6 Kressman • Land of the Poppy
In the Land of the Poppy:
The Japanese Occupation of Manchuria,
1931 - 1945
Tim Kressman, Yale University
The effects of opium, which would reduce the Chinese to pathetic, subhuman beings in the eyes of the Japanese, coupled with opium’s great economic
importance, made it appealing for Japan to occupy poppy-growing areas of
China. For the Japanese, Manchuria came to represent their unwavering
control of the opium monopoly, responsible for the huge annual revenues
needed to finance Japan’s ambitious military and industrial programs, and
their will to dominate the Chinese people. The Japanese remembered how
Western powers manipulated Qing China through its steadfast dependence
on opium, and they drew from their own experience on the island of Formosa
(present-day Taiwan) to formulate the opium policy of Manchukuo, the puppet state established in Manchuria. In this land to the north, where the
poppy had long been bound to the history and economic system of the region,
the Japanese used the knowledge they had already accumulated of opium’s
destructiveness to advance their agenda from 1931 to 1945.
I
n the 1930s, Japan furthered its ambition to spread Japanese civilization
and ways throughout the world. According to one of the country’s most
prominent China scholars, Naito Konan, this was Japan’s mission, and
China—the largest nation in Asia—was the main target. Naito saw his nation as the
natural inheritor of the cultural maturity that once belonged to China, a land he
believed was long dead, a corpse “wriggling.”1 Writing as waves of industrialization
swept the country, Naito captured what it meant for Japan to achieve its dream of
controlling China, making comparisons to progress and change—ideas all too familiar to the Japanese:
Suppose, with the intention to open up a huge rice field, you start digging irrigation canals. Eventually, you hit a big rock, which must be
cracked with a hammer or even blasted with dynamite. What would you
say if someone should disregard your ultimate objective, and criticize
you for destroying the land?2
Surpassing China not only became a psychological goal, a means of eliminating any
challenge posed to Japanese power after years of contentious relations, but also an
1 Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 367.
2 Ibid., 367-8.
Columbia East Asia Review 7
economic goal. With China’s vast amounts of natural resources, Japan could assert
what was seen as its rightful authority over the rest of Asia—a view that became
known as the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. In 1931, Japan assumed this
mantle when it invaded Manchuria, a region in northeast China.
Opium became the physical manifestation of Japan’s psychological and economic reasons for invading China. The control of opium cultivation and trafficking
in poppy-growing areas like Manchuria provided more than just the finances for the
Japanese government to sustain the war. Giving Japan command over the Chinese
people as they became addicted to the narcotic and reduced to pathetic, subhuman
beings, opium also came to represent Japanese racial superiority.
As a direct result of the Mukden Incident, Japan seized Manchuria from the
Chinese Nationalist government and established the puppet state of Manchukuo.3
The natural resources, industrial production, and vast poppy fields in Manchuria
made it a promised land that had long interested the Japanese.4 Here Japan could
base its invasion of China and completely exploit the land, its resources, and its
people to bolster the offensive in the Pacific. Opium was the key. Farmers openly
cultivated it as their only means of work, and the entire industry was an accepted social institution. Despite putting together a formal plan to gradually eliminate opium,
the Manchukuo government, serving as a mere façade to mask Japan’s true interests
in the region, prolonged the Manchus’ toleration of a drug viewed increasingly as an
inherently evil substance. For the Japanese, Manchuria came to represent their unwavering control of the opium monopoly, responsible for the huge annual revenues
needed to finance Japan’s ambitious military and industrial programs, and reinforced
Japan’s will to dominate the Chinese people. The Japanese remembered how Western
powers manipulated Qing China through its steadfast dependence on opium and
drew from their own experience on the island of Formosa (present-day Taiwan) to
formulate Manchukuo’s opium policy. In this land to the north, where the poppy had
long been bound to the history and economy of the region, the Japanese used the
knowledge they had already accumulated of opium’s destructiveness to advance their
agenda from 1931 to 1945.5
3 Ibid., 368-70. The invasion and establishment of Manchukuo is much more complicated than my statement may
suggest. For years the Japanese had tried to take Manchuria and had been active in the region. In 1928, Japan had the
powerful and long-ruling Manchu warlord Zhang Zuolin assassinated in the hope that his death would spark a war in
northern China. Instead, his son, Zhang Xueliang, succeeded him and demonstrated an alarming independence, which
threatened Japanese motives. On September 18, 1931, his rule prompted the Japanese to set off explosives on a railway
line outside of Mukden, a city chosen for its proximity to the largest barracks of Chinese troops in Manchuria. In what
became known as the Mukden Incident, the initial bombing grew in magnitude, as Japan ordered a full-out attack on
the barracks and took Mukden itself. When Japanese troops in Korea flooded across the border into Manchuria, Zhang
Xueliang retreated to avoid a large-scale conflict, giving Japan ample time to consolidate the region and establish a new
“country.” The wider implications of this invasion and the international response will not be discussed in this paper.
