Introduction
When I think of bandits (bazoku), what comes to mind are the vast plains of Manchuria. Manchuria always reminds me of bazoku. My heart burns for bazoku because they evoke a great masculine romanticism.Footnote 1
Here is a man who styles himself as a ‘lonely wanderer on horseback’, portraying Manchuria as a land of bandits steeped in ‘great masculine romanticism’. His manuscript, published in 1919 in the periodical Ajia jiron by the Black Dragon Society (黒竜会 Kokuryūkai), one of the continental adventurer groups, vividly depicts the bandits of Manchuria: ‘As the afterglow of sunset casts its shadows across the earth, a band of horse-riding warriors, disappearing beyond the plains bathed in the glow of the setting sun, chatter cheerfully: “Today’s bounty reached fifty thousand ryō!”.’ He lauds them as ‘righteous bandits, devoted to the noble vocation of manhood—helping the poor and upholding justice’. In his manuscript, the bandits of Manchuria are given a special name, bazoku (馬賊), meaning horse-mounted thieves or traitors. This man, identifying himself as a ‘Japanese national (日本国民 Nihon kokumin)’, interestingly regards himself as a bazoku.Footnote 2
From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, China gained infamy for widespread banditry across its territory. Manchuria was one of the regions where banditry was most rampant.Footnote 3 Due to the ill-defined nature of the word ‘bandit’, its various forms and complex relationship with local society were often incomprehensible to the colonial powers expanding into the region.Footnote 4 This ambiguous characteristic of banditry in China reinforced the perception of China’s backwardness. Given this context, the portrayal of Manchurian bandits by this Japanese expansionist raises an intriguing question: why and how could these fantasized images of Manchuria as a land of horse-riding, righteous bandits coexist with the dangerous, lawless image of the region? How could this Japanese expansionist proudly regard himself as a Manchurian bandit?
This article analyses the term ‘bazoku’ and the fantasy of Manchurian bandits that appeared in the Japanese popular media from the 1900s to the 1920s. Drawing on a multi-directional analysis of the representation of the term ‘bazoku’ in the Japanese media, it argues that the bazoku fantasy, which emerged during the Russo-Japanese War, transformed the popular image of Manchuria into a masculine frontier—an imagined space distinct from and external to China—where Japanese imperial masculinity was to be cultivated. During this period, the burgeoning Japanese empire saw widespread banditry as a kind of ‘local specialty’ of Manchuria. Public media such as newspapers and magazines depicted and circulated this infamous quality of the region from the late nineteenth century when the Japanese public began receiving news about bandits in Manchuria. Yet, the representations of Manchurian bandits in the Japanese media were not entirely negative. Unlike the derogatory image of bandits described in the Japanese government’s official documents, the image of bazoku portrayed in the popular media evolved into a distinctive masculine national hero that appealed to growing nationalist sentiment in Japan. Coalescing with the popular, if peculiar, heroic sentiments around so-called expansionist continental adventurers’ (大陸浪人 tairiku rōnin), the term ‘bazoku’ forged a fantasy of Manchuria as the land of heroic brigands. This fantasy, evoking the image of outlaw heroes from the renowned Chinese novel The Water Margin, depicted exemplary male subjects of the Japanese empire who sacrificed themselves for the empire in the ‘turbulent’ times of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this context, the term ‘bazoku’ came to embody a distinct spatio-temporality—Manchuria from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries—an association that endures in Japanese usage to the present day. This is to say, the spatio-temporality now embedded in Japanese definitions of this term is itself a historical construct, and its analysis reveals how the region known as Manchuria was epistemologically constructed as an outlaw territory outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, enabling Japan’s intervention.
The bazoku fantasy reveals the historicity of the consolidation of Japanese colonial power in Manchuria before the Manchukuo period. It is well known that the South Manchuria Railway Company served as a conduit for the power of the Japanese empire in Manchuria, facilitating Japan’s ‘informal empire’.Footnote 5 However, empire-building did not rely solely on physical manifestations such as institutional organs and military occupations. Rather, it occurred in the ‘realm of the imagination’, reproducing and realigning imperial politics.Footnote 6 The bazoku fantasy exemplified the imperial imaginaries that reinforced Japan’s conceptualization of its overseas territories. This empire building imaginary was, in fact, simultaneously a nation-building imaginary of Japan as a modern imperial nation-state, much like it was for European empires.Footnote 7 Since imperialism was fundamental to the nation-building project,Footnote 8 reconceptualizing ‘internal’ and ‘external’ territories based on their relationship to the Japanese empire was essential not only for building an empire, but also for consolidating Japan as a modern nation. Often, the lines between the national and imperial spaces were blurred and unstable, but this instability was a critical feature of early twentieth-century imperialism and the spatial politics of empire.Footnote 9 After the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese media reconceptualized Manchuria as the frontier of the Japanese empire, where a Japanese masculine subjecthood could be forged and to thus consolidate the imperial nation.
