Farming the Empire: Working Women in the Rice Fields of Manchukuo during the Second World War

This presentation examines the experiences and representations of women in farming communities in the multi-ethnic state of Manchukuo within the Japanese empire. Studies of race, ethnicity, and colonial governance have explicated the case of Manchukuo and illuminated critical issues of colonial modernity, the paradoxes and totalities of empires, and the legacies of the Manchukuo experiences. While these accounts illuminate new voices and emphasize women’s roles for and against the empire-building process in Manchukuo, women often become trapped in a perpetrator/victim binary in the masculine narrative of imperialism as part of the mobilization for total war after the late 1930s. By focusing on analyses of educated women’s rights in the imperial era or the heroines of post-colonial nationalist narratives, these studies silence a vast majority of the population, the farmers, and their lived experiences. My paper shifts the focus toward agrarian women in the rice fields of Manchukuo during the Second World War. As a part of the numerous bases of Japanese imperial expansion, these women lived out the duties and benefits of feeding soldiers at home and in battlefronts by participating in agriculture. An analysis of reports from contemporary newspapers explicates how migrant farming families and their women were represented in the wartime empire. The voices and positions of farming women will also be presented through an analysis of memoirs and anthropological interviews. This paper demonstrates how racial, ethnic, and gender boundaries were fixed yet fragile, as well as how class intersected with colonial productions of race and gender. I argue that as a multi-ethnic modern nation-state in the Japanese empire, wartime Manchukuo was a space of paradox, where the majority of women challenged and negotiated the “traditional” and “modern” roles in their families, working communities, and the empire.