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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Japan’s early-1940s survey of rural North China, revealing the institutions, hierarchies, and networks behind its wartime knowledge production and showing how claims of scientific objectivity served to legitimize and naturalize the aims of Japanese imperialism.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the investigation of customary practices in rural North China jointly undertaken in the early 1940s by the East Asian Research Institute under the Asia Development Board and the Economic Research Department of the South Manchuria Railway Company (SMR). Previous scholarship has largely centered on the debate among prominent scholars such as Hirano Yoshitarō and Kainō Michitaka concerning the existence of a Chinese village community (or Gemeinschaft), while paying far less attention to the mechanisms and networks that supported the investigation itself. In contrast, this paper analyzes the multilayered imperial research networks through which wartime Japanese scholars constructed legal and social knowledge about rural China.

Drawing on reports and publications issued by the East Asian Research Institute and the SMR, along with personnel files, and postwar memoirs, the paper first reconstructs the political, bureaucratic, and institutional contexts that shaped the survey—from budgeting and personnel formation to the selection of field sites. Building on this foundation, it examines the hierarchies and networks of knowledge production that emerged among legal scholars and economists in the imperial metropole and the SMR investigators in the field. It will highlight both the tensions and the collaborations between metropolitan scholars—many of whom possessed limited knowledge of China—and the SMR investigators who carried out the empirical work. It further examines how debates over the existence of a Chinese village community evolved within this context.

Finally, by following participants’ discussions of scientific objectivity and political engagement, the paper demonstrates how claims of scientific objectivity served to legitimize and naturalize the aims of Japanese imperialism.

Overall, it offers a dynamic account of wartime knowledge production that moves beyond static readings of research outcomes and illuminates the entanglement of science and politics.