Articles
Japanese Nostalgia for Empire in China : The Forgotten Story of Kangde Academy, 1935–1944
Abstract
This article examines Kangde Academy, a private school that operated from 1935 to 1944 in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. The school was founded by the first director of Manchukuo’s General Affairs Board, Komai Tokuzō. Existing studies in Japanese and English on Manchukuo have paid inadequate attention to Komai, an important contemporary Japanese bureaucrat who contributed to Manchukuo’s creation in 1932, and research on Komai’s interest in education as a means of fostering cooperative relations between the Japanese and Chinese is notably lacking. The article draws on the sparse and scattered sources in order to elucidate the reasons behind Kangde’s foundation, accounts of school life at Kangde, and the postwar experiences of Kangde’s graduates. In doing so, it argues for the importance of looking beyond the history of domination and violence when attempting to develop a more nuanced understanding of the operation of Japan’s empire in China. The story of the Kangde Academy casts fresh light on fourteen years of interactions between Japan and China from 1931 to 1945 and problematizes the concept of apology for the Japanese Empire in postwar Japan.