The World of East Asia Series

For more than half a century, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimusho) possessed an independent police force that operated within the space of Japan’s informal empire on the Asian continent. Charged with “protecting and controlling” local Japanese communities first in Korea and later in China, these consular police played a critical role in facilitating Japanese imperial expansion during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Remarkably, however, this police force remains largely unknown. Crossing Empire’s Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia, by Erik Esselstrom, is the first book in English to reveal its complex history.

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3231-5 / $59.00 (CLOTH)

Between 1932 and 1945, more than 320,000 Japanese emigrated to Manchuria in northeast China with the dream of becoming land-owning farmers. Following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan’s surrender in August 1945, their dream turned into a nightmare. Since the late 1980s, popular Japanese conceptions have overlooked the disastrous impact of colonization and resurrected the utopian justification for creating Manchukuo, as the puppet state was known. This re-remembering, Mariko Tamanoi argues, constitutes a source of friction between China and Japan today. Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan tells the compelling story of both the promise of a utopia and the tragic aftermath of its failure.

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3267-4 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

For more information on the new World of East Asia series, click here.