A Research on Yoichi Funado's Manshukoku Engi: How Japan as a Colonial Empire Has Been Rediscovered in Hardboiled Detective Novels

Abstract

Historian Shinichi Yamamuro, an expert in the history of political philosophy, claimed that he had dedicated himself to his book, Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion (Enlarged Edition), trying hard to respond to Yoshimi Takeuchi, who in 1963 said, “Japan as a nation hadn’t held a funeral for Manchukuo yet.” He asserted one unforgettable fact that “in China, the thirteen-and-half-year-long existence of Manchukuo had been recognized as the fourteen-year-long tragic history starting from the date northeast China was invaded and occupied by imperial Japan.” He then continued to indicate that future studies on imperial Japan shall never regard Taiwan, Korea or any member of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as “an individual subject,” but shall perceive and understand “how Japan as a colonial empire gradually formed a system to integrate Asia as a whole” in advance so as to reexamine “the significance of Manchukuo’s position and status.” This research carefully investigates the hardboiled novelist Yoichi Funado’s posthumous Manshukoku Engi (9 Volumes, 2007-2015), which attempted to make a comprehensive response in a form of a novel to the questions raised by Yamamuro in Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion. Meanwhile, Manshukoku Engi depicted large-scale and tremendous changes under the context in which “Japan as a colonial empire” had been correlated to “Taiwan, Korea and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” as well as “Manchukuo.” Manshukoku Engi has employed abundant critical and judgmental elements, which are believed in this research to be profoundly related to the technique of hardboiled detective novels manipulated by Funado.

Keywords

• Yoichi Funado
• Manshukoku Engi
• Hardboiled detective novels
• Japan as a colonial empire
• History of East Asia