Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist

by Kazuko Kuramoto, Kathy Uno (Afterword)

Kazuko Kuramoto was born and raised in Dairen, Manchuria, in 1927, at the peak of Japanese expansionism in Asia. Dairen and the neighboring Port Arthur were important colonial outposts on the Liaotung Peninsula; the train lines established by Russia and taken over by the Japanese, ended there. When Kuramoto's grandfather arrived in Dairen as a member of the Japanese police force shortly after the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the family's belief in Japanese supremacy and its "divine" mission to "save" Asia from Western imperialists was firmly in place. As a third-generation colonist, the seventeen-year-old Kuramoto readily joined the Red Cross Nurse Corps in 1944 to aid in the war effort and in her country's sacred cause. A year later, her family listened to the emperor's radio broadcast ". . . we shall have to endure the unendurable, to suffer the insufferable." Japan surrendered unconditionally.
Manchurian Legacy is the story of the family's life in Dairen, their survival as a forgotten people during the battle to reclaim Manchuria waged by Russia, Nationalist China, and Communist China, and their subsequent repatriation to a devastated Japan. Kuramoto describes a culture based on the unthinking oppression of the colonized by the colonizer. And, because Manchuria was, in essence, a Japanese frontier, her family lived a freer and more luxurious life than they would have in Japan?one relatively unscathed by the war until after the surrender.
As a commentator Kuramoto explores her culture both from the inside, subjectively, and from the outside, objectively. Her memoirs describe her coming of age in a colonial society, her family's experiences in war-torn Manchuria, and her "homecoming" to Japan?where she had never been?just as Japan is engaged in its own cultural upheaval.

Genres: History, Japan, Memoir, Nonfiction, China, Biography, War

189 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1999

Reviews

[Mischa Temaul · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Something like the roaring echo of tsunami woke me up violently. Father was already dressed. “It’s a riot! Run! They are at the police chief’s house now. Hurry up and run!” Somebody was banging on our back door, shouting. A riot! We had to run!” (46).

Author Kazuko Kuramoto pens a gripping memoir that will surely leave a lasting impression on readers with its vivid imagery and heart-breaking tale of a young woman growing up in the time of war; Manchurian Legacy relives the haunting days of Kuramoto and her family as they struggle for survival after Japan’s inglorious demise.

Kuramoto’s memoir not only gives an outstanding insight to the historical events that took place in Dairen, the forgotten Manchurian city where she was born, but also captures the heart of a young woman’s memories as a teenager during World War II and her struggle to find an identity post-war in her parent’s native Japan.

Her maternal grandfather, serving in the Japanese police force, is sent to Dairen shortly after Japan’s glorious victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. As the third generation of her family, Kuramoto, born and raised in 1927 in Dairen “at the peak of Japanese expansion in Asia” solely believes in Japan’s “divine” mission to save Asia from the “evil hands of Western imperialism.” Her three brothers are drafted like many young men to serve in the Japanese Imperialism Army when World War II erupts. Kuramoto, a patriotic seventeen-year-old- girl, wants to join the battlefield like her brothers to aid Japan in its sacred cause to save Asia from Western imperialism. Later she joins the Red Cross Nurse Corps in 1944. To her surprise, she does not receive “cheers and praise from the whole family” leaving Kuramoto to question whether “patriotism [is] a privilege granted only to men and boys” (4).

The unconditional faith in Japan that Kuramoto believes in when growing up is to be tested after the country’s total surrender.

Japan’s surrender leaves Kuramoto feeling betrayed: “betrayed by Japan, the God-chosen country with a noble mission, the country that could do no wrong” (42). Being far away from the mainland of Japan’s war frontier, she once believed that “Dairen was Japan—not an extension of Japan, but the representation of its power, the symbol of its international supremacy” (22). With Japan’s surrender, the city of Dairen soon falls into the hands of the Soviet Union and the local Chinese, who had been treated as average-class citizens, revolt against the Japanese colonists; brutally beating some while others escape in hiding to the mountains.

