ Fig. 5. 4 Ri Kōran was on a bus during her visit to Japan. “Man’ei azuma he iku” Ê©³#ü , (Man’ei Marches East). Manshu Eiga, volume 3, no.5, 1939. 153 impossible for the author to appeal for independence publicly. He noted that “‘Japanese and Manchukuo’s collaboration and ‘Japanese and Manchukuo’s friendship’ [were] involve[d] with stink politics,” thus advocating the development of agriculture for the purpose of constructing a “paradise” (11).39 Although his conclusion of “paradise” conformed to the official propaganda of “ōdō rakudō” ǥʘƨä, paradise ruled by the king’s way, his criticism of Japanese colonialism in Manchukuo and his imagination of a multiethnic, collective, and agricultural community epitomized Manchukuo’s claiming of sovereignty. Since this essay was published on a state-funded magazine, Datong Culture (Datong wenhua ôÄŴ§), his enunciation of national independence could be considered as an idea sponsored by certain pro-independent power in the colonial government. Similar urge to claim sovereignty is seen in film production. Ri Kōran’s rise to stardom is at once Man’ei’s response to the aspiration of national film and a business attempt to compete against Shanghai film (High 2003, 273). As soon as Man’ei established, the film critic, Akagawa Kōichi ąŒ|2 appealed for great films that could introduce Manchukuo to the world. He warned filmmakers that it would only bring out negative result if the filmmakers in Manchukuo’s thought of making film in “Japanese Manchurian” style (Akagawa 1937, 14).40 Another film critic evoked the cinematic representation of Manchukuo’s multiethnicity to reinforce the conception of “a nation for 39 My translation. The original text in Chinese is “ÉƌȤűƹʛcïƙǐȯʑ;マ żǐÃu8żǐbÕ8;’ƎŮǀǾȸÌ8]— ȱdzˇ ʎʏö½ƛQPʞ8É 《Əżǐcïむƛ¥¡ ” 40 My translation. The original text in Japanese is “ żƒc!ǍĦǾôœŨ: ;そŘÍ *)#6》ƾ*"ʍėƙ Uœ+*.” 154 all” in Manchukuo (Nishimura 1938, 18).41 Although the colonial superiority of Nishimura made him regard Manchukuo’s people as “less civilized and less educated” (£VÛÞĂÛĉ+), his focus on multiethnicity illuminated a way to construct Manchukuo’s national identity. In addition to multiethnicity, music was another concern of Manchukuo’s audience. For them, the representation of Manchukuo’s unique music is crucial (Tengyan 1939, 30).42 If Richard Dyer is right that “stars matter because they act out aspects of life that matter to us; and performers get to be stars when what they act out matters to enough people,” Ri Kōran’s star image acts out independence and sovereignty that matters to Manchukuo’s people and seems to fulfill Manchukuo’s aspiration for national cinema sovereignty (Dyer 1986, 19). Besides her fluid pan-Asian look, Ri’s virtuoso singing and her dignified star persona enable her individual image to stand for the new national community. It is through her music recordings and movie personae that a progressive, modern, and multiethnic Manchukuo self-determination are being imagined, individually and collectively. It is fair to say that Ri is the “central feature” of Manchukuo’s (19). Then, in 1939-1941, “the continental trilogy,” The Song of White Orchid, The Night of China, and The Vow in the Desert, made Ri Kōran a “central feature” in Japan. Her role as a submissive and appealing Chinese girl ignited Japanese audiences’ dream of 41 My translation. The original text in Japanese is “ʍ!v,£VÛÞĂÛ ĉ+sû-¡5Úä!MC*on)¬+(!āä-2! ÜÛM^!l‚!Ÿ¾ì&_4%*@U!Ĉü"©×!¡ϛ" ­'T—Ág *.” 42 My translation. The original text in Chinese is “ɮĘQơğ>àãǐÅЮÛĘ Q4Èた™78ĘQ¥N.” 155 conquering Manchukuo, the continent. The three joint-productions between Man’ei and Japanese Tōhō were also the notorious propaganda film in the film history. Scholars criticized them for serving Japanese “national policy,” the promotion of Japanese imperialism and the eulogy of Japanese expansion in Asia (Furuichi 2011,71). However, I want to point out that this image of sensual and obedient Chinese woman was only highlighted in the second period of Ri’s film career, unlike her star image in the first period (1938-1939) that underscored her aura as an artist. This transformation happened with Man’ei’s oversea expansion and acceptance of Japanese imperial propaganda. In its attempt to seized overseas market, Man’ei banked on Ri’s popularity as the face of Manchukuo and collaborated with Tōhō. On the Japanese side, the audience welcomed the representation of a Chinese woman who was sympathetic to “Japanese Spirit” (High 2003, 272). Ri Kōran in the three joint-productions was a submissive colonized woman with exotic appeal, falling in love with Japanese man played by the most influential male star, Hasegawa KazuoĐĄŒ2t. The passive image clashed with her previous film image of independence and dignity, but it became a huge attraction to the Japanese audience. “Because of her physical beauty and her charm of an excellent soprano, Japanese people’s fantasy and curiosity of Manchukuo were stimulated” (Tanaga 1998, 13). On one film poster of The Song of White Orchid, Ri leaned on Hasegawa with a smile on her face. Her naked arms and hands were spotlighted. The radiance on her qipao also drew people’s attention to her voluptuous body. Unlike Hasegawa, who was in black and partially in the shadow, Ri’s face, body, and hair were all highlighted. The lighting flattered her posture and also enhanced the sensual effect. In this couple, Japan was the dominant male and Manchukuo was the submissive female (see Fig. 5. 5). The image 156 sophisticatedly coded the colonial relationship of domination through gender when Ri’s devotion to her Japanese lover was grasped as Manchukuo’s capitulation to Japan. Because of her sudden popularity in Japan, her earlier film, Fighting Policeman, was also remade into a Japanese version and showed in Japanese theaters. Film posters for Fighting Policeman claimed Ri as the leading role and foreground her image, while ignoring the real leading by Manchurian male stars. A fragile young girl comforted by the strong police, or an alluring woman with gorgeous eyelashes, Ri was portrayed as a dependent and appealing woman in need of a man’s help and redemption (see Fig. 5. 6). Her feminine allure also represented “the virgin land” of Manchukuo waiting for Japanese conquest. Ri’s transformation from a professional woman with autonomy to a submissive woman with exotic appeal was pervaded by the power dynamics between Japan and Fig. 5. 5 a film advertisement of The Song of White Orchid. Courtesy by Makino Collection of Columbia University Library. Fig. 5. 6 a film advertisement of Fighting Policeman. Courtesy by Makino Collection of Columbia University Library. 