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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

A Company Affair

Starting in February 1934, the Manchuria Aviation Company launched a monthly magazine, ManAir. Based on the first issues, the corporation might have intended the magazine for internal circulation. It used ManAir to announce both professional and personal news, from promotions to the marriages of its workers. Soon, however, the pages of ManAir began to document the company's technological innovations, its cultural norms, and its ambitious growth across the Asian continent. ManAir has left us valuable evidence through which we can piece together the history of the Manchuria Aviation Company.

First and foremost, as the company magazine, ManAir developed the Manchuria Aviation Company “brand.” Much like Mitsukoshi's periodicals, ManAir was an exercise in corporate marketing. The novelty of flight made it an object of fascination for Japanese graphic designers in the 1930s and 40s. Looking through this gallery, consider:

What are some of the ways in which ManAir symbolized the Manchuria Aviation Company on its covers?

How do the various mediums—ink, print, and paint—communicate different messages about the company and about aviation more broadly?

One immaterial space within the Japanese empire fostered by ManAir was that of the public sphere. While it remains unclear how widely ManAir actually circulated, it is obvious from the periodical's contents that it imagined, at least, a far-reaching audience. Not only did managers and technicians within the Manchuria Aviation Company write for the magazine, but journalists, scholars, officials, and other professionals from fields beyond the aviation sector in Japan contributed their expertise as well.

Still, ManAir did not demonstrate the freedom of the press. Because the corporation itself was owned jointly by the Manchukuo government, the South Manchuria Railway, and the Sumitomo zaibatsu, among others, it had obligations to support ideologies of the state and capital.

Follow this pathway to explore the various themes of ManAir as it promoted messages of imperial nationalism and mass consumption.

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Imperial Japan up in the Air
The advent of aviation in the early twentieth century opened up an uncertain and contingent space of the Japanese empire, in between borders that did not so neatly align between land, sea, and air. This new form of transportation superseded earlier networks of ships and rail, extending the Japanese empire westward, from Manchukuo to Inner Mongolia, and beyond.
This module examines how the aerial perspective, as made possible by aviation, helped Japanese occupiers imagine the Eurasian continent in its geographical vastness, and yet how their terrestrial limitations ultimately failed to sustain control over this space. For imperial Japan, the Manchuria Aviation Company (J. Manshūkoku kōkū kabushiki kaisha), founded in 1932, would become the predominant presence over Inner Asia during the wartime era.
The first pathway, Reading ManAir Magazine, delves into the modern spaces created by the Manchuria Aviation Company through its in-house magazine, ManAir (J. Mankō). The Manchuria Aviation Company advertised its services by portraying its technological prowess and geographical reach. The corporation also sold the concept of flight with images of the modern woman and, as the Pacific War intensified, militarized children. ManAir intentionally conflated patriotic duty and its profit motive, using nationalism as a vehicle to drive its commercial viability.

The second pathway, Eurasian Expansion, explores how Japanese air control outpaced its land occupation, as the Manchuria Aviation Company flew farther into the Republic of China and made alliances with Mongol princes. The territory surveyed by the Manchuria Aviation Company was sprawling, their mode of vision, exclusive: besides Japanese endorsements and Chinese critiques, indigenous reactions to these aerial incursions, for the most part, did not exist.
Finally, the third pathway, Technologies of the Gaze, focuses on the seemingly objective renderings of the land produced by aerial photographs, developed in the ‘dark room’ of Japanese imperialism. This form of visual technology both fueled and followed geographical understandings of the Asian continent in the 1930s and 40s.

Click here for a list of references for this module, which is also available from the module's Conclusion page.
New Nomads of the Sky
Boundaries in the sky did not so neatly conform to those on earth, and airplanes of dubious origin moved with freedom throughout China. In 1935, Manchuria Aviation Company representative Nagabuchi Saburō traveled beyond the borders of Manchukuo to Bailingmiao to persuade Demchugdongrub, the leader of the autonomous movement in Inner Mongolia, to let the company increase operations, not to mention, sell him a plane or two. As recounted in the company magazine, ManAir, Nagabuchi said to the prince:
In the age when the Mongols conquered the entire world, those of the fastest speed were horses. In Mongolia, the horses were many. From now on, in this age of the airplane, the future lies in transportation across the sky, so the country with the most airplanes will master the globe.
In response, “Demchugdongrub who put on airs about being the next Chinggis Khan, was exceptionally pleased” (Nagabuchi 1935). Nagabuchi compared airplanes to nomads and the sky to the steppe not only to appeal to the prince’s nationalist sensibilities, but also to justify Japanese violations against both Mongolian and Chinese sovereignty. In the logic of open space, whether sky or steppe, conventional notions of territoriality no longer held. In the uneven and uncertain boundaries of the Japanese empire, these men saw airplanes as the new nomads in defying and redefining territoriality in a region of strategic significance.

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