"The Double Inheritance: The Afterlife of Colonial Modernity in the Cities of Former 'Manchuria' " by Yukiko Koga

Yukiko Koga

Deposited 2008

Abstract
Both China and Japan seek, for their own reasons, to erase traces of Japan's former empire. The region once known as "Manchuria" has long been consigned to the distant past. Yet now that Northeast China seeks investment and tourism from abroad, the cities of former Manchuria have become key spaces for Chinese and Japanese to encounter their complex history. At times the past erupts violently in the present, as when construction accidentally unearths toxic weapons buried by the Japanese Army at war's end. At other times, the past appears in heated debates over preserving colonial-era architecture and sites of memory. And at others, it lingers surreptitiously in the offices and factories of the fast moving, market-oriented Chinese economy. In all the cases, however, the introduction of the market economy in China has created a new dynamic concerning the past, as the cities seek to turn their colonial inheritance into capital.
This dissertation explores the afterlife of colonial modernity in the former site of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo by tracing colonial inheritance in Harbin, Changchun and Dalian, three major cities in Northeast China. In recent years these cities have placed the historical preservation of colonial-era architecture center stage in their efforts to redefine their image as modern. Through ethnographic and historiographic observations, this dissertation illuminates how renewed urban space functions at the juncture of a multitude of "posts"—post-colonial, post-imperial, post-socialist, post-Cold War, and post-postwar aspirations and anxieties—which have become pronounced as both China and Japan are ever more immersed in the globalized economy. This study illustrates how this conjuncture questions, articulates, and redefines what it means to be modern, and, to that end, what it takes to redress colonial violence. It goes beyond conventional discussions of Japan's war responsibility to locate the question of coming to terms with the past within the daily articulation and pursuit of modernity.