ABSTRACT
Many stereotypes about Japanese responses to the Manchurian crisis are based on evidence from urban areas. Where rural society is taken into account, it is often said to have provided unqualified and virtually automatic support for the army. In fact about half of Japan’s population lived in rural areas in the early 1930s, making rural responses to the Manchurian crisis a vital part of the picture. What actually emerges from a close study of publications produced in and for the countryside is the clear message that for villagers, the overwhelming issue at the time of the invasion of Manchuria was not foreign policy but the depression. To interpret villagers’ experience of the early 1930s chiefly in terms of the ‘fifteenyear war’, or to dismiss rural reactions to the Manchurian Incident as blind obedience to the army or as a straightforward manifestation of ‘war fever’, is to ignore this central fact.