4 Colonel P.T. Etherton and H. Hessell Tiltman, Manchuria: The Cockpit of Asia (New York: Frederick A. Stokes
Company, 1932), 1. The authors call Manchuria “the promised land of Asia, where drama never dies…a land of strange
incongruities.”
5 The scholarship produced on Manchuria from the 1930s to the end of World War II is profuse. Many books on
modern China, including Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1999), and journal articles cover Manchuria’s recent history, especially in connection to Japan and the war. No definitive
modern work, however, exists solely devoted to this region of China, let alone to opium’s long history there; the best
resources available were written either during or right after the period in question. On Manchuria, see particularly Owen
8 Kressman • Land of the Poppy
A Widespread Social ‘Evil’
Opium was not always such a prevalent and controlling sociopolitical force in China,
but rather morphed into one over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British began trading the narcotic in the 1700s as an alternative to silver
to exchange for Chinese goods. By 1820, huge quantities of opium were needed to
sustain over one million addicts in the country.6 This marked the beginning of the
opium problem. A cycle was soon in place that perpetuated China’s political and
social stagnation: “The narcotic had to be available in large quantities; there had to be
a developed means of consuming it; enough people had to want to smoke it to make
the trade viable, and government attempts at prohibitions had to be ineffectual.”7
Although the Qing emperor sought to end this overwhelming economic dependence
on opium in 1839, his aggressive actions against the British led to the Opium Wars
and had humiliating repercussions for the Chinese. In addition to having to cede
land to the British and permit direct contact with the Qing government, the Chinese
were forced to open more ports to British trade and legalize the import of opium.8
By the turn of the century opium had become part of China’s social fabric.
In May 1910, British diplomat and explorer Sir Alexander Hosie arrived in Beijing,
planning to visit six of China’s provinces, all major opium centers, and investigate
poppy cultivation. Hosie had travelled extensively throughout China, from Sichuan
and the edge of Tibet in the far west to Manchuria in the northeast, describing the
products and trade of little-known regions for the first time in a Western account. He
was commissioned in 1908 by the government of India to study the opium-growing
provinces, when “India offered to stop the export of opium to China if China abandoned the cultivation of the poppy.”9 Upon his arrival in 1910, Hosie first directed
his attention to northwest China, where at this time of the year he hoped to see the
poppy in flower and the harvesting process.10 He discovered that the government in
Shanxi had eradicated the poppy, and that a recent attempt to revive its cultivation
had caused an uprising and led to forty casualties. Although Hosie called the quest
for the poppy in Shanxi “like hunting for a needle in a haystack,” he noted in his
narrative that the flower was very much on the minds of the people he encountered,
Lattimore’s Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1935) and Inner Frontiers of China
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1940), and Manchuria: The Cockpit of Asia (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1932)
by Colonel P.T. Etherton and H. Hessell Tiltman. For works focusing on opium and the international drug trade, see
Opium: A History by Martin Booth (New York: Thomas Donne Books, 1996), Webs of Smoke: Warlords, Spies, and
the History of the International Drug Trade by Kathryn Meyer and Terry M. Parssinen (Maryland: Rowan & Littlefield
Publishers, 1998), and Frederick Thayer Merill’s and Gerald N. Grob’s Japan and the Opium Menace (New York: the
International Secretariat, and the Institute of Pacific Relations and the Foreign Policy Association, 1942). The best works
specifically on opium in Manchuria are primary sources: see pamphlets, such as “The Control and Suppression of Opium
in Manchoukuo” (New York: South Manchuria Railway Company, 1938), as well as contemporary newspaper and
journal articles in the Far Eastern Survey and Pacific Affairs. (Note that Manchukuo and Manchoukuo reflect Japanese
and Chinese respective differences in transcription.)