The second portion of Kuramoto’s memoir gives glimpses of post-war and the battle she faces in forming an identity with her “homecoming” to Japan—the country to which she has never been but “taught to love and honor” (114).

Kuramoto surpasses Anne Frank’s Diaries with her evoking power to grab and place readers in time as they relive the events of her life. The recollections of her memories are historically important in uncovering a lost geographical city that faded in World War II. Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy is both haunting and powerful with its vivid imaginaries awaking emotions that are felt on each page.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

*4.5*

Uhh I teared up/cried a little bit??

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've not read much on the Japanese colonial experience during and after WWII, so this memoir (which is more fascinating than it has a right to be) is highly illuminating.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the end of the Meiji Era and into the Taisho Era, Japan became consumed with the idea of global expansion and the desire to imperialize. After the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Japan gained Taiwan from China; after defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese War they received Liaotung Peninsula in southern Manchuria. According to the Treaty of Portsmouth signed between Russia and Japan in1905, Russia would give up the rights to all of Manchuria including the railroad. Liaotung Peninsula held the port city of Dairen where the South Manchuria Railroad Company was headquartered. Manchurian Legacy by Kazuko Kuramoto is the story of her family’s experience in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation. When the Chinese nationalists and Russian Red Army push the Japanese out of Manchuria at the end of WWII, her family is forced to return to mainland Japan. Manchurian Legacy describes the experience of the Japanese colonists in China during occupation, their consequential exile to Japan proper, and the overall effect the unconditional surrender had on Japanese culture in the years following the war.
Leading up to the Pacific War, it was Japan’s intent to save Asia from Western imperialism which had slowly been expanding into the continent since the 17th century. Success would result in shared prosperity for Asian countries with Japan as their leader. It was this just mission that motivated Japan’s movement into China and eventually their role in WWII. The author was a teenager during the war. Two of her brothers are serving in the Japanese Imperial Army when she decides to join the Red Cross Nurse Corps to do her part to “save Asia from the evil hands of Western imperialists.” (pp. 4). While she is studying at the boarding school, one of her childhood friends comes to visit. He harshly denounces the military propaganda spread by the government. The weight of the realization that her “entire generation was a sacred sacrifice dedicated to the ‘divine’ war”, causes her to begin questioning Japan’s role in the war (pp.15). When it is discovered she may have tuberculosis, she is released from school and she begins living with her relatives. Her allegiance continues to waver when she is brought into contact with her cousin Toru.
Toru mocks Kuramoto’s faith in Japan’s motives, calling her belief that Manchuria was the same as Japan naïve. He brazenly points out that because she grew up in Manchuria she did not know what it meant to be Japanese. She had only been taught to love Japan but had never really been there. It dawns on her that the Japanese in Manchuria were not accepted by the local Chinese. At one point, she attempts to find common ground with her Chinese friends by singing the only thing she knew in Chinese—the Manchurian national anthem. This upset them for it was not their anthem to sing, it was Japanese. She began to see the deep-rooted resentment the local people felt for the Japanese imperialists who had taken over. It shocks her that the local Manchurians were not supportive of Japan’s involvement in the area! Slowly she begins to see through the propaganda that insisted that Japan was helping China and Korea. Instead it dawned on her that the Japanese had effectively infiltrated themselves into both countries and in effect treated the locals as inferiors. Through the goal of defeating Western influence in order to unite they had created more division—they began to look just as imperialistic as the West in the eyes of their Asian counterparts.
These thoughts of uncertainty haunt her. On seeing one of her Red Cross classmates she reflects on the shakiness of her foundation: “I envied her for her unwavering faith in Japan, for her innocent pride, and for her passionate dedication, all of which seemed to be slipping through my hands.” (pp. 29). She notices that her father is also suffering from a discomfort brought on by the military effort in Manchuria. He knows it was easy for the younger generation to not take Japanese supremacy seriously without realizing the toll of effort went into securing it as well as the precarious balance it rested on. The government was even using Shintoism as a means of uniting the people on an emotional level behind the cause of the war. As Japan continued to lose ground in the Pacific and the U.S. took Midway, the military propaganda of the situation only continued to thicken and promise of victory was prevalent.