157 Manchukuo. When “the continental trilogy” was popular in Japan during 1939-1941, it also witnessed the peak of Japanese imperialism in East Asia. Japan, Germany and Italy signed the Berlin Pact in 1940, which tighten relationship between these three nations after the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936, and also made Japan more confident in confronting the U.S and Britain in East Asia (Morris 2003, 42). The 1941 Neutraility Pact between Japan and Soviet Union “would relieve Japan of considerable pressure from the north, and which would permit it to concentrate on Pacific and southern problems” (Department of Defense, USA 1978, 46). In early 1941, Japan’s success in diplomacy and the progress in the war with China enabled the empire to dream of dominance in East Asia. The imperial army brought along Ri kōran’s film, The Night of China, in their invasion of French Indochina in 1940. The army intended to spread the empire’s “goodwill” by Ri’s star image of submissive colonized woman (Hazumi 1942, 6). Thus, Ri’s image not only was a symbol of Manchukuo as in the first period but also became “an icon of Empire” in the second period of her career in Man’ei (Baskett 2008, 77). Although the Japanese colonizer and Man’ei respectively attempted to promote its imperial project or film business through Ri Kōran’s stardom, neither ambition was actually realized by “the continental trilogy,” except that Ri became the biggest film star in East Asia. “The continental trilogy” was only favored by Japanese audience, but could not reach people in the colonies. The film critic, Hazumi Tsuneo æýœt, discovered that the same Ri Kōran’s films could not compete with American film in Shanghai’s market. In fact, hardly any Japanese film was favored by Shanghai audience, but Hazumi attributed the business failure to the lack of suitable Japanese films for first-class theaters in Shanghai (Hazumi 1942, 8). As a scholar from the empire, Hazumi failed to 158 understand that the film’s blatant imperialism turned off people in the Japanese colony. Unlike the puzzled Hazumi, his Manchukuo contemporary saw through the problem of “the continental trilogy,” especially Ri Kōran’s transformed image. They criticized Ri Kōran’s performance in the Song of White Orchid for being “haixiu” î, “timid,” “shy,” or “meek” in English (Yamashita and Gong 1940, 29). Manchukuo’s audience was unable to appreciate the colonial romance, treating their star idol Ri as an obedient and powerless woman. Surprisingly, the worry of “national policy” in overriding the freedom of creativity was shared by the president of Man’ei, Amakasu. He demanded Man’ei to make film for Manchurian people rather than absolute submission to “national policy” It was worth noting that the “national policy” that Amakasu opposed was Japanese imperialism, and what he wanted to revive was the representation of Manchukuo’s independence (Yamaguchi 1995, 132-133). Amakasu’s new strategy might be based on two business concerns. Primarily, it was because of Man’ei’s loss of Japanese market. When Pacific War started after Pearl Harbor in the December of 1941, the “continental Boom” quickly faded away in Japan. The interracial romance, as well as Ri Kōran’s songs were deemed as cacophony to the wartime spirit (High 2003, 283). While Japan was drawn deeper into wars in China and Southeast Asia, the style of “continental trilogy,” lost its charm to the Japanese audience. Secondly, Amakasu’s rearrangement of film production was a response to the increasing social demand for “national film” in Manchukuo. In order to save its film market, Man’ei held several symposiums in Fengtian, Xinjing, and Harbin, inviting local intellectuals for advice. Film critics in Fengtian compared Man’ei film with Shanghai film and pointed out that the submission to “national policy” damage Man’ei’s 159 creativity. They noted, “Man’ei’s cinematized ‘national policy’ [was] no more than the government announcement, nevertheless, with freedom of production, Shanghai’s filmmaker [had] more chance to create good films” (Yamashita and Gong 1940, 28). The “national policy film” film critics attacked here was the film that carried out Japanese national policy, propagandizing imperial expansion, like the “continental trilogy” starred by Ri Kōran. This criticism did not mean the refusal of the film carried out Manchukuo’s national policy of promoting national independence. Given “national policy film” was shifting between the promotion of Japanese imperialism and Manchukuo’s spirit of nation building, Zhou Guoqing, another film critic, asked for “national film” of Manchukuo instead, in order to claim Manchukuo’s national identity. In a critical article, Zhou appealed, “we want[ed] to see something that could differentiate Manchukuo’s film from other national film.” For him, “national film” was the film work that represented “national character” (kokuminseikÛ), like Japanese Nikkatsu’s Earth. If Manchukuo’s filmmaker could represent Manchukuo’s “national characters,” “Manchukuo’s film would not be the extension of any other national film” (Zhou 1940, 12). This kind of request reached a peak in 1942 when Manchukuo entered the tenth year of its establishment. People needed an affirmation of their national identity rather than the representation of Japanese imperialism. It is people’s demands for a proper national film of Manchukuo and Man’ei’s accountability to such demands that Ri Kōran’s star image underwent another transformation during 1941-1943, what I called the third period. The change began with The Night of Soochow (J: Sushū no yoru, C: Suzhou zhi ye ɀ!q, directed by Nomura HiromasaĎ²Æ„, 1941), a co-production with Tōhō’s rival studio, Shochiku 160 Ofuna´åsð. Scholars regarded this film as an imitation of Tōhō’s The Night of China, with southern China as its background, and an interracial romance between Japanese man and Chinese woman as its plot. For me, Ri Kōran’s film character, a nurse at an orphanage, made the film distinctively different from The Night of China. Ri reclaimed her role of the working woman and the image of a nation builder on the screen from first period of her film career. According to Eiga Junpo, The Night of Soochow was an extraordinary success among Chinese audience because Ri’s film character, the Chinese woman who shared equal responsibility and opportunity with her Japanese lover in constructing a “Great East Asia.” The cinematic representation of gender equality amused Chinese audiences since gender relationship was index to the colonial relationship between Japan and China or Manchukuo. The equality embodied by the Chinese film character, though by a Manchurian film star, expressed China and Manchukuo’s longing for political independence. Nevertheless, audiences also criticized that the film did not give the female protagonist as much mobility as the male protagonist had. While the Japanese man in the story was all about work, the Chinese woman eventually sacrificed her work for love (Asai 1942, 31-32). According to this comment, we could see that gender equality, social mobility, and