In this light, I define ‘frontier’ as a region that is constantly re/constituted into a physically and epistemologically marginalized area by a nation and empire. On the other hand, a nation and empire re/construct themselves through the image of frontier. For the early American frontier historians, such as Frederic Jackson Turner, ‘the wild and savage’ frontier was ‘the line of most rapid and effective Americanization’, where the immigrants ‘were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics’.Footnote 10 Turner’s perspective suggests that the frontier can be reconceptualized as a space where the nation and its subjects are mutually constitutive. This observation is similarly evident in modern Japan. For example, representing Hokkaido as a ‘savage’ frontier went hand in hand with Japan’s self-identification as a ‘modern’ and ‘civilized’ nation.Footnote 11 Also, while Japan’s settler colonialism, with transpacific inter-relations, contributed to constructing Japan’s frontier,Footnote 12 frontiers were not always meant for settlers. The characteristics of the frontier can vary, and the images of each frontier are neither fixed nor identical. The settler colonial style frontier hardly became a mainstream image of Manchuria, at least before 1931, because available lands for Japanese immigrants were strictly limited to the Kwantung Leased Territory, except for the narrow lands attached to the railroad. Instead, the remarkable vastness of Manchuria that Japanese immigrants were not allowed to settle rather resembled the American ‘wild wild west’—the dangerous land of outlaws.
In analysing the Japanese empire’s image of a Manchurian frontier, this article focuses on the construction of masculinity in the context of imperial nation building. Japanese masculinity as portrayed through the bazoku fantasy will be referred to as ‘imperial masculinity’. As many literary scholars and historians have observed, the formation of gender was deeply entangled with the modern nation-empire building.Footnote 13 Nationalism becomes ‘radically constitutive of people’s identities through social contests that are frequently violent and always gendered’, and nations ‘depend on powerful constructions of gender’.Footnote 14 In modern Japan the formation of gender identity became closely intertwined with that of national identity, thereby consolidating Japan as a nation-empire.Footnote 15 Politics became a ‘masculinized arena’ through the contrasting militarized, masculinized body of the emperor and the normative womanhood of the women in the imperial family.Footnote 16 Within this context, Manchuria, through the bazoku fantasy, emerged as a highly masculinized frontier where Japanese men, invited into the ‘masculinized arena’, were to be nurtured, to compete, and to prove the superiority of Japanese masculinity in the global contest of masculinities.
This bazoku fantasy constructed a distinctive type of outlaw hero, distinguished from the war or soldier heroes formed through military experience and warfare. By repeating the storyline in which an immature man or boy, without the protection of family or nation, ventures into the land of rampant banditry and emerges as an independent hero, the bazoku fantasy portrayed Japan as a leading empire. In this process, various masculinities, defined along national boundaries, were hierarchically rearranged with the Japanese one at the top. The Japanese imperial nationalist imaginaries on bandits, therefore, masculinized Chinese bazoku as a follower of Japanese leadership. While Chinese national elites were self-identifying China as the ‘sick man of East Asia (东亚病夫 Dong Ya bing fu)’, these Japanese nationalists dramatically masculinized certain Chinese men, portraying them as heroes.Footnote 17 While physical strength and loyalty were traits often attributed to the Chinese bazoku, Japanese imperial masculinity was distinguished by intellectual qualities such as rationality and leadership, which were cultivated through self-discipline. This intellectual strength was predominantly utilized to ‘lead’ Chinese national heroes, who were depicted as unsure of how to combat Western powers, symbolized by Russia. In this context, imperial masculinity, as embodied in the bazoku fantasy, envisioned a new order in Asia under Japan’s leadership and urged Japanese male subjects to assume roles as leaders of this Pan-Asianist order.