The Russians broke through the northern border of Manchuria in August 1945 and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese Army was marching from the south to meet them. Anti-Japanese guerilla forces were resurfacing throughout Manchuria. The nearly two million Japanese citizens in Manchuria found themselves “trapped in the midst of [their] enemies, without any contact with Japan” (pp. 40). The local Japanese assumed that in this situation they would fight to the end. The author relates:
As most Japanese men did then, my father did not think that Japan would choose to surrender. It was unthinkable that Japan would surrender to any country. Japan had never bowed to another country and never would. Japan would choose to fight to the last man and die with honor. It seemed that Father had already accepted the idea that the time had come for all Japanese to end their own lives. He was merely wondering what method the emperor would choose to execute this mass suicide. (pp. 40)
When the emperor announces Japan’s unconditional surrender to the rest of the world, the citizens of Japan feel deeply betrayed. For the Japanese in Manchuria, no time was given for this to sink in before the guerilla forces begin to terrorize their imperial intruders. Riots break out, houses are burned, and people are killed. The Japanese are forced to flee into the hills to assure their safety. Kuramoto’s father secures a temporary truce and a number of surviving families is allowed to stay in an abandoned building while they wait for a train come to take them to Dairen which had been pacified by the Russians. This is a time of great humiliation, sorrow, and confusion for the Japanese.
In Dairen the author comes “face to face with the new world, a world where Japanese supremacy was a big joke, where Japanese privileges no longer existed” (pp. 71). The roles have reversed as the Chinese are the ones in charge and the Japanese are subservient. The once secure Japanese struggle to find employment or financial resources. They become street sellers and vendors, many selling family heirlooms such as jewelry and kimonos. The Russians have completely overrun the city and the Japanese government is in shambles. The Russians act like barbarians and trash the city. Many women and girls are raped by the soldiers. The author is forced to cut her hair short in order to look like a boy. Many Japanese were homeless refugees who did not survive the harsh winter. The city of Dairen had been flipped on its head and “was now a mockery of what it once had been” (pp. 107). The Japanese began to talk about ‘ka-eh-lu’ or going home—returning to where they came from. But for the author, Dairen was her home and a place of pride. She was bitter about giving it over to the Chinese who she felt did not care for it or have the same sense of ownership. To her “Dairen was Japan, Dairen was [her] country, Dairen was a pearl nurtured and cultured with love and respect” (pp. 105). The Japanese who had grown to love Manchuria were forced to return to a country which, for many of them, was a foreign land. In May 1946, the United States occupiers of Japan transported close to million survivors from Manchuria to the homeland of Japan. For the author, this did not feel like a homecoming but rather an “untimely picnic” (pp. 113).
The new arrivals to Japan were immediately pegged as repatriates and received a fair share of discrimination and hardship assimilating into mainland culture. They dressed, spoke, and acted differently than mainland Japanese. The reality was that Japan was different for all Japanese. The atomic bombs had devastated the physical and moral landscape. Coming to grips with surrender was something completely new and they dealt with it in a unique way:
The Americans and other foreigners have everything over the Japanese now. The Japanese got it into their heads that the war and everything was all their fault and that they owe everything to everybody, especially Americans…A tacit agreement prevailed among the population in postwar Japan that everyone must act as if the war had never occurred, as if no was ever interested in the past war, and as if we were, and had always been, peace lovers, with only a handful of Japanese military responsible for the war. (pp. 127-8)
The author spends years attempting to adjust to the new way of life in Japan and continues to struggle. She longs for her life in Dairen and continues to feel like a foreigner in a country devoid of its pride. Eventually she gets married to an American engineer working of the U.S. military in Japan. They move to the United States where she adopts a little girl and finds joy in parenting. She never completely comes to grips with the events she underwent but attempts to do so by writing her memoir.
I appreciated the account of Kazuko Kuramoto exile from Manchuria and her self-examination regarding the cultural prejudices and racial conflicts brought upon by Japanese imperialism in the area. I thought the author did an excellent job of exposing the layers of thinking and feeling involved in the process of coming to grips with Japan’s role of expansion in China. It was refreshing to learn about these things from a woman’s perspective and the coinciding struggle illuminated on the role of a woman in Japanese society. She was intelligent and outspoken given her ideas and the conflicting feelings she felt. Her memoir did a noteworthy job of meshing her subjective experience with the objective realities of the time. From her individual account, it was easy to make inferences toward the general Japanese population’s reaction to the tumultuous change.