personal sovereignty mattered a lot to Manchukuo’s audiences. A star who could represent or act out these aspects of ideas would be what they wanted to see, and this star was Ri Kōran. In one issue of Manshu Eiga, there is a folio entitled “Ethnic Harmony—Variation of Ri Kōran” featuring the five faces of Ri Kōran representing the principal ethnicities of Manchukuo, Manchurian/Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Mongolian. The very fact her image maker puts her in the costumes of different ethnicities reveals the racial 161 flexibility of Ri Kōran as the star text, her ability to embody “Five Manchukuo Ethnicities in Harmony.” With her star image, Ri Kōran begins to stand for the emergent Manchukuo, its women and its modernity. To Richard Dyer, “the star-audience effect is particularly intense amongst the groups that shared a peculiarly intense pressure from role or identity conflict, and the groups that were excluded from dominant articulation” (Dyer 1979, 37). In Manchukuo, the conflict between the dominant and the marginalized does not merely lie in the dichotomy that Dyer notes, such as the adult and the adolescents, the male and the female. Rather, the dichotomy is Japanese domination versus Manchukuo’s suppression. Manchukuo itself is a collectivity of marginalized groups. Ri Kōran’s star image in this peculiar context, the submissive but independent, the athletic and educated, the sexually appealing yet innocent, the both Japanese and Chinese yet neither Japanese nor Chinese comes to configure collective identity of Manchukuo. With her voice, her mobility, her sexuality and her multiple identities, Ri’s unique star persona eventually enables her to center the last masterpiece of multiethnic fantasy by Man’ei, the film musical, My Nightingale. 162 (Fig. 5. 7, “Ethnic Harmony—Variation of Ri Kōran äYa──°ęù8ăV,” Manshu Eiga 4, no. 4) III. When film musical flourished in the 1930s-1940s all over the world, Manchukuo was no exception. For Man’ei to realize its ambition of having a place in the transnational film market, it had to compete with both Hollywood’s and Shanghai’s musicals. American film musical shapes this genre with its characteristic film language. It privileges the integration as the key feature. “Smoothing out the transition between [registers], by having the numbers do narrative work,” the Hollywood musical overcomes the disruptive effects of song and dance (Dyer 2012, 58). Another characteristic of it is dual-focus structure. The duality of female and male, good and evil, black and white, etc. and the reliance on couple formation to bring to the film narrative a nice closure (Altman 1987, 28). However, Hollywood’s practice is not the only golden standard. In terms of integration and dual structure, different national film musical has different takes. Italian cinema has a more “casual” and “pragmatic approach to the relation between voice and body” than Hollywood film (Dyer 2012, 32). In Japan, the musical form is incorporated 163 with the existing Japanese film genres, such as shoshimin eiga (salaryman film) (Gerow 2012, 162). Hollywood’s dual structure, “the parallel stars of opposite sex and radically divergent values,” is transformed into the duality of office and family while music provides the resolution of the story (Altman 1987, 19). The singing part is usually distant from the domestic space but takes place in a nightclub and performed by the singsong girl or the dancer. Like Japan, the Chinese tradition also tend to frown upon bodily display in the 1930s and 1940s, so most of the singing and dance scenes in Chinese film musical take place in the entertainment joints. Unlike Hollywood musical’s integration of music and narrative, Chinese musical refers to “a seamless arrangement of diegetic songs and dance into narrative, regardless of their musical provenance.” It ranges from “films that transpose nightclub scenes on to the screen,” “musicals that directly copy Hollywood models,” to “those flamboyant appropriations of traditional opera, as well as multi- faceted varieties in between” (Yeh 2012, 172). In the case of Manchukuo musical, because of Ri Kōran’s stardom and vocal talent, the film musical tends to heavily depend on the construction of the female protagonist. The solo focus of the female rather than a dual structure differentiates Manchukuo film musical from Hollywood film musical of the same period. Shanghai’s film musical also tends to focus on the singing female protagonist. The female protagonist in Shanghai film musical is always a songstress of the lower class, such as Songstress Red Peony (Genü hongmudan ƭùȟǝJ, directed by Zhang Shichuan ĹȊĥ, 1931), and Zhou Xuan’s singsong girl in Street Angel (Malu tianshi ˋ ʄõw, directed by Yuan Muzhi ɛǞP, 1937). The setup of the teahouse, the nightclub, or the dance hall make possible the staging of singing and dance, while these 164 commercial spaces also designate that the singing, the singing subject, and her sexuality are all commodities. In Sounding the Modern Woman, Jean Ma regards the image of songstress in Chinese film musical as a medium, whose voice articulates, conveys and negotiates the desires and traumas associated with modernity; however, the voice, the body, and the performance of the songstress in the diegetic world, as well as the female star herself in both diegetic and non-diegetic world, are appropriated by the industry and consumed by the male gaze (Ma 2014, 116-122). The modernity that the songstress embodies is a gendered modern culture. Fundamentally speaking, the modern woman that is created by the image of the songstress is captured by capitalist consumerist culture, no matter if she is the innocent singsong girl played by Zhou Xuan in the 1930s or the sensual Mambo girl played by Grace Chang in the 1950s. Even in the Leftist film made in Shanghai, the female singing subject is always appropriated by a revolutionary discourse. The singing woman cannot escape from the stereotype of the fallen woman, and she can only be redeemed when her body and voice are appropriated by nationalism and revolution. In the other words, the singing woman in the 1930s and 1940s’ Chinese film musical is both gendered and commodified, reflecting the economy and revolution of the historical time that objectify and consume the singing woman, her singing and her sexuality (Jones 2001, 122). Manchukuo and Shanghai’s film musical both rely on the female lead. The difference is that the role of the lead in Manchukuo film musical has never been a singsong girl. In the various musical that Ri Kōran plays the lead, her sexuality is not sellable commodity. As the protean figure in the musicals, Ri can lend herself with different forms of musical play, enhancing the cinematic effect, such as the 165 workingwoman’s singing in Journey to the East in Ri’s first film period. Her song in the