6 Spence, Search, 129.
7 Ibid., 129
8 Ibid., 158.
9 W. E. Soothill, “Hosie, Sir Alexander (1853-1925),” rev. K. D. Reynolds, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed March 11, 2012, doi: 10. 1093/ref:odnb/34005.
10 Sir Alexander Hosie, On the Trail of the Opium Poppy (London: George Philip & Son, 1914), 2.
Columbia East Asia Review 9
even in places where it was not being grown.11
The demand and trafficking of opium continued to grow, as the unstable political situation in China saw the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and heightened foreign intervention. In the November 1934 issue of Asia Magazine, journalist Wilbur
Burton commented that under its various forms the drug had “been sold as openly
as rice wine.” In many of China’s cities, addicts of poor social standing made it their
routine to stand in line for hypodermic injections several times each day, while others took a more traditional route, choosing to heat refined opium paste over a flame
and then smoke it from the bowl of a long-stemmed pipe.1213 The Chinese thought
foreigners were the ones to blame for promoting the trade of opium and encouraging
more people to fall under the spell of the poppy. The reality was much different. Burton argued that by the 1930s the opium traffic was mostly in Chinese hands: “The
overwhelming bulk of the narcotic drugs now consumed by the Chinese is produced
in China, largely by Chinese, and with full Chinese official approval.”14
During this chaotic period, warlords fought among themselves and against the
Japanese for control of the country and needed the revenue from selling opium to
finance their exploits. In his 1934 article, Burton remarked that about $30 million
from the opium monopoly was used to support the armies of General Chiang Kaishek, the chairman of the Nationalist government of the Republic of China.15 Chiang
knew that controlling opium meant funding his army, which motivated his administration to organize an opium monopoly, entitled the National Anti-Opium Bureau
(later the National Opium Suppression Committee), an institution that claimed to
raise “opium prohibition revenue.”16 This money instead made its way to the military
treasury. The Far Eastern Survey reported in May 1938 that the government’s annual income had reached $100 million for the national war against Japan.17 Though
Chiang’s government had allegedly promised to remove this social evil from China,
opium, as well as its derivatives, morphine and heroin, received little or no opposition
from the Chinese Nationalists for helping to fund the war.
The Game in the North
The opium situation in Manchuria parallels China’s in its long relationship with harvesting poppy. Many of the reasons in China’s history concerning why the government could never eliminate opium and why the opium trade was exploited to finance
wars can also be found in Manchuria’s history. By the creation of Manchukuo in
1931, opium had become synonymous with Manchu society. Smokers consisted of
11 Ibid., 4-5, 34. Hosie provides various examples of how he encountered opium in conversation. Some people asked
him for his opinion of Shanxi’s suppression efforts; others asked him if he had opium.
12 “The Control and Suppression of Opium in Manchoukuo” (New York: South Manchuria Railway Company, 1938),
5-6.
13 Spence, Search, 130. Spence discusses different ways of taking opium derivatives. Besides opium smoking, the
popular choice, some people steeped derivatives in potions or smoked them mixed with other herbs or tobacco.
14 “Opium in Manchoukuo,” 6.
15 Ibid., 5.
16 Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: Thomas Donne Books, 1996), 166.
17 “Opium in Manchoukuo,” 7.
10 Kressman • Land of the Poppy
approximately one-tenth of the population of 30 million and little stigma was attached to the habit. A picture of the poppy in bloom even appeared on certain forms
of the paper currency.18 The new administration recognized that the extensive opium
and narcotics trafficking network was one of its most pressing issues.19 Like other
regions in China, including Shanxi where Sir Alexander Hosie travelled, Manchuria
accepted opium as a social institution and tolerated its existence.
This toleration originated in the early 1800s when Chinese immigrants were
first allowed to enter Manchuria, a vast, mostly unpopulated land once reserved only
for native Manchus. Opium had become the most demanded crop in the nation
through the booming trade with Britain. In Manchuria, opium-harvesting opportunities were particularly plentiful because of the region’s rich, well-cultivated soil in a
temperate climate.20 Social historian Owen Lattimore compared the mass migration
to Manchuria for opium to the gold rushes in California and Australia. Without the
lure of opium, “hundreds of square miles in frontier regions of Manchuria, now inhabited by an industrious and prosperous population, could never have been opened
up and settled so early, rapidly, and thoroughly.”21 Villages and communities sprung
up along the frontier, after families congregated in poppy-cultivating regions to earn
a living. No other crop offered the same potential profit as opium for three reasons.
