"In this history of Japanese involvement in northeast China, the author argues that Japan’s military seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 was founded on three decades of infiltration of the area. This incremental empire-building and its effect on Japan are the focuses of this book. The principal agency in the piecemeal growth of Japanese colonization was the South Manchurian Railway Company, and by the mid-1920s Japan had a deeply entrenched presence in Manchuria and exercised a dominant economic and political influence over the area. Japanese colonial expansion in Manchuria also loomed large in Japanese politics, military policy, economic development, and foreign relations and deeply influenced many aspects of Japan’s interwar history."

Did Japan surrender in 1945 because of the death and devastation caused by the atomic bombs dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or because of the crushing defeat inflicted on their armies by the Soviet Union in Manchukuo, the puppet state they set up in north-east China? Indeed, the Red Army's rapid and total victory in Manchukuo has been relatively neglected by historians. Charles Stephenson, in this scholarly and highly readable new study, describes the political, diplomatic and military build-up to the Soviet offensive and its decisive outcome. He also considers to what extent Japan's capitulation is attributable to the atomic bomb or the stunningly successful entry of the Soviet Union into the conflict. The military side of the story is explored in fascinating detail - the invasion of Manchukuo itself where the Soviet 'Deep Battle' concept was employed with shattering results, and secondary actions in Korea, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. But equally absorbing is the account of the decision-making that gave rise to the offensive and the political and diplomatic background to it, and in particular the Yalta conference. There, Stalin allowed the Americans to persuade him to join the war in the east; a conflict he was determined on entering anyway. Charles Stephenson's engrossing narrative throws new light on the last act of the Second World War.

From 1932 until the end of World War II, the Japanese established and maintained by bloody rule a puppet regime in the Chinese region of Manchuria. This region was composed of three northern provinces in China; the puppet ruler was the last Chinese Emperor, Pu Yi, and this rich industrial region was clearly coveted and managed by the Japanese as a critical element in their imperial dominion. Yamamuro Shin'ichi's extraordinary book rereads this occupation under new light. The author shows that right-wing Japanese military and civilian groups thought of construction in this sparsely populated region as an effort to build a paradise on earth, with roots deep in Asian traditions. At the same time, Chinese and Korean populations in the region were abused by the Japanese military, and many Japanese were deliberately misinformed about what was being done in their name. Yamamuro examines the policies and events unfolding on the ground during this time. With close attention to the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans involved, and the links between the military and the home islands, he offers his own overall assessment of this distinctive instance of state-building. Making use of numerous sources in Chinese and Japanese, from legal documents and government decrees to memoirs and poetry, Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion goes beyond rhetoric to provide a unique assessment of the history of this period.

In this first social and cultural history of Japan's construction of Manchuria, Louise Young offers an incisive examination of the nature of Japanese imperialism. Focusing on the domestic impact of Japan's activities in Northeast China between 1931 and 1945, Young considers "metropolitan effects" of empire building: how people at home imagined and experienced the empire they called Manchukuo. Contrary to the conventional assumption that a few army officers and bureaucrats were responsible for Japan's overseas expansion, Young finds that a variety of organizations helped to mobilize popular support for Manchukuo—the mass media, the academy, chambers of commerce, women's organizations, youth groups, and agricultural cooperatives—leading to broad-based support among diverse groups of Japanese. As the empire was being built in China, Young shows, an imagined Manchukuo was emerging at home, constructed of visions of a defensive lifeline, a developing economy, and a settler's paradise.

Yosano Akiko was a highly acclaimed Japanese poet. She was also a prominent feminist. In 1928 she was invited to travel around areas with a strong Japanese presence in China's northeast. This is her account of that journey.

Between 1932 and 1945, more than 320,000 Japanese emigrated to Manchuria in northeast China with the dream of becoming land-owning farmers. Following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan’s surrender in August 1945, their dream turned into a nightmare. Since the late 1980s, popular Japanese conceptions have overlooked the disastrous impact of colonization and resurrected the utopian justification for creating Manchukuo, as the puppet state was known. This re-remembering, Mariko Tamanoi argues, constitutes a source of friction between China and Japan today. Memory Maps tells the compelling story of both the promise of a utopia and the tragic aftermath of its failure. An anthropologist, Tamanoi approaches her investigation of Manchuria’s colonization and collapse as a complex "history of the present," which in postcolonial studies refers to the examination of popular memory of past colonial relations of power. To mitigate this complexity, she has created four "memory maps" that draw on the recollections of former Japanese settlers, their children who were left in China and later repatriated, and Chinese who lived under Japanese rule in Manchuria. The first map presents the oral histories of farmers who emigrated from Nagano, Japan, to Manchuria between 1932 and 1945 and returned home after the war. Interviewees were asked to remember the colonization of Manchuria during Japan’s age of empire. Hikiage-mono (autobiographies) make up the second map. These are written memories of repatriation from the Soviet invasion to some time between 1946 and 1949. The third memory map is entitled "Orphans’ Voices." It examines the oral and written memories of the children of Japanese settlers who were left behind at the war’s end but returned to Japan after relations between China and Japan were normalized in 1972. The memories of Chinese who lived the age of empire in Manchuria make up the fourth map. This map also includes the memories of Chinese couples who adopted the abandoned children of Japanese settlers as well as the children themselves, who renounced their Japanese nationality and chose to remain in China. In the final chapter, Tamanoi considers theoretical questions of "the state" and the relationship between place, voice, and nostalgia. She also attempts to integrate the four memory maps in the transnational space covering Japan and China. Both fastidious in dealing with theoretical questions and engagingly written, Memory Maps contributes not only to the empirical study of the Japanese empire and its effects on the daily lives of Japanese and Chinese, but also to postcolonial theory as it applies to the use of memory.

Volume I covers in detail the background, strategic regrouping, and strategic planning and conduct of the offensive.