film depicts a utopian Manchukuo and constructs a progressive female role. While Ri’s Liqin, the Manchurian woman in Tokyo is at once a singing woman and a working woman, only geisha and Can-can dancer in Japan can sing and dance. In this contrast, Manchukuo’s modern woman seems to have more autonomy. In Night of Soochow, Ri’s role of Meilan sings only for fundraising for the orphanage she works at. As a working woman who takes care of the next generation for the nation, Meilan’s singing also becomes part of nation construction. Winter Jasmine depicts a triangular romantic story between Ri’s Manchurian woman, a Japanese woman and a Japanese man in Fengtian. In the role of Bai Li, her and Murakawa’s songs become a competition between woman and man, Manchukuo and Japan. Neither Journey to the East, Night of Soochow nor Winter Jasmine follows Hollywood’s dual structure but hinges on Ri’s operatic vocals. The solo focus thereby foregrounds Manchukuo’s bourgeois culture through Ri’s cosmopolitan appearance and European style of singing. Shimazu’s My Nightingale further represents an aspiration of European culture in music and visuality. The film is based on Daibutsu Jirōs=½č’s novel under the title of Harbin kajō.0/1¿u (Harbin Songstress), telling an interracial father-daughter story in the multicultural Harbin. Not adopting the original title of the novel, Shimazu uses the symbol of the “nightingale” to suggest an implication of Western poetic tradition, from Sappho’s “spring’s messenger, the sweet- voiced nightingale” to John Keats (Hirsch 2007, intro). The filmmaker’s disavowal of the original title not only reveals his intention of distinguishing Mariko, the female protagonist, from the songstress of lower class but also situates Ri kōran’s Mariko in classical western culture, highlighting her identity as an artist. Hollywood’s stereotypical 166 romance is replaced by the affiliation of the Russian father and Japanese daughter. Mariko, as constructed as a future artist of Manchukuo, her performance of the European style art song embodies a multicultural Manchukuo with Japanese and European culture at its essence. From Journey to the East to My Nightingale, the singing woman in Manchukuo musical evolves from a Manchurian workingwoman embraces bourgeois culture to a Japanese female artist who inherits European bourgeois tradition. This evolution reveals that Manchukuo’s colonial modernity is framed by Japanese imperialism. At the core of its apparent multiethnicity and multiculturalism is a longing for convergence of Japanese and European culture only. Below, I provide a close reading of Journey to the East, and My Nightingale. One is the extant earliest Ri’s work in the first period of her career, and the other one is Shimazu’s masterpiece. In this chronological comparison, we can see clearly the evolution of Manchukuo’s film musical and understand its stylistic distinction. Made in 1938, Journey to the East showed us the preliminary musical production of Manchukuo. Unlike Hollywood’s highly integration of the narrative and the music, Journey to the East consists of two story lines, in which disparate images of Manchukuo are portrayed. While “integration” is central to Hollywood film musical, scholarship in recent years becomes interested in the different time and space created by the narrative and the music in a film, which I call “incongruity.” Richard Dyer calls attention to “the space of a song.” In the film, “singing fills space.” “Its relation to the spatial and temporal co-ordinates of lyrics opens out onto the question of space and time” (Dyer 2012, 8). In Jean Ma’s reading of Dyer, “songs collapse the distance between singer and listener to transcend the ordinary life.” “Songs entail a transformation in the phenomenal 167 experience of the spectator-auditor” because “the repetition and redundancy has a tendency towards a sense of stasis” (Dyer 2012, 5; Ma 2014, 10). McMillin points out that there is another order of time in the theatre, not just the cause-and-effect sequencing of the plot but the lyrical repetitions of song and dance (McMillin 2014, 8). Dyer and McMillin’s important studies invite us to look into the “incongruity” of the different time and space created by music and narrative in Journey to the East. The construction of characters and their disparate embodiments of Manchukuo reveal the contradiction between Manchukuo’s self-imagined sovereignty and Japanese imperialism. Journey to the East begins with two Manchurian peasants’ journey to Tokyo. The two illiterate peasants become homeless as soon as they arrive. Hired by an advertisement agency in Tokyo, they unexpectedly become an urban phenomenon for their vulgar performance of Er-ren Zhuan Wcʇ, the folk song-and-dance duet popular in provincial Manchuria. Portraying these two Manchurian peasants as comic figures, who earn a life in Tokyo by entertaining the city with their country burlesque, the first story line of Journey to the East seems a contrast between Manchukuo and Japan, the provincial frontier and the metropolitan center. Another story line reverses the opposition through a Manchurian woman’s thriving professional and personal life in Tokyo. Starred by Ri Kōran, Liqin’s cosmopolitan appearance and virtuoso singing wins her recognition in Japanese society. Working at the advertisement agency, Liqin helps out her compatriots in their stay in the metropolitan city. The two story lines contradict each other in terms of the different embodiments of Manchukuo’s national identity. While the male peasants represent Manchukuo as provincial and backward, the capable working woman embodies Manchukuo’s bourgeois culture. Liqin’s popularity in Tokyo envisions that Manchukuo’s 168 cosmopolitanism can enable it to be an equal nation to Japan. However, the film concludes with Liqin and her folks’ back home. Although the narrative rationalizes their going home as for nation building, the film ending totally upsets the optimistic possibility envisioned by Liqin in the space of her song. Rather than a patriotic volition, it is Japanese imperialism dictates Manchurian migration’s leave. Among all the Manchurian characters in Journey to the East, Liqin has least reason to go back to Manchukuo because her personal life and professional life both develop well in Japan. However, the construction of the Liqin character in the space of songs perhaps is too progressive, thus, in the space of the narrative, she is so out of place. Japan is primarily a patriarchal society in the film. Japanese women also sing in Journey to the East, but they are geisha who sing and dance at a high-end restaurant for entertaining businessmen or can-can dancers in the westernized theater who seduce male audience. In both scenarios, Japanese singing and dancing women, no matter traditional or modern, are portrayed as commodities. They are similar to