Kuramoto, Kazuko. Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1999.

[1000NightsAKnight · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book on the strength of Bob Newman’s review. As a third culture kid myself, I was intrigued to know what life was like for a third culture kid of the Japanese Empire born and raised in Manchuria.

Kazuko Karamatu’s memoir starts in media res in 1944, when she is a 16 year-old high-school graduate about to enroll in the Red Cross. Her stint in the nursing corps doesn’t last long as she develops tuberculosis and is swiftly reclaimed from the possibility of hardship and danger by her wealthy family. Nonetheless, it kicks off a period of adolescent reflection about her place in the world just as that world comes crashing down at the end of the war.

Up till then, haute bourgeois Manchurian life was all that she had ever known. Her father was a government official; an uncle was an executive in the Manchurian Railway Company; another uncle owned an iron importing company; her grandfather had been a police inspector. At nursing school, even her native Japanese classmates accuse her of being a snob and gawk at her chauffer-driven car. Segregation cut deep in the colony with the Chinese excluded from schools, ‘restaurants, theaters, busses, streetcars, and even the residential areas and shopping areas’. Her two brothers were in the Imperial Japanese Army and one-by-one her generation was being called upon to defend this way life. Could they do so in good conscience?

Expecting to be called up, Kunio, one of Karamatu’s friends, writes her a blistering farewell letter:

Above all, however, it was a frightening statement. Kunio called Manchukuo, the country that had been set up in Manchuria by the Japanese government in 1931, Japan's puppet country. He went on to say that the brotherly bond between Japan and Manchukuo that the Japanese government claimed existed was nothing but hypocritical propaganda. What really existed, he said, was a relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, with a deep-rooted hatred on the part of the oppressed. Finally, Kunio claimed, the war Japan had waged in the Pacific for the last three years was nothing but a manifestation of a hunger for more military power, the Japanese themselves being the victims of a government controlled by the military. ''It is a crime,'' Kunio continued, "to blindly prolong a war that has long lost its cause, at the cost of our lives. What are they trying to prove," the letter screamed in fury, "at the cost of our entire generation?"

After Japan loses the war, all this self-examination and handwringing go for nought. The Chinese turn on the Japanese—friend and foe alike—in riots and other violent reprisals. The invading Soviet Army establishes some semblance of order, but from the end of the war until their repatriation, the local Japanese are thoroughly humiliated. Her father and uncle are able to scratch a living cooking tempura in a booth in a department store, but many Japanese die in the streets, some committing suicide in despair.

Karamatu and her family are repatriated in early 1947 and the second part of her memoir deals with the rebuilding of their lives. Given that her brothers start off as ditch diggers, it appears to be a story of quiet triumph: one brother opens a successful school; another brother becomes the head of a meteorological observatory; her sister marries the president of an import-export company; Kunio ends up as the secretary of the Japan Journalists' Federation. But it’s not so well-told as the early part of her life, any chapter of which would have been worthy of a magazine like the New Yorker. Her family survived the war intact, but the precocious, sharp-eyed, fearless girl, who had disguised herself as a boy so as to move about freely during the Soviet occupation, didn’t quite make it to Japan.

Once there, we instead have to endure the company of a weepy, desperate housewife as Karamatu marries a philandering and alcoholic American whose drama consumes her entirely. One thus comes to the end of the book, in 1982, somewhat shocked at how little one learns about post-war Japan outside of the various US bases on which she and her husband lived. It's only after her husband finally drinks himself to death that the old, spirited Karamatu makes something of a return. She enrolls in a business college in the US and becomes a legal secretary. She raises her adopted daughter there, marries again and has a second daughter. But in her very last lines, on the occasion of her father’s funeral, she admits that she settled, even if the bargain did not quite do herself justice: ‘Rest in peace, Father, I have long come to terms with it all and with myself. But, oh, not without remorse.’