Becoming outlaw heroes in Manchuria
It is worth noting that the term ‘bazoku’ (Ch. mazei, Kr. majŏk) conveys a specific spatio-temporality in contemporary Japanese usage, referring to bandits in Manchuria from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The seventh edition of the Kōjien dictionary (2018) defines bazoku as ‘a group of mounted bandits who roamed northeastern China since the late Qing period’.Footnote 18 Similarly, the Shogakukan Unabridged Dictionary of the Japanese Language defines it as ‘plundering thieves on horseback. Specifically, bandit groups that were rampant in northeastern China since the late Qing era’.Footnote 19 Both dictionaries thus situate bazoku spatially in northeastern China—namely, Manchuria—and temporally in the late Qing period.Footnote 20 This association of bazoku with a particular place and time contrasts with the fact that, among the many Sino-Japanese terms referring to bandits, the more general term in Japanese usage was hizoku (匪賊 Ch. feizei, Kr. pijŏk). Eric Hobsbawm’s influential book, Bandits has, for instance, been translated into Japanese as Hizoku no shakaishi (A Social History of Bandits).Footnote 21 Thus, although the two terms—hizoku and ‘bazoku’—share certain connotations, they refer to distinct categories.Footnote 22
This lexical association is further confirmed by media usage. An analysis of Yomiuri Shinbun articles from 1874 to 1945 shows that 817 articles contained the term ‘bazoku’, of which over 90 per cent were associated with Manchuria or adjacent regions such as Vladivostok and the rivers bordering the Korean peninsula. In contrast, among the 1,226 articles containing hizoku, the term referred not only to bandits in Manchuria but also more broadly to those in Taiwan, Korea, and various provinces across China. This pattern confirms that bazoku carried a distinct spatio-temporal association with Manchuria, while hizoku functioned as a more general term. Until the Manchurian Incident of 1931, when the term hizoku abruptly eclipsed bazoku, the Japanese media consistently preferred bazoku over hizoku when describing banditry-related events in Manchuria.Footnote 23
Among the various terms referring to bandits, only bazoku carried the image of ‘righteous bandits (義賊 gizoku)’: well-organized and disciplined in chaotic times. This image of ‘righteous bandits’ had a broadly known reference: The Water Margin (水滸傳), one of the most famous novels published in the Ming period. It depicts the story of 108 outlaws during the Song dynasty who seek refuge in Mount Liang (梁山泊) where they established a society governed by their own rules and order. Their sanctuary persisted until the Song emperor Huizong granted them amnesty and summoned them to serve the court. During the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, Japanese literati read and reinterpreted this Chinese fictional work and Mount Liang became a metaphor among Japanese literati as a refuge for those seeking retreat from the chaotic world to achieve future justice.Footnote 24 The image of well-organized groups of ‘righteous bandits’ who settled in remote northeastern China, far from the political centre, conjured up the outlaw heroes of Mount Liang. Following the Meiji Restoration, as different political groups expressed varying views on Japan’s future expansion, images and fantasies of bazoku in turn evolved around these political desires and visions concerning China and Manchuria.
The term ‘bazoku’, associated with Manchuria and grafted with the image of righteous bandits, was increasingly fantasized through adventure fiction during and after the Russo-Japanese War. This fantasy embodied the self-formation of Japan as a nation-empire. Such self-formation was achieved by reimagining Manchuria, a space located outside Japan’s national territory, as its frontier. Here, frontier does not signify a land to be settled and cultivated, but rather a liminal zone that defined and reinforced the identity of the nation itself. The rise of adventure fiction as a genre was closely tied to imperial self-understanding. The British empire provides interesting examples of how adventure literature reflected the expansion of empires and its portrayal of masculinity. Graham Dawson observes that the adventure quest serves as a powerful metaphor for human capacity as a conqueror, embodying ‘the prevailing of human purpose in the world’ in modern literature. In this light, adventure fiction was closely associated with imperialism, functioning as ‘the generic counterpart in the literature to empire in politics’.Footnote 25 Writers like Defoe saw the empire ‘to be a place where adventures took place, and men became heroes’.Footnote 26 In Edwardian Britain, with the growth of publishing and popular readership, new public audiences differentiated by age and gender emerged. The expanding gender-specific literature and youth organizations separated the worlds of boys and men from those of girls and women. Adventure fiction for boys thus portrayed ‘imperial ideas in all their nationalist, racial and militarist forms’ presenting a model image of the imperial adventure hero.Footnote 27
Like the British era of popular imperialism, when the media (re)created adventure tales centred on an idealized soldier-hero fighting for the empire, Japanese adventure heroes likewise emerged from the battlefields of imperial expeditions.Footnote 28 As the media, publishing market, and the reading public expanded rapidly after the Meiji Restoration, children’s literature, serving as a powerful metaphor for empire, proved highly lucrative.Footnote 29 In particular, the news media and the publishing industry reaped substantial profits from Japan’s first two foreign wars. Jingoism proliferated through war reportage in the burgeoning mass media environment as positive accounts of victories from the battlefield not only entertained readers but also bolstered national sentiment.Footnote 30 The Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) gave Japan its first ‘official’ colony—excluding Hokkaido and Okinawa, which had already been incorporated into Japan—and inspired a surge of national spirit while demonstrating the profitability of war for publishers. With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, Japanese publishers hastily produced works centred on the ongoing conflict, anticipating profits comparable to those of the previous war. Popular enthusiasm for the war encouraged the serialization of stories in boys’ adventure magazines, cultivating a new readership of middle-class male adolescents in the late Meiji to the Taisho periods.Footnote 31 Adventure fiction for boys not only entertained young readers of the new empire but also imparted lessons for becoming virtuous men for its future. This genre thus offered an important source for understanding gender attitudes in prewar Japan.Footnote 32 The masculine heroes depicted in the popular media were not only symbolic figures of nationalism that consolidated the Japanese empire but also embodied ‘normative’ masculinity. These ‘normative’ masculine heroes embodied the image of soldier hero forged in war—figures such as Nogi Maresuke, Commander Hirose, Yogokawa Shōzo, and Oki Teisuke.Footnote 33
