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Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo by Annika A. Culver (review)

Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo, by Annika A. Culver. Vancouver & Toronto, University of British Columbia Press, 2013. xii, 268 pp. $90.00 Cdn (cloth), $32.95 Cdn (paper). Japan's wars of imperial expansion in the 1930s and 1940s not only involved military combat, but made a strong use of ideology and culture both domestically and in the battlefield. Annika Culver expands on work done by previous scholars such as Louise Young and Barak Kushner about Japanese state-building techniques in its client state of Manchukuo in what is now the northeastern part of the People's Republic of China. She explains how the Japanese militarist regime used propaganda and cultural industries both in Japan and in Manchukuo to mobilize ideological support for its new state and its new vision of a new order in East Asia. Culver contributes to this scholarship by focussing on the actions and lives of specific artists and authors involved in cultural endeavours supporting the Japanese government's projects in Manchukuo. Culver particularly focusses on those who were associated with left-wing or proletarian politics and who had been associated with modern trends in art such as surrealism. The Japanese militarist regime pursued a relentless crackdown on left-wing thought and culture during the 1930s and many left-wing activists, intellectuals, and cultural producers formally renounced their ideology in a process known as tenko, or "conversion." This conversion not only involved rejecting one's former ideology, but also embracing the militarists' project of domestic national unity and Japan's mission to expand its influence and establish a new order in East Asia. Many of these artists, intellectuals, and authors contributed their skills by producing propaganda in support of the regime's aims. For some, this was a way of dispelling suspicion because of their pasts. For others, the conversion was genuine, but often the goal of social justice, proletarian empowerment, and the pursuit of a utopian society was still conserved, albeit in a new framework. Although Manchukuo was technically autonomous, the chief influences on its government were the Japanese Kwantung Army and the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway. Japanese settlers, experts, and culture were encouraged in Manchukuo and its government actively recruited experts and artists to come, observe, report, and contribute to the building of a state that was linked to Japan. Ironically, the Manchukuo government was more open than the Japanese government in engaging with those that had tainted ideological pasts, so many former left-wing experts, intellectuals, and artists found new opportunities and more freedom in their pursuits in the new Manchukuo than in Japan itself. The arts of literature, painting, drawing, photography, and cultural theory are represented in these personal stories. …