the songstress in Jean Ma’s examination of Chinese film musical. In contrast, as a singing subject, Liqin in the space of the song is not the commodity as the stereotypical singing woman. Depicted in a close- up, she sings with confidence and comfort as if she is the center of the world. Liqin is portrayed like a star who can only be appreciated in distance and not approachable. The singing Liqin resembles to Ri Kōran’s image in the non-diegetic world. Ri Kōran is depicted as an independent, educated woman with extraordinary mobility—one can read her news, listening to her songs in the radio, but one can hardly approach her because she is always traveling between different cities for her work. Ri’s star image and Liqin’s film 169 image is connected and converged by the song, representing Manchukuo’s national identity as an independent and dignified one. The song Liqin sings is “A Tune of Early Spring” (Yoshun ko uta ʶƃę Ñ) whose lyrics depict an abundant and happy life in Manchukuo. Liqin or Ri Kōran’s chiaroscuro in her singing differentiates herself from other Chinese songstress, whose singing may not include the use of the head-voice and lack of vibrato in a European sense.43 Thus, Liqin’s performance evokes the vocal style of European art song and indicates a more sophisticated taste that Japanese people admire. The blend of Chinese musical instrument and Liqin’s operatic singing represents the harmony of different cultures and resonates with Manchukuo’s self-conception as a paradise for multiethnic people. According to Richard Dyer, music takes up space because it is always physically produced somewhere and later linked to regional and national “aural landscapes.” “These aural associations […] geographically anchor music when taken up for wider mass consumption, even while moving away from local embeddedness, crossing borders…” (Dyer 2012, 25-26). The degetic music here is a song in Chinese with Chinese string and woodwind accompaniment, while in the close-up and long shots, Liqin is singing with the magnificent skyline of Hibiya as her background. The match of music and editing creates an effect of that the Manchurian woman’s Chinese song crosses the national borders and fills up the space of Japan’s most important financial district. In the time of the song, the 43 “Chiaroscuro” is an Italian term that means “bright-dark” tone. “Every sung note was supposed to have a bright edge as well as a dark or round quality in a complex texture of vocal resonance.” “It is used to describe the ideal voice quality for classically trained [European] singer” (Stark 2003, 33). Meanwhile, “the exclusive use of the head-voice” “coupled with a lack of culture for vibrato in the European sense can serve as an introductory indication” of the difference of the classical singing between Chinese and European singers (Shen and Simon 2011, 3). 170 character of Liqin defines Manchukuo’s modernity as women’s independence and multiculturalism. This progressive woman’s image is incongruous to Japanese male- dominated culture and is also incompatible to the image of “good wife wise mother” that is advocated during the imperial war in Japan. Although this construction of independent woman in the space of songs later becomes a characteristic of Manchukuo’s film musical, no space for Liqin in Tokyo. Journey to the East showcases Manchurian migration’s story in Japan, and implicitly reveals that the migration is not welcome despite the propaganda of “Japanese and Manchukuo’s friendship” in its contemporary. However, Japanese people have more freedom to access Manchukuo, and this is evidenced in My Nightingale. Shimazu’s masterpiece displays that Manchukuo becomes a paradise for Japanese and Russian migrants. The adopted father-daughter story replaces Hollywood duality and envisions a new form of nation formation that is not based on singular lineage but of political consent. However, the absence of the other ethnicities, such as Chinese, Manchurian, and Korean etc. reveals that the film’s imagined nation formation is exclusive to Japanese and Russian communities. While the female protagonist’s growing into a mature artist anticipates Manchukuo’s eventual independence, her identity as a Japanese descendent and her mastery of classical European songs reveals that Shimazu’s imagination of Manchukuo’s modernity is also limited to a total Europeanization of Japanese. My Nightingale can be read as a prehistory of the founding of Manchukuo. The father-daughter generational plot shows disparate aspirations of nation formation. The Russian Revolution causes the Russian émigré’s exile to Chinese Manchuria. Geopolitical competitions between Russia, Japan and China in Chinese Manchuria lead to 171 the separation of a Japanese family. Thus, similar condition of displacement connects the Russian male tenor, Dimitri, to the lost girl, Mariko. They form an interethnic family in Harbin. Dmitri is a royalist from the center of the old empire, Moscow. Mariko, though Japanese descent, grows up within the Russian community in Manchuria. The loving relation between father and daughter of different racial origins and ideological stances promises the forging political and cultural solidarities in the open space of Manchuria, while this aspiration conflicts with the displaced Russian people’s irreducible attachment to their Russian lineage. From the Russian father, to his dear friends the countess, the count, and other opera artists, they all long for an impossible past. In Dimitri’s local time, Harbin has been transformed into a replica of Russian city and provides him with a space to live and survive, while Russia has become Soviet Union, a place that exile like he cannot really go back. The past he is longing for is not “a past time,” but a feeling of belonging, juvenescence, stability, and high art, a “St. Elsewhere, another time, a better life.” According to Svetlana Boym, this kind of “unrealized dream of the past” is nostalgia. Nostalgia and progress are “alter egos,” and Dimitri’s nostalgia for “another time” is coeval to his adopted daughter’s attachment to the present and her aspiration of future (Boym 2001, XVI). Unlike her adopted father, Mariko does not have the memory or lineage of either Russia or Japan; rather, her whole being is anchored in the locality of Harbin, the city based on multiethnic affiliation. The Russian father and Japanese daughter relation evidences the possibility of Manchukuo as a multiethnic affiliation and political solidarity. While Dimitri’s nostalgia to imperial Russia and Mariko’s allegiance to Harbin are both resulted from their displacement caused by imperial expansion, their conflicting conceptions of identity reveals incongruity of different narrations of the 172 nation. Constructed thus, My Nightingale displays the complexity of the multiethnic imagination of Manchukuo. The story of adoption