While aligning with the solider-hero narratives, the bazoku fantasy—interwoven with the geopolitical imagination of Manchuria—created a distinctive narrative of outlaw heroes. The key difference between the outlaw and soldier-hero narratives lies in the locus of their contribution: the former voluntarily operates within an unofficial sphere of imperial expansion. By ‘unofficial sphere’, I refer to activities conducted outside the legal order and institutional structures of the state. This sphere contrasted with the formal, publicly recognized domain of the military, where service and contribution to the empire were officially acknowledged. To be specific, the bazoku fantasy was initially modelled on the Special Mission Team (SMT), an unofficial operation of the Japanese Army during the Russo-Japanese war. The SMT was a kind of espionage force commissioned to disrupt the supply lines of the Russian armies during the Russo-Japanese War. Supporting the Japanese Imperial Army, its goal was to destroy Russian supply lines, weapons, ammunition, and magazines. Six teams of 47 members each were dispatched to different regions in Hailar, Qiqihar, Harbin, and Fengtian, targeting the Russian supply infrastructure. Their mission was not only to disrupt supply systems, but also to spread propaganda and rumours among the local people to discourage locals from cooperating with the Russians. To accomplish this mission, each team was encouraged to hire or work with the local bandits.Footnote 34 According to the SMT’s plans, these members had to be patriotic, be able to speak Chinese, and be skilled in riding horses. To maintain the confidentiality of the mission, SMT members, together with hired bandits, disguised themselves as Chinese by shaving their heads and wearing Chinese garments.Footnote 35 The SMT’s tale of heroism depicted local bandits as resources they could mobilize for their mission. The fantasy of patriotic men who acted heroically even unto death on remote battlefields in the Russo-Japanese War, when combined with the bazoku image of ‘righteous bandits’, gave rise to representations of the outlaw hero.
This outlaw hero narrative continued into the Taishō period and became intertwined with the activities of the continental adventurer groups. Through this connection, the image of the patriotic outlaw hero further expanded. The continental adventurers, also known as tairiku rōnin, defined themselves as patriotic adventurers who operated outside the institutional politics of the Japanese empire. Originally, the term rōnin referred to illegal vagrants who wandered beyond their legal domicile. During the Meiji Restoration, however, rōnin samurai styled themselves as shishi (志士, revolutionary samurai) and actively participated in the making of imperial Japan. Since then, people who engaged in political activities without an official position in the government or military came to be called rōnin.Footnote 36 Often described as ‘pioneering figures’, the continental adventurers portrayed themselves as men who traversed little-known and perilous regions of the continent, engaging in unofficial political activities and transmitting information back to the metropole. They were represented as patriotic and self-sacrificial groups who were ‘contributing’ to the empire’s future. In reality, however, they were politically conservative and expansionist organizations that actively committed themselves to Japan’s imperial project.
More specifically, they were political groups that shared expansionist aspirations towards the continent, travelling across Korea, China, Manchuria, Mongolia, and Siberia. Kokkentō (国権党), Genyōsha (玄洋社), and Kokuryūkai (黒龍会) were the most prominent organizations among them. Although the term tairiku rōnin conveyed the image of ‘marginal’ or ‘superfluous’ men detached from institutional politics,Footnote 37 it did not mean that these groups lacked political influence. Their extensive networks allowed them to exert pressure on the government and to build alliances with politicians and militarists. They were even funded by the state, the military, businessmen, and press companies.Footnote 38 The political presence of the continental adventurer groups in modern Japan has often been described as a form of ‘bizarreness’ that defies simple explanation and is ‘difficult for foreigners to understand’,Footnote 39 because their existence and political power could hardly be explained through ‘normal’ and institutionalized processes of politics. However, their power in modern Japan served as counterevidence to this very notion, revealing how the ‘unofficial’ and out-of-legal spheres were in fact indispensable to the formation of the order of rule of law.
With the rise of nationalist sentiment in Japan, the robust patriotism of these adventurers resonated deeply with the Japanese public, who were themselves undergoing a transformation into imperial subjects through their experiences in the wars with China and Russia. The identity of the continental adventurer groups, who claimed to operate outside institutional politics, projected onto the bazoku fantasy an image of absolute devotion—one that sought no recognition from the state. In this sense, the bazoku fantasy, tied to Manchuria, reworked the typical narrative of the national masculine hero first created through the Russo-Japanese war by adding a sense of outlawness—and, in turn, reimagined Manchuria as the lawless frontier where such outlaws could thrive. It required voluntary participation in the simultaneous process of nation- and empire-building, positioning men as growing imperial subjects. This growth was made possible not in the metropolitan centre, but in Manchuria, thus making it an essential space of the empire.
I refer to the masculinity constituted through bazoku fantasy as ‘imperial masculinity’. Gender identity formation through these masculine hero narratives deserves close attention, as it lay at the core of the subjectification process in the formation of the nation-empire.Footnote 40 As Louise Young has argued, imperialism was not simply an external project of conquest but an entangled process for state-making and nation-building, a form of total imperialism in which politics, economics, culture, and society functioned as an integrated whole. In this sense, if gender formation cannot be separated from nation-building, it must also be understood as inseparable from imperialization. The masculinity revealed through this fantasy thus internalized Japan’s aspiration to become a nation-empire. What made this process powerful was precisely its entertainment value: it appealed to the public through pleasure, excitement, and affect, rather than through ideology alone.
