Making Manchuria Japan’s frontier: The <i>bazoku</i> fantasy and imperial masculinity, 1900s–1920s

Abstract From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, China gained infamy for widespread banditry across its territory, with Manchuria being one of the regions most affected. During this period, the emerging Japanese empire saw banditry as a ‘local specialty’ of Manchuria. However, the representations of Manchurian bandits in the Japanese media were not entirely negative; they were often depicted as masculine heroes fighting for justice. What did this fantasized image of Manchuria as a land of horse-riding righteous bandits signify? This article analyses the term bazoku (meaning horse-riding bandits), and the fantasy of Manchurian bandits in the Japanese popular media from the 1900s to the 1920s, exploring the politics shaping these representations. The image of Manchuria as a land of bazoku in the Japanese media reconceptualized it as a Japanese frontier, separated from China. The term bazoku came to embody a specific spatio-temporality—Manchuria from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries—demonstrating the epistemological construction of Manchuria as an outlaw territory outside of Chinese jurisdiction, thus justifying Japan’s intervention. The bazoku fantasy also shaped Japanese imperial masculinity, characterized by intellectual qualities such as rationality and leadership, cultivated through self-discipline, and thereby deemed fit to lead Asian nations. This construct established a hierarchy of nationally defined masculinities, with Japanese masculinity positioned at the top. In this context, imperial masculinity supported the Pan-Asianist ideology that legitimized Japanese expansion across Asia.