Life Along the South Manchurian Railroad by Ito Takeo Joshua A. Fogel

Author:Ito Takeo, Joshua A. Fogel [Ito Takeo, Joshua A. Fogel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, General, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781134942992
Google: 97nsCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-08T01:27:22+00:00

SMR Investigations of Rural Chinese Villages

In any event, just as research that approached the trends in modern China got underway, we were confronted with the Manchurian Incident of 18 September 1931. After it had occurred, analyses of the structure of rural villages in Manchuria became exceedingly popular. Two motives for this development can be cited. First, with the upsurge in the "great revolution," debate on the "Asiatic mode of production" became widespread in European studies of China, and a great deal of interest coagulated around the structure of Chinese villages. In this instance Japanese scholarly concern was aroused by an international debate. The second cause was the popularity of a method which by investigating the structure of agriculture gave one a basic position for the analysis of society generally, as might be seen, for example, in the Nihon shihonshugi hattatsu ski kōza (Symposium on the History of the Development of Capitalism in Japan).

Riding the crest of this vogue for methodology, we carried out rural village investigations in Manchuria on a massive scale. To investigate regions that had been newly incorporated under Japanese dominion, to obtain policy materials, and to understand accurately these newly seized objects for exploitation: these were the objectives. The SMR sent a group of village investigators led by Amano Motonosuke to the Interim Industrial Research Bureau, an organ created by the government of Manchukuo. It engaged in research with a staff of forty or fifty men. The real leader here was Shiomi Tomonosuke, who after the war was a bureau chief in the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and finally quit as vice-minister there, and he received the cooperation of men such as Suzuki Tatsuo.

The result of this research was five or six volumes in folio, comprising an enormous amount of material. But it was only raw materials, and no summary of it was ultimately forthcoming. The SMR issued it as a development in Marxist theory in the Manshū keizai nempō (The Manchurian Annual Economic Report). While taking many suggestions for their research methods from the investigations of Soviet economists, such as Iashinov and Mad'iar, the report was not well compiled, as compared to its models by Soviet economists. The group that carried out the investigations continued their analyses of villages in the pages of Manshū hyōron, run by Tachibana Shiraki. It was these investigators who kept the Manshū keizai nem,pō in print and whose writings in it raised the spirits of the SMR researchers by criticizing the Kwantung Army and the political administration of Manchukuo.

After the village investigations in Manchuria, a group centering around myself carried out field research in thirteen counties in eastern Hopeh (North China) just before the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War. These materials later came into the hands of Yamada Seitarō, who developed a theoretical system for Chinese villages.

When the war with China began and military force was put to use deep in the Chinese hinterland, investigations of Chinese villages were carried out on a large scale and in a detailed fashion.

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