A Textual Reading of My Manchuria: Idealism, Conflict and Modernity

Abstract

The two volume work My Manchuria [ぼくの満州], written by Japanese manga artist Morita Kenji, is a provocative reconstruction of Japan’s colonial Manchuria project. Morita was born in 1939 in Manchuria and spent his childhood there until his return to Japan in 1946. From the 1990s he, as a Japanese repatriate, began to engage in activities related to Manchuria. Since 2002, he has organized several manga exhibitions about the experience of Japanese expatriates in several Chinese cities. The original version of My Manchuria was a manga series published between October 1997 and March 1999 in the Sunday Edition of Red Flag [しんぶん赤旗日曜版], a newspaper published by the Japanese Communist Party.² The manga was later revised to be published as two volumes by a Tokyo-based publisher in 2001.³ According to Morita, his short childhood in Manchuria and bitter experience of postwar repatriation to Japan inspired him to create this work.⁴

The memories of one person, whether he or she is a high-ranking state official or an agrarian settler, never reveal the historical truth of the power of the Japanese state. But the memories of many people of different nationalities, classes, genders, and generations who try to remember at various points — the ‘presents’ — bring us at least closer to such truth.¹