First, officials had discontinued the regional storage of grain, leading to a loss of grain
reserves and a decidedly weaker rural economy. Second, the land tax enforced poppy
growing on a large enough scale to reduce food crops to a bare subsistence level.22
And third, transporting grains and legitimate crops from the fringes of civilization to
the market at a profit was nearly impossible; as the distance of travel increased, so did
the cost. It made more sense for farmers to produce opium, since its small bulk could
cover transportation costs and bring a considerable profit.23
Opium also dominated the politics of Manchuria. When money was needed
to finance the participation of Manchu armies in civil wars in China, the government
turned to opium, which could then be cultivated openly under official license and
land tax in the oldest settled regions of Manchuria, in addition to on the frontier.24
It was normal for governors and other politicians to participate in opium trafficking
without resorting to secrecy. For example, one governor of Heilongjiang, was reputed
to have drawn a large income from opium grown on his wilderness holdings. The
more powerful an official was, the more likely he was interested in land development,
18 Frederick Thayer Merrill and Gerald N. Grob, Japan and the Opium Menace (New York: the International Secretariat,
and the Institute of Pacific Relations and the Foreign Policy Association: 1942), 93. In the last days of the Manchu rulers,
no particular effort was made to cure addiction. In the ten years preceding Japanese occupation in 1931, there was also an
alarming increase in the consumption of narcotic drugs: morphine, heroin, and cocaine.
19 “Opium in Manchoukuo,” 4.
20 Booth, Opium, 4-5. When farmers harvest the poppies, they look for points of the crown standing straight out or
upward, which signifies that the pod, the part of the plant that secretes the opium, is ripe
21 Owen Lattimore, Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1935), 188.
22 Ibid., 190.
23 Ibid., 192. In one instance, Lattimore describes how opium made it profitable to increase steam transport to the
settlements on the Lower Sungari River on the Manchu frontier. The increase in steam transportation to and from this
region made it profitable to increase production of grain and soybeans. Opium was the paying crop and did much to
shape the development of Manchuria.
24 Ibid., 194.
Columbia East Asia Review 11
grain companies, flour mills, railways, and steamers—the entire economic infrastructure of Manchuria—and thus, also in opium.25 In the era of the warlords after the
Qing collapse, opium brought the rulers of Manchuria almost 100 million silver dollars annually—50 million of which came from the opium-rich region of Jehol alone.
Everything came back to the poppy. Opium was a destructive force to the thousands
who became addicted to it, but this force was in the end accepted as an age-old evil
rooted in the very social and economic foundations of Manchuria.
Another force shaping Manchuria’s development was its tremendous industrialization in the late 19th century and into the 20th century, which first attracted the
attention of the Japanese. This could be seen nowhere more clearly than the railroad.
Railroads were instrumental to Manchuria’s industrial growth, since the region had
a much greater railway mileage in proportion to area than the rest of China.26 These
railway lines were owned outright by Russia and Japan, which provided Japan its first
glimpse of the riches of Manchuria. When the Russians lost their monopoly on the
Chinese Eastern Railway, China was just barely able to prevent deeper Japanese penetration in the Manchu economic system.27 As more railroads were built, millions of
people migrated to Manchuria in search of jobs; the population increased from an estimated 15 million in 1910 to approximately 30 million in 1931.28 The huge swell in
people, in turn, expanded Manchuria’s industrial production output, especially coal,
pig iron, and crude oil—key natural resources that would draw Japan to the region.29
Manchukuo and the Greater Plan for Asia
Japan recognized its need for vast resources before establishing Manchukuo. In the
1920s, the Japanese government began to face unemployment problems and agricultural depression, which both worsened considerably with the outbreak of the Great
Depression. Thousands of workers lost their jobs and Japan’s exports fell, leaving the
country in a precarious position. The immediacy of these economic issues prompted
Japan to take extreme measures. The Japanese viewed China as “a producing country
of crude materials needed for manufacturing” that had to be reorganized, and it was
here that Japan found the solution to its troubled economic situation.30
Following the Mukden Incident and the establishment of Manchukuo in
1931, Japan hastened the industrialization process and looked to expand its interests
25 Ibid., 194. Everything was connected. Sustaining these industries that Lattimore mentions—land development,
grain companies, flour mills, railways and steamers—demanded normal agricultural production.
