Manchukuo

With the Western nations in the depths of an industrial depression, Japan began a series of aggressions against the Chinese in Manchuria.

The gains were consolidated in a puppet state known as Manchukuo, comprising a fertile and populous area as large as California.

China was unable to offer much resistance, and Soviet Russia could not risk a major war in the Far East.

Even so, some of the Soviet border clashes with the Japanese in time of peace were actually battles fought with tanks and planes.

Except that he doesn't.

As he rises up in status in the navy, he is named the main purchasing agent in China for the Japanese navy, and he uses his position to plunder goods from the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo to hawk and peddle them back in Japan at an enormously high profit margin.

he also was able to build a quite successful opium and narcotics empire.

With the success of these two enterprises, at the end of the war in 1945, he was said to be worth the equivalent of 175 million US dollars.

And there was a senator by the name of Joseph McCarthy who called this all out in real time and said we have been infiltrated our state department's been infiltrated steve i've been writing about this i've been reading about this learning about this for 20 years at this point it is the biggest bald-faced lie that uh the chinese communist party fought the japanese in world war ii and that they somehow defeated japan that's where they teach all the people in china by the way it's not what happened it's not true at all it was the soviet union that pushed japan out of Manchuria.

out of Manchukuo, as the Japanese had called it.

Then they took that industrial base, the Japanese industrial imperial war base that they had built up in Manchuria, and they handed all the weapons to Chairman Mao.

And once Mao got his hands on that, they immediately launched the Battle of Beijing.

Returning to the city, I head towards Erdao District, where the Museum of the Imperial Palace of the Manchu State stands as a monument to a complicated and painful chapter of history.

The palace, or Weihuang gong, was the residence of Pu'i, the last emperor of China, who was installed by Japan as the puppet ruler of Manchukuo.

Walking through the gates feels like stepping into a frozen moment of nineteen thirty-two, where the architecture blends traditional Chinese motifs with Western styles, a visual contradiction that mirrors the political reality of the time.

The ticket is around seventy yuan, a small price to pay for the privilege of witnessing such a charged space, and the silence inside the exhibition halls is profound, broken only by the soft footsteps of other visitors.

It can be traced all the way back to Abe's grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi.

Kishi was once a high-ranking official in Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state established in northwestern China that existed from 1932 to 1945.

After the Second World War, he was arrested in 1945 as a Class A war crime suspect, but then was later released when US authorities decided that right-wing anti-communist figures like Kishi could help steer post-war Japan in a pro-Western direction.

He then went on to broker the founding of the country's Liberal Democratic Party, LDP, in 1955, and became Prime Minister two-

And they morph into their own kind of freelance resistance cell to the Japanese occupation, which is taking place in the late 1930s, 1940s.

So for listeners who weren't aware, Japan basically tried to annex most of China during the sort of gradually starting in Manchuria or Manchukuo, as they tried to call it, in 1937.

And it became into open warfare with both the Chinese communists and the Chinese nationalists So there's a sort of three-way fight going on between these powers.

So Japan is very much an occupying force, and that's in the background all the time, especially in the mise-en-scene of the film.