Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion (Encounters with Asia)

A very well written overview on the complexity of Japanese involvement in Manchuria.

I give it five stars simply because it's the best book on China's Northeast by a Japanese author with full command over Japanese-language sources. The translation is good, but like all books today, it has not been edited or proofed to the standards that should prevail at Ben Franklin's University. Yamamuro started as a lawyer and e spends too much time on the legal underpinnings (non-existant) of the Manchukuo state. He does not give us a sense of the astounding leaps in development theory and finance that the "two kis and three sukes" accomplished in Manchukuo and which, as Duara says, established "the East Asia Modern." He has a paragraph near the beginning in which he confesses that he really does not know the full story of Japanese atrocities in the Northeast during the Pacific War, when perhaps as many as a million died in order to provide food and arms for the doomed IJA effort in the Pacific.