26 Owen Lattimore, Inner Asia Frontiers of China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1940), 141.
27 Ibid., 145.
28 Ibid., 13. According to Lattimore, who cites the China Year Book, three years in this range (1927, 1928, 1929) each
saw over one million people enter Manchuria.
29 Spence, Search, 376. Here Spence provides a table comparing Manchuria’s and China’s industrial production from
1926-1936. In this 10-year period, Manchuria’s total industrial production output rose from 42.2 million yuan to 159.5
million yuan. For more information on Manchuria’s industrial output, see: “The Heavy Industry of Manchoukuo,” East
Asian Economic Intelligence Series, No. 3 (Tokyo: Kyodo Printing Company, 1940). This pamphlet includes a detailed
inventory of the Manchuria’s natural resources, including their present conditions, major industries and companies,
locations, and use by the Japanese.
30 Ibid., 368.
12 Kressman • Land of the Poppy
in both Manchuria and greater Asia. Led by the Kwantung Army, the unit of the Imperial Japanese Army stationed in Manchuria, the Japanese made it their objective to
exploit the land and its people.31 No product provided the means to do so like opium.
The Japanese learned to navigate Manchuria’s opium-friendly climate and encouraged poppy growing to an alarming extent, looking to reap huge annual profits.32
Not only did the control of opium mean they would be able to finance their activities in Manchuria—rapid industrialization, the increase in coal and iron production,
and the construction of additional railways—but that they would also quickly and
effectively control the Manchu population.
These factors coalesced in the shaping of Manchukuo’s complicated opium
policy from 1931 to 1945—a program that was grounded in Manchuria’s social and
economic history. Japan manipulated the opium situation in Manchukuo to fit into
its greater plan for Asia. On one hand, there was Japan’s unwavering drive to control
opium production in Manchukuo, which earned Japan over $300 million a year in
the 1930s.33 And on the other, Japan’s concept of racial superiority also played into
why Japan perpetuated this puppet state. Through both of these approaches, we will
understand what Manchuria represented for the Japanese.
Manchukuo was part of a larger Japanese opium network spanning much of
Asia Pacific, away from the home islands of Japan. Manchuria’s accessible railway
lines created a tight-knit market for the buying and selling of narcotics in northern
China, which facilitated the easy transport of products throughout the region.34 Unlike many of the other opium centers controlled by the Japanese, including Formosa,
Hong Kong, French Indochina, and Korea, Manchuria had unparalleled access to the
rest of mainland China. This made the new country a crucial intermediary in Japan’s
trafficking of opium; people in Manchukuo could smuggle or trade their opium, as
well as opium from Japanese staging areas in the Pacific, with China to raise a significant income.
In order to ensure opium money returned to Manchukuo, the administration initiated a monopoly. The purpose of this monopoly, as announced by the government, was to suppress all irresponsible private trafficking. Within a half year of
the country’s foundation, the government passed the Opium Law on November 30,
1932 to counter unregulated opium smoking and addiction throughout Manchuria,
which were seen as direct threats to “the character and vitality of the nation”:
In order to eradicate this evil practice of long standing, there is no other
way than to pursue a policy of gradually reducing the number of addicts.
That is, opium smoking by the general public must be strictly prohibited, but the addicts must be given special Governmental attention to
31 John Stewart, “Manchuria Today,” International Affairs 20 (1944): 79.
32 Ibid., 79. Though Stewart does not directly mention poppies in the article itself, he is asked about the opium
situation in a Q&A directly following the text: “Had the Japanese encouraged the use of drugs and narcotics in Manchuria
as they had done in North and Central China?”
33 Booth, Opium, 163.
34 “Opium in Manchukuo,” 9. The Japanese continued the construction of new railways and highways linking all
sections of the country of Manchukuo to the very borders.
Columbia East Asia Review 13
cure them of the habit. At the same time, through the medium of educational and social institutions, the people must be awakened to realize
the deadly effects of opium smoking to prevent the increase of addicts.35
The government founded sanitariums and clinics in major cities, such as Harbin,
Jehol City, Mukden, and Changchun36 to cure those who needed medical treatment.
