Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy
Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy is the story of a Japanese family of colonists in Manchuria, a region in northeastern China. Japanese emigration to Manchuria started in the early 1900s and intensified throughout the first two decades of the 20th century. In September 1931, the Japanese Imperial Army launched an invasion of Manchuria, occupying the whole region within five months. The following year, on March 9, 1932, the Japanese announced the creation of Manchukuo, a formally independent nation, but for all intents and purposes, a puppet state that significantly expanded Japan’s colonial holdings in Asia. In her memoir, Kazuko Kuramoto – born in Dalian, Manchuria, in 1927 in a family of Japanese colonists – describes herself as “the product of this almighty Japanese imperialism” (Kuramoto, x).
Based on your analysis of Kuramoto’s memoir, how do you interpret Kuramoto’s statement? Specifically, how does Kuramoto’s nature as “a product of Japanese imperialism” manifest in her time in Manchuria? And how does the legacy of Japanese imperialism affect the author’s life after Japan’s defeat in the war and the dissolution of Manchukuo?
Please be aware that merely meeting the word count requirement of 1,800 words is not enough to excel in this assignment. In addition to reaching the minimum length, it’s crucial to ensure that your ideas are thoroughly developed. This means clearly explaining concepts and offering examples from the sources to support your arguments. Depending on your writing style and the complexity of the ideas you’re exploring, it may require more or less space to articulate your points adequately. Therefore, strive to meet the minimum length requirement and ensure your arguments are clear, coherent, and fully elaborated.
The other two questions (“How does Kuramoto’s nature as “a product of Japanese imperialism” manifest in her time in Manchuria? How does the legacy of Japanese imperialism affect the author’s life after Japan’s defeat in the war and the dissolution of Manchukuo?”) are sub-questions that you can use to break down the first question. In other words, in the first part of your paper, you can discuss what Kuramoto means when she says she is “a product of Japanese imperialism” by considering her experiences during her time in Manchuria (= from the beginning of the memoir up until the end of the war and Kuramoto’s return to Japan). In the second part of your paper, you should discuss what Kuramoto’s statement means in the context of Kuramoto’s life after the collapse of the Japanese empire in 1945 (= how did the fact that she was “the product of Japanese imperialism” continue to affect her life after she left Manchuria, returned to Japan, and eventually relocated to North America?).
As the prompt explains, you must support your answers with at least FOUR significant examples from Kuramoto’s memoir. By “significant examples,” I mean that the examples you choose to use must not be minute details from the book; instead, they must be examples dealing with broad enough aspects of the memoir to allow you to develop a significant point in the paper:
at least two examples should focus on Kuramoto’s time in Manchuria (chapters 1-9)
at least two examples should focus on the legacies of Japanese imperialism after the dissolution of Manchukuo in 1945 (chapters 10-14)
BOOK: Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist
ISBN-10: 9780870137259
ISBN-13: 978-0870137259