has become in this instance the story of different national formations and displayed in the musical spaces. My Nightingale’s innovative father- daughter relationship takes an immediate departure from Hollywood musical. According to Rick Altman, sexual duality is central to the genre of Hollywood musical, though male and female characters also embody other dualities (e.g., work and entertainment, riches and pleasure). The binary opposition of women and men is typically resolved by marriage or other form of reconciliation (Altman 1987, 17). Crucially, this dual structure in My Nightingale is transformed into a father-daughter relationship. Dimitri’s singings mainly take place in the on-stage classical opera. His performance of Gothe’s Faust and Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades evokes the nostalgia to bourgeois culture and European imperial tradition, and also resonates with Manchukuo’s favor of Western classical music. Meanwhile, Mariko the daughter evokes an emergent community in the space of songs. Her first song “Persian Bird” is a typical Russian style art song. Mariko’s lower register is smooth. The notes sung with a more open throat are powerful and resonant. Her use of melisma and vibrato showcases the Japanese girl’s mastery of European art song at ease.44 This song takes place in the domestic space when Countess Milskaya comes to visit Dimitri after ten years separation. The euphoric melody of Mariko’s “Persian Bird” cheers up the exiled Russians and transforms a Harbin’s residence into a temporary harbor for displaced people. The lyrics describe a little bird’s first dance in life 44 My understanding of European art song and reading of Manchukuo’s music benefits from Professor Jeffrey Stolet and Chi Wang. I thank both of them for their contribution to my project. 173 and the close-up of Dmitri’s joy shows his satisfaction of Mariko’s virtuosity. Ri Kōran’s exquisite vocal in fluent Russian adds meaning to this image (Chion 1994). On the screen is a young, naïve, and innocent Asian face, while what we hear is masterful female soprano singing Russian art song. The mismatched audiovisual effect displays a forming minor group in Harbin. Mariko’s image merges with Ri’s star image and becomes an assemblage of the minority in the space of song. Like Mariko in the diegetic world and Ri in the non-diegetic world, the displaced children in Chinese Manchuria do not have the lineage that a nostalgic desire can be projected onto, “Persian Bird” sung in deterritorialized Russian enunciates the longing for belonging. Critic Jie Li notes that Ri’s performance in this film is “remarkably childish, as if she wished to return to her cosmopolitan childhood days” (Li 2013, 87). For me, Mariko’s youth and naivety symbolize the burgeoning collective community. Her mastery of Russian language and art demonstrates the cosmopolitanism and multilingualism of the emergent nation-state. Rather than nostalgia of “the cosmopolitan childhood,” Mariko’s song envisions the becoming of multicultural and multiethnic future. The imagination of the nation in formation is also witnessed in Mariko’s performance of the song “My Nightingale” at a charity party, when the maestro’s little bird has transformed into a professional vocalist. However, this imagination is perplexed because the charity party is devoid of the local historical Chinese demography. Both the orchestra on stage and audience off are predominantly white in ethnic composition. While Hollywood musical is composed primarily of songs and dance, in My Nightingale, Mariko’s close-up and the performance of orchestra, instead of dance, alternate on the screen (Dyer 2012, 27). The orchestra’s disciplined and devoted performance symbolizes 174 the regulated and systematic social order in Harbin. The Caucasian face with western music harbors the Japanese imperialist’s fantasy of modernization through westernization. While the promotion of Western classical music is a racialized choice, the reception of Western music in My Nightingale is also racialized. Lack of other ethnicity’s presence, Mariko’s apparent Asian face thus is distinctive. As a mixture of both Japanese and Russian culture, Mariko’s virtuosity seems to indicate an emergent multiethnic community of Harbin yet this imagination is premised on exclusion of local Chinese and other ethnic groups. One may argue that Mariko’s multiethnic image is accordance to Ri Kōran’s multiethnic personae while her star image becomes an empty national signifier that includes different ethnicities. In great contrast to Journey to the East where Ri Kōran’s star image seems to reflect a society of both Japan and China, in the particular construction of My Nightingale’s public space, the park, the Chinese ethnicity is deliberately unseen. The film ends with a repetition of “My Nightingale” at Dimitri’s tomb. Eventually the young woman rises to independence upon the birth of the modern Manchukuo state. The cinematic embodiment of Manchukuo also evolves from Liqin, who is at once a working woman and a singing woman of Chinese/Manchurian ethnicity, to Mariko, a vocalist of mixed Japanese and Russian culture. However, when Mariko’s aria of an adaptation of Shelly’s poem “when the coldest winter goes away, the blooming spring is coming” rises again, her sad and perplexed face appears in a close-up. Mariko’s implicit anxiety seems to indicate a precarious future of the new nation in front of Japanese imperialism. The film does not engage with the military incident, but the superimposition text on the screen indicates the China Incident of 1932. Several shots display the Russian 175 exiled community’s desperation and Japanese volunteers’ heroic resistance, while the “invader,” the Chinese military, only appears in the Japanese subtitle. My Nightingale’s cinematography portrays Japanese military as the protector of Russian as well as Japanese immigrants in Manchuria. However, the camera’s view of Harbin as an “arcadia” (rakudō in Japanese) of Japanese and Russian communities is attention grabbing. It imagines Manchukuo’s modernity in spite of the fact that Japan rose up as a modern nation through its defeat of Russia in Russo-Japan War in 1905 and that it was defeated by Soviet Union’s Red Army in Nomonhan in 1939. Nevertheless, this friendly revision of Russian Japanese relation in recent history mystifies the birth of Manchukuo in front of the imperial propaganda of “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.” With the mise-en-scène that exhibits Russian architecture, fashion, and classical music, as well as the Japanese girl’s mastery of Russian opera, the generic features of My Nightingale create a utopian nation-state devoid of actual Chinese people. My Nightingale functions as a singing and dance revision of the actual history of Japanese imperialism. The missing presence of Chinese and