Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 612, The Final Frontier, Part 8.

We've established by this point, I think, why it is that Japanese rule in Manchuria was never

able to penetrate that deeply, why it was never successful in rooting itself into Mancharian

society, so to speak. But of course, that still doesn't explain why Japanese rule collapsed

so quickly in 1945. After all, there were still some foundations to build on. Local elites in

Manchuria had generally come around to the idea that Japan was better for their interests

than either the warlord Zhang Sui Liang or the nationalist government.

Japan's military presence in the region was dominant. And with the foundation of Montetsu, the

South Manchuria Railway Company, which, remember, still owned a bunch of land and the rail

networks on top of it, and the other Japanese businesses following behind it,

the region was increasingly economically integrated into the rest of the Japanese Empire.

So there were a lot of strings tying the region to Japan and the people inside it as well.

How did those come undone so quickly?

Partially, this was down to the nature of Japanese colonial rule itself, and remember here,

part of my goal with this miniseries was to contrast Manchuria to other parts of the Japanese

empire.

Japanese rule in northeast China was in many ways very similar to other parts of the Empire, of course.

Functionally, the region was controlled through the military by means of the Guangdong Army,

where, say, Taiwan, Japanese Micronesia, and Korea relied on Japanese-run governments

general that were often run by army or navy men.

Those governments general were often co-run by mainland bureaucrats, associated with the Ministry

of Colonial Affairs, but military influence tended to predominate.

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