As the frontierization of Manchuria and the internalization of imperial masculinity crystallized in the bazoku fantasy, this article turns to two works of adventure fiction that vividly illustrate this process, The Boy Bandit (少年馬賊 Shōnen bazoku) and The Children of a Bandit (馬賊の子 Bazoku no ko).Footnote 41 Published in 1904 and 1916 respectively, these two works represent the bandit narratives of the Meiji and Taishō periods. The Boy Bandit was a piece of juvenile adventure fiction hastily published in 1904, while the Russo-Japanese War was still underway. It can be seen as reflecting the values that Meiji educational experts promoted for boys in the empire. The publisher was Kinkōdō, one of the most influential publishing houses in Meiji Japan, known for its specialization in educational materials, and the writer was Mori Magoichiro (1856–1929, pen name: Mori Keien), an educator and textbook writer who graduated from the Tōkyō College of Education (Tōkyō Shihandaigaku Chūgaku Shihanka) in 1882.Footnote 42 The story follows Yamato Fumimaru, a young Japanese boy who, having lost his parents, travels to Manchuria to seek protection from his uncle Takeo. Takeo, modelled on SMT members, serves as a strategist for a Chinese bazoku group tasked with disrupting the Russian rear. Because of the danger of his mission, he refuses to take Fumimaru under his care. Upon learning of his uncle’s patriotic ideals, however, Fumimaru decides instead to join the bazoku group, fighting against the Russian army, and ultimately emerges as a hero on the battlefield.
The second work, The Children of a Bandit (1916), was serialized for five months beginning in February 1916 in the boys’ magazine Japanese Boys (日本少年 Nihon shōnen). The writer Arimoto is best known for his poems for children, but he also wrote numerous children’s novels while working for Japanese Boys from 1912 until 1919, when he moved to Jitsugyō no Nihonsha, the parent company of Japanese Boys.Footnote 43 The story appears to have gained considerable popularity, as it was reprinted twice within a week and later published in book form under a new title, The Song of Bandits (馬賊の唄 Bazoku no uta). Written 12 years after The Boy Bandit, this novel centres on a pair of siblings who travel to Manchuria to avenge their father’s death. Their father, Shinohara, is a former Japanese soldier who remained in Manchuria after the Russo-Japanese War and became a bazoku. He is assassinated by a subordinate of Yuan Shikai, a real politician who became the first president of the Republic of China but declared himself emperor in 1915. Shinohara’s character and activities are modelled on the continental adventurers group led by Tōyama Mitsuru, which supported Chinese revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing in their struggle against the Yuan government. In this light, The Children of a Bandit can be understood as a popular fictional representation of one aspect of the Genyōsha group’s Asian policy in the 1910s.
Manchuria as Japan’s frontier
The bazoku fantasy reimagined Manchuria as Japan’s frontier. It did so in two interrelated ways: first, as an indispensable ‘outside’ through which the nation-empire could imagine itself, and second, as an incubator where masculine subjects of the nation-empire were formed and trained. The first aspect of this frontier imagination can be seen in The Boy Bandit, whose protagonist’s growth from boyhood to manhood serves as a powerful allegory for Japan’s own emergence as a modern nation-empire. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist, Yamato Fumimaru, is still a young boy who lacks maturity and therefore requires a guardian. By the end of the story, however, despite still being young, he achieves inner maturity and becomes a capable man. His youth and maturity together serve as a powerful allegory of Japan as a burgeoning ‘young’ nation. In particular, his very name, Yamato (大和), serves as a clear allegory of Japan’s historical continuity and national spirit. As the name of an ancient polity said to be the first to unify ‘Japan’, Yamato, meaning ‘great harmony’, further symbolized Japan’s historical continuity and distinctiveness as a nation. When the Russo-Japanese War invigorated a sense of national spirit, Japan’s victory was attributed to the ‘Yamato spirit (大和魂 yamato tamashii)’.Footnote 44
At the same time, Yamato Fumimaru’s journey into the broader world further symbolizes Japan’s emerging strength as a nation and empire. Having lost his place within a traditional family, Fumimaru’s world expands from a small seaside village near Nagasaki to Tianjin and onwards to Harbin. In other words, Fumimaru embodies Japan as a nation that had only recently entered the international nation-state system and was seeking a new position within it. Throughout this quest, Fumimaru proves himself to be a polite, determined, and patient young man who understands proper conduct, thereby exemplifying Japan’s claim to be ‘civilized’ and qualified to participate as a player in the international nation-state system. He eventually finds himself on the battlefield in Manchuria, confronting Russia as an imperial subject, just as other empires engaged in their colonial rivalries. When Fumimaru triumphs over the Russians, he earns renown and is feared by the Russian army, who regard him as a demon (鬼神 onigami) on the battlefield. The story concludes with the implication that Fumimaru will continue to grow under Uncle Takeo’s tutelage in both academic studies and martial arts, symbolizing Japan’s promising future.
