Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The migration of ethnic Koreans to Manchuria (now the northeastern provinces of the People’s Republic of China) began in the late nineteenth century, as agricultural migrants sought better lives north of the Yalu River. Migration intensified after Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. Over the subsequent decades, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Koreans moved to Manchuria and its border regions. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932, brought these Koreans “resident in Manchuria,” or Zai-Man Koreans, under the mixed administration of Japanese imperial power and the new, putatively independent state of Manchukuo. Some Zai-Man Koreans sought to negotiate for political power and autonomy within the national-imperial project through engagement with mass political organizations and structures. This thesis investigates the history of Zai-Man Korean involvement with the Concordia Association, Manchukuo’s primary mass political organ, through analysis of records of the Concordia Association and other organizations. Building on existing scholarship in Japanese and English concerning the Concordia Association and its precedents, I argue that collaborationist Zai-Man Koreans were active in Manchukuo mass politics throughout the state’s existence, seeking to negotiate political space and authority, but that their representation did not translate to political power, as Zai-Man Koreans were bound by both the Manchukuo nation-building project and broader imperial ambitions of the Empire of Japan. This “double burden” role demanded that Zai-Man Koreans be constituent elements of both an imagined multi-ethnic Manchukuo state and of an assimilating Japanese Empire. Through to the end of Manchukuo and Japan’s imperial ambitions, this contradiction remained unresolved.
DOI: 10.7302/27989
Author: Delphia, Michael
Language: English
Topic: Japanese History and Culture
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7123283174