Racializing Modernism of the “Other” Spaces: Kai Mihachirō and Manchukuo Local Color

Built upon the historically contested region called Manchuria, a geographically abstract term, which encompasses today’s three Chinese provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang, Manchukuo (1932-1945) marks the climax of Japan’s political, militaristic, and economic expansion amidst the era of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. The state-building project of Manchukuo produced not only privileges for imperial settlers but also the uncertainty and instability of their dual identity vis-à-vis their homeland counterparts. Artists, patrons, and cultural administrators who engaged in and responded to Japan’s larger project of making a multi-ethnic utopian state, whose primary determinant of social relations varied, such as capitalist impulses and diasporic disposition, which challenges the conventional dichotomy of colonizer-colonized hierarchy or national categories.

The aim of my study is to uncover the dynamics between the new, imperial organization of the arts, operated in Changchun, and the pre-existing system of the cosmopolitan art scene in Dalian. Settler artists negotiated and redefined their urban modernity and shaped collective settler identities by being an observer and collectors of ethnic others. The ways in which they resisted the imperial hierarchy were deeply bounded and attuned to the imperial hegemonic campaign of race and ethnicity. My study focuses on one such artist, Japanese traditional-style painting or nihonga artist Kai Mihachirō (1909-1978), who started as a low-profile leftist and liberalist man in Japan and became a leading figure in Dalian and in the Manchurian art scene through his unique local-themed art and folklore research.