With a one-off national holiday on Sept. 3, China will celebrate the 70th anniversary of victory in the “war of resistance against Japanese aggression,” as it calls its theater of World War II. But in the country’s northeast — formerly known as Manchuria — Japan’s occupation still feels near. You can sleep in former Japanese hotels, embark at Japanese-designed train stations, and descend into former Japanese bunkers. Farmers still sink hoes into unexploded ordinances; shuttered Shinto temples squat stubbornly in parks. Erstwhile colonial buildings are now museums or government offices, protected and marked as “patriotic education bases” and popular with domestic tour groups.
The largest concentration of these sites is 600 miles northeast of Beijing, in the city of Changchun. In 1932, it was declared the capital of “Manchukuo,” a puppet state nominally headed by China’s last emperor, Puyi. The Japanese military lured him north to legitimize its occupation, which began six years before an all-out invasion of the country. Puyi claimed to have been duped: To his dismay, he sat not on the throne of the restored Qing dynasty but in an office, behind an empty desk. “I soon discovered that my authority was only shadow without substance,” he wrote in his memoir, From Emperor to Citizen. “I didn’t even have the power to decide whether or not I could pass out of the door to go for a walk.” Yet were he to stroll outside today, Puyi would recognize a surprising amount of Changchun.
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