Preserving the “Primitive”- The Exoticism of Indigeneity and the Romance of the Manchurian Frontier

by Elizabeth Nemitz

As a line from an old Japanese war song goes: “The red setting sun of distant Manchuria / shines down on a stone at the edge of a field / beneath which my friend lies” (Young, 91). The song, a relic from the Russo-Japanese War era, laments the tragic and heroic loss of wartime comrades. Both sharply nostalgic and bitterly evocative, the song experienced a dramatic resurgence in popularity among the Japanese public in the aftermath of the Mukden Incident of 1931, the precursor to Japan’s colonization of Manchuria. In many ways, its resurgence speaks to the distinctive allure Manchuria held in the Japanese popular imagination—envisioned as vast tracts of terrain populated by ancient forests and roaming groups of “bandits, rebels, and mysterious heroes,” where a “red setting sun” signaled the end of each day (Duara, 174). Bewitching though they were, these visions of a pristine and unpopulated landscape belied the reality of Manchuria, where Han Chinese and other sub-nationalities had dwelled for generations, and where Indigenous Tungusic tribes had lived for thousands of years. In Japan proper, where theories of pan-Asianism dominated intellectual discourses, visions of Manchuria—and in particular, attitudes toward Manchurian Indigenous groups—aided the conceptual fashioning of a so-called “pan-Asian” civilization. This in turn played an active force in the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo (Duara, 183). 

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Representations of Land and People
The historical term “Manchuria” formally refers to the region consisting of China's most northeastern provinces, Jilin, Liaoning, and Heilongjiang, called simply the “Northeast” today. The region’s history is rich and layered, encompassing ancient kingdoms, nomadic populations, and diverse ethnic groups. In the eighteenth century, the region served primarily as a Manchu cultural domain, largely due to the policies of Qing emperors, who wished to preserve the Manchu identity of their homeland (Duara, 41). By the late nineteenth century, however, influxes of Han Chinese agricultural settlement, the rise of the railroad, and major global influences re-spatialized the region, ushering in “new rhythms of life” amid an economically-charged landscape (Duara, 172). 

The shifting demographic and economic makeup of the region reshaped its social, political, and cultural identities, giving rise to new and competing interpretations of the land. Among Koreans, for example, nationalist writings viewed the region as part of the Korean cultural sphere, centering on Chang’bai Mountain as the spiritual ancestral birthplace of the Korean nation. For the Japanese who saw Manchuria as a natural expansion point following the colonization of the Ryukyu Kingdom (Okinawa), Taiwan, and the Korean peninsula, propaganda materials emphasized images of grasslands and aboriginal ethnic tribes. This particular offering of Manchurian lore and history minimized the role of the Han Chinese majority, overlooking the vast Han agricultural settlement that had already transformed the supposedly untouched lands (Duara, 173-174) Cultural mechanisms such as museums, publications, and artistic collections downplayed the presence of the Han Chinese majority while highlighting the abundant natural resources, Indigenous communities, and historical kingdoms of the region. 

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Implementing “Harmony Among Races”
This vision reveals the transient, almost dreamlike role Manchuria played in the Imperial Japanese imagination. Such a top-down reconceptualization of the colonized periphery served a critical rhetorical purpose in colonial experiments, not just in Manchuria, but also in Anglo settler states like the United States and Canada and East Asian colonies like Taiwan. Colonial powers re-interpret the periphery’s cultural, racial, or physical characteristics to serve their own missions and ideologies, often depicting land as “uninhabited” or sparsely populated by indigenous peoples. In the case of the Manchurian project, the view of a wide, untapped land inhabited by “noble” Indigenous tribes fueled the Japanese visions of racial harmony. This manifested in policies that aimed to isolate and “return” Indigenous groups back to their perceived traditional ways and “reverse the pervasive process of Sinicization among minorities” in a bid to maintain their perceived cultural purity under Japanese oversight (Duara, 182). These seemingly innocuous images of Manchuria veiled far more nefarious civilizing ambitions.
 Having examined the spatial and symbolic depictions of Manchuria, we now turn to how these representations were made materially consequential through ethnographic practice and scholarly legitimization. These efforts served to manufacture linkages between Manchurian ethnicities and the Japanese to support a pan-Asian agenda and concepts of a Japanese-led civilization. Japanese scholars and ethnographers contributed to this reframing, as many sought to embed Manchuria’s racial-cultural roots within this greater ideological scheme. This particularly concerned Manchurian Indigenous groups, such as the Oroqen, a deer and reindeer-hunting, shamanistic people who, to the Japanese, “represented the most primitive and ancient subgroup of the Tungusic people” (Duara, 182). The Japanese and Koreans were portrayed in Japanese scholarship as another subgroup, the Southern Tungus. Thus, the idea of such a “pan-North Asian people” or “family” affirmed a special ethno-cultural link between the Japanese and the Oroqen. By appealing to this connection, the Japanese could assert their claims to the land while maintaining racial superiority over the other “familial” branches of the pan-North Asian people (Duara, 183). 

In addition, scholarship on the Oroqen often furthered the trope of the exotic or mythical colonized subject. Academic work and ethnographic studies enthusiastically portrayed the Oroqen as inhabiting an “enchanted fairyland” (Duara, 185), a people whose traditional ways were in regrettable decline due to Han agricultural settlement. Ethnographers like Nagata Uzumaro documented various Oroqen cultural practices that resembled Japanese practices to further prove historical connections between the two, with a few distinguishing key differences—the Japanese, although purported to be a Tungusic people like the Oroqen, had evolved past their pure, traditional state, whereas the Oroqen had been portrayed as relatively unchanged for over 2,000 years (Duara, 185). 

Primitive Authenticity and the Charting of History
    While in many cases around the world, the framing of Indigenous people as “primitive” or “savage” has justified brutal civilizing missions, the so-called primitivity traditional nature of the Oroqen necessitated their “preservation” rather than their extermination, a technique Historian Prasenjit Duara calls “primitive authenticity” (187). According to Duara, the romanticization of the Indigenous “represented a valued part of our lost selves, to be protected and preserved”; that is, the Oroqen represented a quainter, more ancient branch of lost Japanese heritage, allowing the Japanese to link “the self to the primitive even while it distanced itself in the security of civilized status” (188). Within this conceptual framework, the Imperial Japanese were able to both appropriate the Indigenous origins of the land as a shared inheritance while still affirming the superiority of their own civilized state over the subjugated. Romanticized visions of Manchuria and its ethnic groups often masked very real exploitation of these populations on the ground. The Japanese’s aim to physically “preserve” and “isolate” the Oroqen and return the tribe to its ancient ways of life resulted in the fundamental restructuring and uprooting of Oroqen society, which, contrary to Japanese understandings, had already come to depend upon a degree of agriculturalization and integration with the Han Chinese (Duara, 186). In this way, primitive authenticity seeps into every aspect of political and social life, robbing Indigenous populations of their agency and self-determination and erasing native knowledge and concepts of land and space. Most importantly, it allows the colonizer to not only lay claim to alien territory, but also to fundamentally shape the very memory of land and history. By draping conquest in the language of kinship and cultural preservation, the Japanese Empire showed how easily the rhetoric of racial unity can become a veil for domination—a pattern whose echoes still reverberate in modern forms of historical revisionism.
References
Duara, Prasenjit. Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
Young, Louise. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. University of California Press, 1998.

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