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Paper short abstract

Manchukuo attracted diverse utopian projections in the 1930s-40s. This paper examines how photographs from that era functioned as material sites in post-war temporal negotiations, revealing Manchukuo's symbolic role as a "lost" utopia and as an inspiration for reimagining the future.

Paper long abstract

During the early 1930s, the puppet state of Manchukuo became a site for intellectuals, artists, and bureaucrats from diverse political and ideological backgrounds to project their utopian visions. Contradictory notions of Manchukuo coexisted: as an earthly paradise for a multi-ethnic, harmonious society, but also as an experimental ground for techno-fascist dreams favouring modernisation through rationalisation and social reorganisation (Mimura 2011; Moore 2013).

Even after the fall of the Japanese Empire, Manchukuo’s legacy persisted in career trajectories of politicians and technocrats who had formative experiences there, and in the technological imaginaries they carried forward (Moore 2009; Yang 2010). Manchukuo thus represents continuity between the pre-war and post-war periods, which are otherwise viewed as disjunctive, given the supposedly radical post-war political, ideological, social, and economic transformations.

This paper analyses how Manchukuo functions as a location for post-war chronopolitics by treating photographs from the 1930s and 1940s as sites for temporal negotiation. Manchurian amateur photographers and prominent metropolitan photojournalists - including Kimura Ihei, Horino Masao, Kuwabara Kineo, and Hayama Hiroshi - produced rich repertoires documenting the development of the multi-ethnic puppet state, its industrialisation, and ‘pioneering’ Japanese settlers building new lives. These images presented Manchukuo as embodying idealised visions of imperial and universal progress, capturing utopian expectations and desires that continued to resonate in post-war contexts when many of the original materials were republished and reinterpreted by the photographers themselves and by audiences.

Rather than merely viewing photographs as windows into the past, these photographers and audiences found in these images of Manchukuo links to the post-war present and to the future. By examining selected photography publications and their reception, the paper identifies two symbolic functions of Manchukuo: as a ‘lost’ utopia and as a source of new (utopian) imaginaries. Photographs of Manchukuo are thus material objects through which the meaning of the past was renegotiated and pressed into the future.