As an allegory of Japan itself, the protagonist’s achievement and maturation take place outside the homeland—in Manchuria. In national literature, the frontier—where imperial subjects endure hardships and strive for the empire—paradoxically loomed larger than home or the space of family. The uncertain and perilous frontier consistently offered opportunities for male subjects to test and cultivate their masculinity. To avoid compromising their manhood, they were compelled to distance themselves from the domestic sphere, where feminine values of comfort and sentimentality posed a threat.Footnote 45 The safety provided by parents, family, and the nation offered no chance for a boy to evolve into an imperial masculine hero whose superiority could be proven only through competition with other national masculinities. Perhaps this is why many bandit narratives begin with the loss of the protagonist’s parents, setting him on a long journey to an unknown land.Footnote 46
In the course of Fumimaru’s growth, Manchuria emerges as a sparsely populated, frozen wilderness where Japan and Russia compete for dominance. The narrative thus casts Manchuria as Japan’s frontier—the outermost boundary of the empire and the very site where imperial territory and power relations fluctuate. Fumimaru can advance safely only within the range of the Japanese army’s control; beyond it, he must face danger and hardship alone. He becomes both a Japanese subject and a man at the moment he steps beyond the protection of the imperial forces. Masculinity and maturation, therefore, can be attained only by moving beyond safe territory—a condition that made the frontier indispensable for the empire’s future. The representation of Manchuria as a frontier not yet fully integrated into the empire thus helped construct the image of a growing, young, and masculine Japan.
In this sense, Manchuria functioned as an incubator for the cultivation and maturation of Japan’s normative national subjects. Both stories follow a typical bildungsroman narrative in which a young person faces challenges and grows up. What defines the bildungsroman is not merely the protagonist’s personal development, but the reconciliation of individual aspiration with the demands of social conformity.Footnote 47 In The Boy Bandit, the protagonist’s spiritual and intellectual maturation aligns with the normative order demanded by the imperial nation. Here, ‘normativity’ means what Franco Moretti observed through the concept of ‘consent’: the protagonist’s internalization of social norms as his own ‘free will’.Footnote 48 As Takashi Fujitani similarly observes, in this process of maturing into a ‘civilized’ adult, the protagonist’s decision-making as a ‘free individual’ becomes crucial precisely because it reproduces the discipline and order of the nation.Footnote 49 For example, the author of The Boy Bandit followed this logic of development closely: as Fumimaru journeys to the battlefields of the Russo-Japanese War, he evolves from a dependent child into an autonomous subject who leads others in the empire’s remote frontier. His decision to join the battle is presented as an act of his own ‘free will’. The very exercise of his ‘free will’ to participate in a patriotic war elevates him to the status of Japanese war hero. In this narrative, Fumimaru’s personal growth and the expansion of the empire unfold simultaneously. Likewise, in The Children of a Bandit, the protagonists’ private revenge is fulfilled only when it converges with the empire’s purported ‘mission’ of ‘saving’ the Chinese people from their corrupt and impotent government. The male subject who participates in and devotes himself to the imperial project is thus formed not passively through education within the metropole, but voluntarily through adventures on the frontier, such as in Manchuria. Manchuria functioned both as a perilous battlefield and as a site of contestation with other national subjects—such as China and Russia—through which the distinctive features of Japanese masculinity were articulated.
If The Boy Bandit imagined Manchuria as a training ground for the imperial subject, The Children of a Bandit transformed it into a historical and political frontier where Japan rehearsed its imperial destiny. Written a decade later, the bazoku fantasy The Children of a Bandit expanded Manchuria beyond a site of individual maturation into a space intertwined with the national history of Japan. The novel envisioned Manchuria not only as a battlefront at the empire’s edge but also as a space where Japan’s national historical experience could be extended. By incorporating actual political figures and events, The Children of a Bandit drew contemporary reality into its fictional world. While the main characters are fictional, the author intricately wove their stories together with contemporary events and figures from both Japan and China. For example, although the protagonist’s father, Lieutenant Colonel Shinohara, is fictional, he is placed in the Russo-Japanese War as a subordinate of General Nogi Maresuke, the symbolic national war hero.Footnote 50 Another character, Lin Yuanxing (Jp. Rin Genkō), a leader of a bazoku group and a supporter of Shinohara, links the narrative to the Seinan War: once a follower of Saigo Takamori, Lin moves to Manchuria after Saigo’s death, becoming a bazoku leader and adopting a Chinese name. Finally, the character Togawa, who assists the two protagonists, clearly evokes Tōyama Mitsuru, the influential head of the tairiku rōnin (continental adventurer) group Genyōsha. These historical references and prominent figures, familiar to Japanese readers, served as a bridge connecting ‘remote’ Manchuria to the metropole and fostering an imagination of the region as an extension of the empire’s territory. In this way, The Children of a Bandit’s storyline is intricately woven into the memory of Meiji Japan’s nation-building and extends that stage into Manchuria. Likewise, literature and history mutually informed and structured one another, thereby actively contributing to the production of reality.Footnote 51 The reciprocal force of popular history that blurred the boundary between fiction and reality thus worked to expand Japan’s national historical boundary into Manchuria.