other ethnicities in the space of the song and dance betrays the director’s narrow conception of a multiethnic Manchukuo. IV. Two decades later, Man’ei was transformed into Changchun Film Studio (Changchun dianying zhipianchang ʦƃたĿ›Ǜµ, hereafter, Changying ʦĿ), one of the most important film institutions in the Communist regime after 1949. Although Ri Kōran and Man’ei’s film have been regarded as the evil propaganda of Japanese imperialism and a humiliation to Chinese people, her cinematic image as an independent ethnic woman reincarnated in New China, defining modernity of Communist China as 176 multiethnicity and gender equality in the space of songs. From 1949 when the new nation was founded to 1966 before the Cultural Revolution, Changying produced the most popular film musicals in the Communist regime. Exemplified by Five Golden Flowers (Wuduo jinhua ZƔʢȽ, directed by Wang Jiayi ǥĐR, 1959), Liu San Jie (”=“ directed by Su Li ɀʠ, 1960), and Visitors on the Icy Mountain (Bingshan shang de laike ŽĠ[Ǿƙč, directed by Zhao Xinshui ʁņƷ, 1963), Chinese cinema for the first time focuses on the ethnic people in Yunnan Y°, Guangxi IJブ, and Xinjiang Ÿて, looking for communist cosmopolitanism in multiethnic song and dance. The prominent film musical production from Manchukuo to the People’s Republic could not be a “natural continuity.” The significance of its evolution between political and aesthetic regimes is personified by various ethnic working women in Communist China, as same as Ri Kōran’s Liqin, Bai Li, and Mariko in Manchukuo. 177 CHAPTER VI EPILOGUE This project is an interdisciplinary study of Manchukuo cultural production. The first part examines understudied Manchukuo literary texts in Chinese, Japanese and Russian languages. With the incorporation of Manchukuo’s multiethnic and multilingual literary works, my dissertation complicates the relationship between nationalism, national language, and national literature. It invites a rethinking of the field of Chinese literary studies and East Asian studies. The second half of this dissertation, chapters three and four, shifts the focus to Manchukuo film, primarily the film production by Man’ei, the only film studio in Manchukuo. Through formal analysis and historical research, this dissertation shows that a unique Manchukuo modernity is generated through the localization of film genre and the cultivation of a transnational film culture. These two parts are intrinsically linked by their shared focus on the image of working woman, an aspiration for a society that is multiethnic, the longing for a collective community, and the diasporic experience of people who became Manchukuo citizens. Delving into Manchukuo’s multiethnic and multilingual literature and film, this dissertation examines imaginaries of nation and modernity in Manchukuo’s cultural production, situated within the political, historical, and temporal boundaries of this unique semi-colonial and semi-sovereign land. This conception of modernity and nation is so progressive that it incorporates diversity and equality into the construction of a nation in the early twentieth century, when nationalism and imperialism were dominant global phenomena. While Japanese 178 imperial power attempted to enlist film and literature in its service, Manchukuo cultural production unexpectedly demonstrated its autonomy in producing this progressive conception of a nation. It invites us to reexamine definitions of national film and national literature and redefine the boundary of regional studies in a postcolonial context. In this sense, my dissertation demonstrates that we could not continue to consider modern Chinese literature and culture with little regard to the output from Manchukuo between 1932-1945. This project will hopefully restructure the field of modern Chinese culture studies with the inclusion of Manchukuo cultural production. It will hopefully incite the reading and viewing of Chinese literature and film multilingually as Manchukuo cultural work has exemplified. And it will hopefully open up new dialogues on the controversial debate of “the Sinophone.” Given the fact that my discussion of imagining the Manchukuo nation is intimately tied to gender representation, the different roles of women in East Asia also receive critical attention. Culture demonstrates its tremendous power in the construction of a nation. In Manchukuo, the power of culture is even more influential than political and military power because Manchukuo culture claims a substantial cultural sovereignty although its political sovereignty could not be claimed. The contradiction between its sovereignty and coloniality opens up a window for rethinking the conventional understanding of a nation. Manchukuo is a contradiction. On one hand, it was regarded as a puppet nation-state. On the other hand, people can hardly reduce it to the idea of a mere colony. Although the 1932’s Publication Law implemented severe censorship, current 179 scholarship discovered at least 122 Chinese magazines and 227 Japanese magazines that were legally published in Manchukuo. Russian émigrés in the region also published dozens of Russian magazines. Extant archives demonstrate themselves not simply as imperial propaganda, but records and depictions of multiethnic groups’ shared life in Manchukuo (Chu 2008, 28). When Japanese imperial expansion forced deterritorialization upon these people and caused the demarcation of Manchukuo from China, Manchukuo harbored the deterritorialized people and provided an opportunity to dream of other possibilities. Manchukuo literature emerges as a pluralistic minor literature. Compared with the hegemony of Japan’s imperial culture in Manchukuo, Manchukuo literature dwelles at the margin. The reality of deterritorialization also frames Manchukuo literature in opposition to Russian literature in Soviet Union, Japanese literature in Japan, and Chinese literature in China. Literary works produced in Manchukuo during 1932 to 1945 reflected the diasporic experience of multiethnic migration and offered an alternative definition of collective community. Thus, Manchukuo literature corresponds to Kafka’s German writings in Prague. They both depict the marginalized experience of minor groups. In this sense, Manchukuo literature qualifies as a minor literature in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition. Its multilingualism illuminates the conventional understanding of a national literature, a concept that is bounded to singular language and/or ethnicity. As a minor literature, Manchukuo literature offers an inclusive understanding of Sinophone literature. When the plural minor literatures begin to imagine a Manchukuo as a home where the multiethnic diaspora find comfort, a concept of nation emerges, and this national concept is uniquely imagined by 180 multilingual and multiethnic people. This unique imagination