Title: People's empire
Description: This dissertation introduces the idea of "democratic imperialism" to describe citizen involvement in Japan's colonial governance of northeast China during the first half of the twentieth century. It examines the imbrication of democracy and empire that lies at the heart of Japan's modern transformation and which has so far been neglected by historians of the nation's colonial expansion. Part one examines the emergence of democratic imperialism as a movement in the early Taisho years, focusing on its embrace of nationalism, imperialism, and populism in the name of the emperor. Citizen calls for a share in the job of empire developed in tandem with the metropolitan government's increasingly muscular foreign policy vis-à-vis China in the mid-'teens, and growing inter-imperial rivalries between Korea and "Manchuria," the contemporary term for China's three northeastern provinces. The transformation of democratic imperialism from a movement controlled by Japanese plutocrats into a more broad-based movement, in terms of class and gender, is explored in the dissertation's second part. "Mantetsu democracy" emerged as the most potent expression of this transformation as employees of the South Manchuria Railway Company ("Mantetsu") established an association in 1926 aimed at nurturing employees' self-identification as self-governing sub-imperialists. The twin project of improving working conditions caused fissures within the group as members grappled with the conundrum of pressing (Japanese) labor demands in a colonial setting.

The Kwantung Army's takeover of the northeast and establishment of Manchukuo in 1932 set the stage for the dissertation's third and final part. A willingness to accommodate aggressive imperialism undergirded the movement for democratic imperialism from its earliest days. However, as the Kwantung Army extended its reach beyond military affairs into economic, social, and political realms in the mid-1930s, democratic imperialism came face to face with the contradictions and fundamental weaknesses upon which it had been built. The periodicals and newspapers published by Japanese residents of prewar Manchuria form the core of the dissertation's source base and are supplemented by the use of diaries, memoirs, and oral histories. The demands of writing colonial history necessitate the interweaving of the modern histories of Japan, China, and Korea throughout.