The Japanese colonial project in Manchuria stands as being unique amongst the pantheon of colonial projects in China. Where the treaty ports were Chinese cities with portions carved out by western concessions, and fully foreign controlled regions like Hong Kong were limited in geographical scale, the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo was expansive in scope and scale – more comparable to the settler colonization projects of Africa or Australia. Manchuria was subject to grand, utopian Japanese visions and designs – something that David Tucker explores in his essay City Planning without Cities, Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo.^[1] One particularly striking element discussed by Tucker is how Japanese urban planners conceptualized Manchuria. Tucker describes how Japanese urban planners explicitly saw Manchuria as a ‘blank slate’ – an empty, flat, virgin canvas on which they could paint their utopia.^[2] This conception of Manchuria colors every part of the resulting plans – most strikingly in the wider geographical layout of the planned communities which take strict geometric shapes, with no consideration for natural features, already existing communities, and economic viability.^[3] This plan of standardized hamlets has a number of fatal flaws seemingly total and disconnected – but the concept of imagined space can help piece them together.

The thinking behind the hamlet plan represents a very explicit example of Henri Lefebvre’s concept of imagined or mental space in action.^[4] As discussed by Lefebvre, mental space is conceptual in nature – it may be based on some set of guiding principles, perhaps even a conception of reality, but it is by its standard nature an unconstrained, uncontested space.^[5] Lefebvre uses this concept to critique the assumptions and ideas of other academics, framing mental space as an unconscious prior.^[6] This divide described by Lefebvre between the physical and mental space is extremely applicable to the manner with which Japanese urban planners approached Manchuria.^[7] Tucker discusses how the urban planners did study the lifestyle of Japanese farmers and applied those lessons into their designs, but did so in a way that simplified and removed nuance from the lives of farmers.^[8] This flawed conception of the lived experience of farmers was the basis for the geometric layout of proposed hamlets^[9], something which fed into many of the other numerous flaws with the hamlet proposal, notably including its security flaws, economic flaws and logistical flaws.^[10]

Where Lefebvre uses the concept of imagined space to expose the flaws and failings of academic ideas and theories – concepts that are difficult to ‘defeat’ with finality – imagined space is useful in revealing the links between the common elements between the varying flaws of the hamlet proposal. This is a textbook example of how spatial theory can be used to analyze colonial projects and urban planning – an while the implications of spatial theory may be somewhat obvious in this case, similar examples of flawed conceptions of imagined space can be found in other colonial projects of all shapes and sizes – from French Indochina to the British Raj to the wider Japanese Empire.

^[1] Tamanoi, Mariko. “City Planning without Cities, Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo.” In Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, 53–81. [Ann Arbor], Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies ; University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.

^[2] Tamanoi, Mariko. “City Planning without Cities, Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo.” 55.

^[3] Ibid. 58-62.

^[4] Lefebvre, Henri. “Plan of the Present Work.” In The Production of Space, 1–67. Oxford, OX, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991.

^[5] Lefebvre, Henri. “Plan of the Present Work.” 3-4.

^[6] Ibid. 4-6.

^[7] Ibid. 6.

^[8] Tamanoi, Mariko. “City Planning without Cities, Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo.” 62-63.

^[9] Ibid. 66.

^[10] Ibid. 66-71.