It also focused on making the younger generation aware of the harmful and deteriorating effects of narcotic addiction. As part of the government’s five-year industrial
development plan, there would be a greater emphasis on growing legitimate crops,
such as grain and beans, and raising livestock to expand the productive capacity of
the country and the welfare of the people.37 These changes were intended to eventually foster a society in which Manchus would no longer need to raise poppies to earn
a living.38
In time, the divide between this opium policy and the policy the government
actually enacted became more apparent. Despite the legislation drafted and the printed policy of the administration, Manchukuo’s support of the opium trade did not
cease and there was no intent to counter addiction. We can see this in a South Manchuria Railway Company pamphlet titled “The Control and Suppression of Opium
in Manchoukuo.” It suggests an examination of the government’s annual revenue in
order to gauge the success of the reform program. If a rise in opium monopoly sales
existed, then there would also be a downward trend in private traffic and smuggling,
indicating that Manchukuo’s suppression policies were doing their job.39 The opium
monopoly was said to have only been a minor portion of the national revenue. The
pamphlet implies that had this value been larger, there would have been “great temptation to slow the suppression.”40 This comment unknowingly reveals the discrepancy
in Manchukuo’s opium policy, as ironically Manchukuo was doing exactly what the
pamphlet suggested as an alternative.
Manchukuo, Opium, and the Manchu People
The true intent of the government was difficult to read, but underlying everything
was a dependence on opium. On the surface, Manchukuo’s policy mirrored the policy implemented in Formosa in seeking to manage opium addiction and better the
people. The Japanese had been exposed to opium before and over many years discovered how to control its use, which was something that had always eluded the Chinese.
On the island of Formosa (present-day Taiwan), the Japanese government succeeded
in suppressing the large-scale opium traffic. When Formosa came under Japanese
control in 1895, many of its people were hopelessly addicted to opium to the extent
35 Ibid., 14.
36 Jehol City is now known as Chengde and Mukden is now Shenyang. 37 “An Outline of the Revised Five-Year Industrial Development Plan of Manchoukuo” (Dairen: The Manchuria Daily
News: 1939), 21-2.
38 “Opium in Manchoukuo,” 11.
39 Ibid., 9.
40 Ibid., 9.
14 Kressman • Land of the Poppy
that it was severely crippling Formosan society and productivity. Officials sent to
study the conditions of the island found its inhabitants thin and wasting away—the
product of years of habitual smoking.41 The government realized there was a great
need to eliminate the reliance on opium and avoid the same social and economic
problems that had arisen in China due to long-term opium dependence.
Thus, a great experiment began. The Japanese studied the problem, including its tradition and history, and decided their course of action, proceeding with “a
policy of monopoly, successive restriction, prevention of new addiction, and above
all, education of the people.”42 A series of legislation formed the framework of the
reform: in February 1896, an act was passed that prohibited the private importation
of opium, and in 1897, the Formosa Opium Ordinance abolished opium consumption and manufacturing to all but licensed individuals. The government decided to
provide licenses only to adults regarded as confirmed addicts. This approach saw
greater success than the method Great Britain used in India; while the British licensed
only the dealers, which permitted any person to buy from them, the Japanese in Formosa licensed and controlled both the sellers and the buyers, giving the government
greater command over opium trafficking. In addition to the government legislation,
the Japanese conducted education programs that sought to teach the people about
the devastating effects of opium addiction. The combination of these efforts brought
a huge decrease in the number of opium addicts, from 169,064 in 1900 to 14,787 in
1935, and informed Japan about how to control opium to its advantage. 43
Formosa taught the Japanese how to effectively manage the number of drug
addicts—a tool that they then used to their advantage in Manchuria. This knowledge, when coupled with the need to raise the necessary profit and resources to cover
Japan’s military endeavors, encouraged the use of opium as a political and social
weapon to devastating effect in this region. Tightly controlling the decisions of the
Manchukuo administration, the Japanese carefully assuaged the demands of foreign
observers and adeptly hid their objectives in Manchuria. When Manchukuo passed
the Opium Law and presented its policy, the new state was initially constrained by
Japanese concerns regarding international opinion and recognition. However, once
Japan had left the League of Nations, the Kwantung Army no longer had any responsibility to obey the Narcotics Advisory Board, and thus began supervising poppy
plantings in Manchuria.44
In the years following Japan’s departure from the League, the Japanese-controlled Manchukuo administration continued to use idealized rhetoric to maintain
the façade it had created, that all along it had intended to do away with opium. We
can see this in the pamphlet for the South Manchuria Railway Company, a company
41 Booth, Opium, 106. On his visit to Formosa, one Chinese official remarked that there were people that made it their
sole business to prepare opium, known as opium tavern-keepers. He saw that the aborigines smoked opium as an aid to
vice, a habit that could not be broken.