[Bob Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“when elephants fight, it is the ground that suffers”

Back ninety-seven years ago, a baby girl was born in that small part of China taken over by the Japanese a couple of decades before, after the end of the Russo-Japanese War, a place called in Japanese “Dairen”. Her parents and grandparents had lived there before her. Imbued from birth with a strong sense of Japanese nationalism, she grew up living and breathing the idea that Japan was the ideal country, and the Japanese settlers in China or the part known as Manchuria, were pioneers, building a better future. When she was four years old, Japan declared that huge area to be a new country, “Manchukuo”, but it was just a puppet state, completely under Japanese control. They built up industry, agriculture, railroads, cities, education, and a bureaucratic system, but like colonial regimes all over the world, these new things mainly served the Japanese colonists who moved there so extensively that by 1940, there were about a million of them.

If you would like to know what life was like there for the Japanese settlers, this is your book. There are very few others in English. The Japanese, like Europeans, Russians, and Americans, looked down on the local Chinese, thinking them incapable of developing the country themselves, scorning them as second class citizens. Only a few Chinese students could attend the Japanese high schools. The author accepted all the prejudices against Chinese and frankly acknowledges her superior attitude. As World War II progressed and Japan was slowly losing, she tried to join the nursing organization because of her patriotic sensibilities, but due to incipient tuberculosis (and a weakening attitude towards the discipline) dropped out. Her three brothers disappeared into the maelstrom of war.

In 1945, the bottom dropped out of her life. The Russians invaded Manchuria a few days before the end of the war. Simultaneously, the Japanese Army there collapsed and Chinese guerrillas and Communist units began to take control. Suddenly the whole Japanese population was dispossessed, many killed, many taken to Siberia as prisoners, and many began to die of starvation, cold, and illness. In this autobiography you will find perhaps the only story available of what happened from the Japanese point of view, the point of view of an 18-19 year old girl. Her family (and all three brothers) miraculously survived and were among the lucky ones that eventually (after nearly two years) were evacuated to Japan.

But our author had never been to Japan. Japanese life in Manchuria was much more open and informal than in the home islands. She always felt an outsider, she was never accepted as a “real Japanese”. Manchuria was her only home. A lot of the book is the sad story of what happened to her after the war—marrying a drunken, two-timing American, doing various jobs—some not so beautiful—and (of course) being scorned by other Japanese. I will leave the ending for readers. It’s a very down-to-earth tale which will keep you interested and is well-worth reading if you have any curiosity about events in that far-off place at a now-distant time.

[Abby Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

i actually really liked this one. this (no shocker) was a required reading for one of my courses but this was the best so far. i feel like when people talk about the Second World War in terms of Japan they almost exclusively are referring to the atomic bombs or Pearl Harbor so it was REALLY interesting to read something from a different perspective
before I took this class i didn’t know anything about the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and this is set during and after WWII talking about how third generation Manchurian Japanese citizens felt displaced after the war and how they were able to find home in lands that didn’t share their culture
very very interesting

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good narrative, I enjoyed it a ton both as a story and history but I can’t give it 5 stars because it feels like some things did not get explored deep enough. Some deeper reflection on patriotism and nationalism would have been nice. The way it’s written she seems to go from “Japan is perfect” to “Japan is not my home and is committing war crimes” in a matter of seconds, I image her real experience was more complicated and would like to read more about her internal struggles with that shift in ideology, unfortunately this book largely stops at the surface level. Still the surface it shows is great and it is an amazing book.

[damagedways · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually finished this like four days ago

[melbutnotgibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it for school but enjoyed the leisure time of the book. Heavy topics but informative and interesting.

[Joseph Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very Readable.

[Zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book as an assignment for my Eastern Civilizations class, but ended up really enjoying it. Hearing about her experiences is quite interesting.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary. Historical significance matched with excellent storytelling. Recommended for everyone, especially those with even a passing interest in China, Japan or WWII.