is what makes ordinary people’s claim for Manchukuo’s cultural sovereignty. This collective community in formation is not based on linear history, or a singular ethnicity; rather, a new kind of affiliation is its foundation. Dislocated in Manchukuo, people lost their linear history and territory, and must constantly define their present on Manchukuo’s soil in order to create their future. Only in doing so are they able to justify their existence in history. This new affiliation, invented through cultural production, is progressive because it is inclusive and diverse in culture and ethnicity. In the minor literature of Manchukuo, the nation that multiethnic people long for is a society of equality and diversity. The nation and the family are essential, often fused concepts in classical Chinese literature. Confucianism emphasizes a person’s social identity over his personal identity. The father-son relationship parallels to the ruler-subject relationship, and a family is an epitome of a state. However, Manchukuo was basically constituted by diaspora, people who lost their traditional family or home. Literature, for the citizens of this diaspora, depicted and reflected how people were connected through sympathy and new social bonds within the new nation of Manchukuo. Manchukuo’s multilingual literature imagines a society that is constituted by human relations that transcended kinship, social classes, ethnicities, and genders constituted the foundation of Manchukuo society. This progressive imagination of a collective community was unique in East Asia and in the world in the 1940s. A comparative reading between Manchukuo’s “Dwarf,” and Eileen Chang’s “Jasmine Tea” shows us that Manchukuo literature defies Confucian 181 tradition. It’s definition of modernity is inclusive in terms of gender, classes, and ethnic diversity. This definition unexpectedly anticipates our current idea of diversity and transnational culture. While the unique definition of modernity proclaims Manchukuo’s cultural sovereignty, the image of working women in literature, film and mass media represents personal sovereignty. In a sharp contrast to Japan’s “good wife wise mother” figure, Manchukuo media and literature promoted the image of working women. The emergence of the working woman was a necessity of Manchukuo’s booming industrialization and capitalism. Female labor also indirectly served Japan’s imperial war. Nevertheless, women’s education and employment unexpectedly facilitated women’s independence and gender equality. Such contradictions existed in every aspect of Manchukuo modernization, representing Manchukuo colonial modernity. In Man’ei film, the prominent image of working woman becomes a frequent theme, which highlights the contrast between Manchukuo and Japanese representations of women. For instance, in Winter Jasmine, Japanese women are still confined at home, while the female protagonist, the Manchurian woman, has the freedom to move between domestic and public spheres. Films in the 1930s-1940s tended to portray modern woman as a victim of consumer culture or patriarchal society, such as the geisha in Journey to the East, or the many female characters in Naruse or Mizoguchi’s film. However, the working woman frequently portrayed by Ri Kōran can choose what she desires. Interpreting gender equality as the emancipation from the domestic sphere, Man’ei film was progressive in its time. 182 In addition to its construction of the modern woman, Man’ei film contributes to world cinema by its innovative film musicals. The Manchukuo film musical distinguishes itself from Shanghai’s “singing and dance film” and Hollywood film musicals by its prominent characterization, film structure, and unique use of music. The image of a singing woman is a focal point in Manchukuo film musical. She is usually a working woman who is financially and emotionally independent and singing is the form through which she expresses her feelings. Women’s singing creates a musical space in a film narrative where aspiration of a collective community and personal independence are enunciated. In sharp contrast to the singsong girl in Shanghai film who is utterly subordinated to the patriarchal society, Manchukuo’s singing women define Manchukuo’s modernity as characterized by gender equality. Hollywood’s sex binary, with the romantic relationship always located at the films’ resolution become localized in Manchukuo and transformed into generational conflicts or adopted families, and the formation of a multiethnic and multicultural nation eventually becomes the genres trope of resolution. Thus, Manchukuo film musical joins the choir of world film musicals, enriching the formal definition of musical genre and asserting Manchukuo’s place in the world film market. The conquest of the world film market was a goal of Manchukuo’s film industry. It was Man’ei’s response to Hollywood’s world domination, and it also reflects the nation’s longing for international recognition. This dissertation shows Man’ei’s endeavors of transnational business and transnational film culture. Japan’s imperial domination in Manchukuo was not absolute. With careful examination of archives and a scrutiny of Ri Koran’s varying star images, this dissertation shows that 183 Ri’s star image underwent a transformation and was contingent to the rise and fall of Japan’s imperial power as well as Manchukuo people’s demand of national sovereignty. When Japan struggled in the Pacific War, the unique film musical centered on an independent woman portrayed by Ri Koran mushroomed. Ri Koran’s cosmopolitan off-screen image resonated with her multiethnic and multicultural on- screen image, embodying Manchukuo’s modernity. Ri’s rise to stardom in East Asia facilitated Man’ei’s transnational film industry and spread Manchukuo’s transnational film culture. With in-depth textual and formal analyzes of Manchukuo literature and film, this dissertation illustrates the construction of a nation from below, that is, in the formation of its culture, in people’s enunciation of a collective community, in the painstaking effort of the aggregate narration of a nation. With an interpretive framework that shuttles back and forth between pre-colonial, colonial, and post- colonial histories and the geopolitics between Japan, China, Hong Kong and Manchuria, I hope to throw new light not only on Manchukuo history and culture but also on multicultural and transnational ways of seeing China studies as well as East Asian Studies. 184 REFERENCES CITED CHAPTER I Aisin-Gioro, Pu Yi. 1965. From Emperor to Citizen—the Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi. Vol. 2. Translated by W.J.F. Jenner. Beijing: Roreign Languages Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities--Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, NY: Verso. 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