In the Children of a Bandit, as the storyline becomes more grounded in real-world politics, Manchuria and the bazoku are reimagined as both the political and mythical frontier of the empire—mysterious and inexhaustible reservoirs of power poised to be harnessed by Japan. The image of the bazoku in this story transcends the portrayal of a specific human group residing in Manchuria; rather, they are imagined as an intrinsic essence of the Manchurian environment itself, blurring the line between nature and man, landscape and heroism. The protagonists’ initial encounter with the bazoku vividly encapsulate this Japanese fantasy.
‘Yumiko, do you see the sand dust?’
‘I do’.
As they looked into the dust, something glittered in the mist of the dust. It was a spear. Soon a horse appeared, then a man. As they approached, the silhouettes soon became two, then three, then four. It was them. The bazoku. They were all mounted on black horses, wore blue robes, and carried blue dragon blades at their waists. The spearheads in their hands glowed like flames in the reflection of the setting sun.Footnote 52
The author orchestrated the first appearance of bazoku against the backdrop of a Manchurian sunset. The flaming red sky, the endless expanse of the horizon, and the image of mounted bandits were widely recognized as iconic representations of Manchuria. By combining these familiar symbols, the author visually encapsulated Japan’s perception of Manchuria as a grand and exotic land of righteous outlaws. As if they were natural resources to be mobilized by Japan, the bazoku are depicted as elements of the Manchurian environment that could be harnessed by Japanese leaders. While Yamato Takeo in The Boy Bandit merely advised the Chinese bazoku leaders in Japan’s victory, Lin Yuanxing, the Japanese bazoku leader in The Children of a Bandit, ‘owned’ and employed his band in service of Shinohara’s children, thus further advancing the empire’s policy towards China. The perception of Manchuria as Japan’s frontier evolved from a distant battlefield where Japan clashed with other empires into a space increasingly connected to the metropole. Japanese characters embodying specific national experiences, such as the Russo-Japanese and the Seinan wars, as well as political figures like Nogi Maresuke and Tōyama Mitsuru, who appear as backdrops in the fiction, collectively extended Japanese readers’ perception of ‘Japan’s space’ to encompass Manchuria itself.
Imperial masculinity
In the bazoku fantasy, maturation is expressed through the construction of a masculinity that is closely aligned with national boundaries. This highly nationalized form of masculinity—one that ultimately serves to legitimize the Japanese empire’s presence in Manchuria—is what I call imperial masculinity. Japanese imperial masculinity emerged through contrast and competition with other nationalized masculinities.
In The Boy Bandit, the imperial masculinity embodied by the two men of the Yamato family underscores Japan’s capacity to tame and direct the violent yet patriotic Chinese men. Whereas Fumimaru symbolizes the future of Japan, Takeo represents the idealized image of the mature Japanese male. The character of Takeo, clearly modelled on the activities of the SMT during the Russo-Japanese War, is mobilized to construct a hierarchical relationship between China and Japan. In contrast to the Chinese leader, Commander Li, who is aged and unsure of how to fight the Russians, Takeo, a Japanese man in his forties, provides strategic guidance for the Chinese bandits. Takeo’s role as a strategist thus articulates a Japanese type of masculinity that defines itself through its capacity to discipline and tame the disorderly energies of its Chinese counterpart.
Deep within the woods, not far from Fengtian, a flatland of approximately ten chō squared lay beneath a sheer cliff. A pure valley stream meandered through, surrounded by quiet wood thickets. Facing the stream, with the thickets behind, stood a neat and simple Japanese house. In the expansive garden embraced by petite evergreen trees, the pure and serene ambiance of an artfully shaped pond reflects the essence of the owner’s heart.
A robust man in his forties, sporting a beard and with braided hair cascading down his back, appears to be a Chinese. However, the firmly closed mouth hints at a keen intellect. The gleam in his eyes radiates a dignified aura, suggesting a character of noble majesty. Whether viewed from the front or the side, an unmistakable Japanese essence pervades his presence.Footnote 53
This fantasy establishes a racial hierarchy through a one-way transformation of identity. A Japanese man can easily pass as Chinese, but the reverse is never permitted within the narrative. While a member of the Chinese bazoku group, Takeo never relinquishes his Japaneseness. When Fumimaru first encounters him, Takeo maintains his home and lifestyle in a distinctly Japanese manner. He cannot conceal his ‘Japaneseness’ even beneath Chinese attire and hairstyle. This unidirectional fluidity extends to Fumimaru as well: his acquisition of the Chinese language within only six months grants him the freedom to move throughout China. Such asymmetrical adaptability further reinforces the fantasy of the ‘Japanese bazoku’, in which Japanese masculinity proves inherently superior to its Chinese counterpart.