42 “Opium in Manchoukuo,” 8.
43 Ibid., 8.
44 Kathryn Meyer and Terry M. Parssinen, Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International
Drug Trade (Maryland: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 193-4. See this book for more information on Japanese
drug trafficking in Asia Pacific.
Columbia East Asia Review 15
affiliated with the Japanese government. Its presence in Manchuria physically represented the influence of Japan on the Manchukuo administration. In several sections
of the pamphlet, the writer cites general claims made in the international community
against the Manchukuo’s opium policy. For instance, some people believed the opium
monopoly was being enforced only for the purpose of increasing the financial revenue
of the Manchukuo government. To that the writer responds, “That’s grossly erroneous.” He goes on to explain that “it is clear” the government was not manipulating
its people for its financial benefit, and that opium smoking cannot be controlled
without first suppressing its illegal production.45 This language, seen in the pamphlet
and elsewhere, was so commonplace that many people were deceived and believed it
actually represented the intentions of Manchukuo, rather than the controlling arm
of the Japanese government, eager to exploit the region. In a paper called “The Independence of Manchoukuo,” read by George Bronson Rea at the George Washington
Law School in 1933, Rea, the Washington adviser to Manchukuo, stressed that Japan
only had the utmost respect for the independence and sovereignty of Manchukuo.
He encouraged the international community to recognize the new state, a country he
saw as currently undergoing a “tutelage” session with Japan that would soon produce
a completely independent Manchukuo.46
We now know for certain that Japan never had an interest in mentoring Manchukuo; instead, Japan pushed for an increase in opium production. A 2007 newspaper article from Japan described how an internal company document found in a
library in Tokyo shed new light on the extent of the opium trade.47 Now that we can
access documents that were once top-secret government property, we can understand
the opium trade’s complicated connection to the revenue Japan needed to run the
war. Manchukuo existed to provide Japan with the natural and human resources it
was lacking, such as iron, coal, and opium. The Japanese government had the power
and the knowledge to control opium trafficking and eliminate drug addiction as it
had done in Formosa, but in Manchukuo it chose not to take this path. Instead, the
government relied on the Kwantung Army to prolong the region’s dependence on the
drug, choosing to invest the money in the campaigns of the Japanese Imperial Army
in southern China, including Shanghai and Nanking, and abroad in the late 1930s
and early 1940s, rather than on opium education programs.48 The plan Manchukuo
had formally developed was not carried out and only obscured Japan’s true intentions
to the rest of the world.
Japan’s drive to control opium production can also be connected to the Japanese belief that they are superior to the Chinese. This was present in two ways in
Manchuria: in the political structure of the state itself and in its reliance on opium.
Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and establishment of Manchukuo were just the first
45 “Opium in Manchoukuo,” 15.
46 George Bronson Rea, “The Independence of Manchoukuo” (Washington, D.C.: George Washington Law School,
1933), 19.
47 Reiji Yoshida, “Japan profited as opium dealer in wartime China,” Japanese Times, August 30, 2007, http://search.
japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070830f1.html.
48 Ibid.
16 Kressman • Land of the Poppy
steps to fulfilling the mission Naito described of bringing Japanese civilization to
China. To emphasize their racial supremacy, the Japanese government made two formal decisions to insult the native Manchus. They appointed Puyi, the last emperor of
China, to the post of chief executive of Manchukuo. Although he was soon crowned
Kangde emperor, he never had complete control over the state and was forced to
answer to the Kwantung Army as a puppet leader. With the ruler, the highest ranked
Manchu in their new state, at their disposal, the Japanese asserted themselves as a
people of a higher social class than the emperor.49 In addition, the Japanese named
their new country “Manchukuo,” which is composed of two Chinese words meaning
“country of the Manchus.” This expression, a term not in the language of the Chinese
or the Manchus, was the “ultimate insult of a name” invented by conquerors, forcing
their subjects to admit conquest.50
Opium, however, humiliated and belittled the Chinese people on a much
deeper level. According to French poet Jean Cocteau, “To smoke opium…is to concern oneself with something other than life or death,” a liminal space where one
treads alone.51 Opium brought about the physical and psychological degeneration of
human beings in a way that no other substance could, so that the Chinese became
almost subhuman in the eyes of the Japanese. Biochemist and researcher Robert S. de
Ropp performed a study in the 1950s entitled “Drugs and the Mind,” which focuses
on the field of psychoactive substances. It stands as one of the best and most graphic
depictions of opium addicts in the final withdrawal stage:
Filthy, unshaven, disheveled, befouled with his own vomit and feces,
the addict at this stage presents an almost subhuman appearance. As he
neither eats nor drinks he rapidly becomes emaciated and may lose as
much as 10 pounds in 24 hours. His weakness may become so great that
he literally cannot raise his head.52
In Manchuria, the majority of the opium users in withdrawal who assumed this
“subhuman appearance” were native Manchus, which played into the Japanese government’s agenda of establishing racial superiority over the Chinese people. Thus, the
power of the Japanese to shame the Chinese through the use of narcotics brimmed
with symbolism, especially after years of tension between the two countries. Manchukuo saw a huge increase in the number of smokers in the 1930s, as the Japanese
encouraged more opium production and ignored the great numbers of people who
became addicted; the year 1937 alone saw 811,005 new smokers.53 Opium corrupted
people of every social class, from poor frontier settlers to Puyi’s wife Wan Jung, the
former empress of China and empress of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. In
