ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on Japan's role in cultivating a modern architecture in China. A second facet of Japan's role in China's encounter with architectural modernity was its annexation of Chinese territories including Manchuria, culminating in the partial occupation of the whole country during the Second World War. The history of Japanese and Chinese building also offers a rare opportunity to consider an alternative, possibly even oppositional, stance to dominant western centric architectural historiography. Japan's architectural activities in China before the Second World War were concentrated in Manchuria, but while focusing on this north-eastern corner of China, developments elsewhere should not be ignored. The study of architecture in Manchuria throughout the first half of the twentieth century therefore demands more work and international discourse, which was the primary motive for Ultra-Modernism–Architecture and Modernity in Manchuria. The assertion that Japan would perish without Manchukuo upended the conventional relationship between imperialism and modernity.
