Boundaries and Beyond: Japanese Empire and Mongolia as Transimperial History

The Japanese empire famously invented and occupied the constructed territory of Manchuria-Mongolia, or Man-Mō. However, the boundaries of Mongolia for the Japanese administration in this equation were deliberately hazily defined. The Mongolian steppe overlapped the jurisdiction of three states: Russia (Imperial & Soviet), Outer Mongolia, and Republican China. How did the Japanese imperial agents during the 1900s–1940s construct the boundaries of Mongolia? How did they navigate between many ethnic groups (Mongols, Manchu, Daur, Orochen, Evenks, Buryats, and Russians) of the northeastern steppe? I attempt to demonstrate how, in the first half of the twentieth century, the Japanese military and bureaucracy, along with various imperial boosters (academics, businessmen, Buddhist priests), defined the parameters of their empire vis-à-vis the Mongol-speaking groups and determined who belonged and did not belong to it.

The borderlands between Japan’s empire, China, and Russia were particularly sensitive, serving as contested sites of ideological, economic, and ethnoracial transimperial rivalries. I argue that the Japanese military and administration attempted to resolve the steppe’s complicated ethnic, economic, and political makeup in accordance with the variegated and shifting Mongolian interests and forces. In other words, the Japanese did not simply superimpose their will and imagination; instead, they had to understand and navigate, sometimes skillfully and sometimes not, the complicated Mongolian politics torn between three different state formations. Russian and Chinese interests in the region equally impacted the production of knowledge about the “Mongols” and the boundaries of Mongolia in imperial Japan.