49 Spence, Search, 370-1.
50 Lattimore, Frontiers, 106.
51 Booth, Opium, Introduction.
52 Ibid., 96-7.
53 王宏斌, 鸦片：日本侵化毒品政策五十年 (Opium: 50 Years of Aggressive Japanese Drug Policy) (Hebei: 河北
人民出版社, 2005), 48. There is a table that includes the number of new smokers in Manchuria from 1933 to 1937.
Translated from Chinese.
Columbia East Asia Review 17
her case, the Japanese supplied her in Tianjin at age 19, and then watched her slowly
deteriorate due to her heavy addiction, using it as propaganda in Japan—an example
of the moral degradation of the Chinese people in the face of their conquerors. When
she lay dying from withdrawal in a Communist prison after the war, she was said to
have “screamed for opium to such an extent the other prisoners yelled for her to be
put down so they might have some peace. . . and hallucinated that she was back in the
Forbidden City, calling out for servants to run her a bath or fetch her food.”54 Wan
Jung, like many of her countrymen, had become a shell of her former self, taking on
both a physical and mental appearance that made her seem subhuman. Thus, the
Japanese manipulation of the empress of Manchukuo represented the extent of their
domination of the Manchu people.
The End of the War
At the height of their power, the Japanese invaded Manchuria and directly benefited from the presence of opium there. Historically bound to Manchuria, the opium
trade was a long-accepted social institution that laid the groundwork for tremendous
industrialization in the form of railroads and mining. The Japanese sought to exploit these resources, as well as the Chinese people, and used opium to support their
greater efforts in spreading civilization and leading the idealistic Greater East Asian
Co-Prosperity Sphere. Even with the knowledge of how to control the drug and limit
the number of addicts from Formosa, the Japanese chose to pursue a different policy.
They tried to conceal their intentions to milk the land of huge quantities of opium
to finance Japanese armies and international drug trafficking, at the expense of the
wellbeing of the Chinese people. This opium monopoly, paired with the Japanese
desire to psychologically degrade the Chinese, has come to characterize the Japanese
occupation of Manchuria from 1931 to 1945.
In the final years of the war, the Japanese had pushed their opium-manipulation policies to their very limits. The smoking of opium had crowded the hospitals,
terminated government officials, and brought about the ruin of Manchukuo’s society.55 As the once great Japanese empire crumbled to the Allies in 1945, Soviet troops
encountered thousands of drug addicts in Manchuria, where the Russians quickly
seized machinery, damaged mines, and stormed a land where Japanese investments
were valued at eleven billion yen.56 The Japanese indeed made Manchuria a manufacturing nexus, a foundry that sustained much of the fighting. But it is this domain’s
historical connection to opium, as constant as the rolling poppy fields that were
found there, that determined the ultimate fate of the Japanese, whose Manchukuo
had become reduced to the same corpse of a nation as Naito’s China before it.
54 Booth, Opium, 163-4. Booth writes that Wan Jung’s companion, Hiro Saga, a distant relative of the Japanese royal
family, described the empress’ dying days. In the year from July 10, 1938, Wan Jung was said to have smoked 740 ounces
of opium, what she believed was ointment for longevity. This misconception signifies a lack in understanding that existed
of opium’s destructiveness on the part of the Chinese.
55 Stewart, “Manchuria Today,” 79.
56 Spence, Search, 470.
18 Kressman • Land of the Poppy
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