End of the Line
The plan was short-lived. Within a year, this commercial alliance collapsed when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The airway across the continent never fully got off the ground, and yet throughout the 1930s, the Manchuria Aviation Company held an ocular occupation over the steppe. In a region fraught with competing territorial claims, the view from above had briefly opened up a technological imaginary, a realm of possibility, for Japanese occupiers.