In this context, Japanese masculinity is not defined by physical strength. Rather, the notion of ‘Japaneseness’ is conveyed through adjectives such as ‘pure’, ‘neat’, and ‘quiet’, and through descriptions such as ‘keen intellect’, ‘dignified aura’, and ‘noble majesty’—all suggesting qualities presumed to be absent in Chinese men. These attributes confer refinement and moral sophistication on Japanese masculinity, in contrast to the Chinese, who are described through explicit terms like ‘violent’, ‘brutal’, and ‘loyal’.
Rather, Japanese men’s imperial masculinity is realized through their capacity to lead and guide Chinese national heroes, the figures portrayed as patriotic and sincere, but whose masculinity remains raw and untamed. To underscore the superiority of Japanese men, these Chinese bazoku are not represented as barbaric outlaws. Takeo explains:
They do not obey the Chinese government or the Russians. They [the bandits] are extremely violent men, yet their brutality arises from loyalty rather than greed. Of course, there are genuine robbers. But the man I serve, Commander Li, and Kōichi’s superior, Commander Chō—who sent Commander Li here—are heroic men who became bazoku because they abhor Russian outrages. They are all sincere men.Footnote 54
The narrative suggests that patriotic Chinese national heroes are brave and loyal to their people, though they lack intelligence. Thus, they appear as objects of moral cultivation and political guidance under Japan’s leadership.
Furthermore, by dissociating ‘China (Shina)’ from the Qing government, the story effectively colonizes ‘Shina’ on a conceptual level. The fantasy legitimates colonial expansion by envisioning that the Chinese bazoku, the ‘genuine Chinese patriots’, had rejected the corrupt government, and that their pursuit of justice could be realized only through Japan’s guidance. In this framework, the Chinese bazoku, depicted as heroes who defy ‘injustice’, become the moral gatekeepers of China. When these ‘righteous bazoku’ adopt Yamato Takeo’s strategy, Japan’s intervention in Manchuria appears not as aggression but as an act undertaken for the benefit of the Chinese people. The more just and patriotic the bazoku appear, the more fully they align with and validate Japan’s activities in Manchuria. It is precisely for this reason that the notion of ‘righteous bandits’ proved so appealing to the Japanese imperial nationalist imagination.
In The Children of a Bandit, Shinohara embodies this form of imperial masculinity. He is portrayed as a heroic figure of the Japanese empire—one who selflessly sacrifices himself for its sake. Formerly a military officer who fought against the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War, he could have returned home adorned with glory. Yet he chooses instead to remain in Manchuria as a bazoku, willingly abandoning his official rank and embracing a life of hardship. His mission, fundamentally an act of espionage, involves clandestine reconnaissance across Manchuria and Mongolia and the surveillance of Yuan Shikai’s autocratic government:
Shinohara joined the bandits. He conducted terrain reconnaissance throughout Manchu-Mongolia, including areas along the Heilongjiang River under Russian control. Simultaneously, he discreetly gathered information on the chaotic state of the Chinese government with the intention of reporting any significant developments to the imperial government.Footnote 55
Although Shinohara’s actions are, in essence, intelligence work serving Japan’s imperial expansion, this imperial activity is reframed as a self-sacrificial act undertaken for the sake of the ‘Chinese people’. This narrative, much like the preceding The Boy Bandit, reproduces the ideological distinction between the Chinese government and China itself. In The Children of a Bandit, China is depicted as divided between the old, decaying regime in Beijing and the suffering, redeemable ‘Chinese people’. Compared to Mori’s earlier and more ambiguous vision of Japan’s leading role, Arimoto articulates ‘Japan’s moral mission’ in China more explicitly through Shinohara’s death and his children’s subsequent revenge. In this narrative, Yuan’s power represents the old and corrupt Chinese establishment, the source of China’s backwardness against which the Chinese revolutionaries, such as Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing, supported at the time by Japanese continental adventurers, sought to build a ‘new political order’ in China.
After learning that their father had been poisoned by Yuan’s subordinate Li, Shinohara’s son Isamu and daughter Yumiko travel to Manchuria to seek revenge. Their personal vengeance against Li for their father’s death becomes intertwined with an assault on Yuan and ‘old China’, leading the revolutionary group to actively support Isamu’s revenge plot. The executor of vengeance is Isamu, who endures all the hardships throughout the narrative. His sister appears only at the end, delivering the fatal blow by stabbing Li in the stomach. This gendered division of action situates the female character as a companion and participant in the male imperial journey, present at the climactic moment yet excluded from the process leading up to it. In this way, the story constructs a narrative in which Japan’s expansion into China proper is justified not as an act of domination, but as a mission to eradicate its ‘outdated’ and ‘backward’ political system and to support a ‘promising’ new political power. Within this imperial logic, the Japanese male is depicted as a free and voluntary agent whose personal fulfilment coincides with the empire’s success, and as a benevolent supporter of China’s political ‘liberation’.
Imperial masculinity is consummated through the triumph of Japanese masculinity, symbolized by a Japanese man leading Chinese (Asian) men to defeat Russian (white) men. This victory asserts the supremacy of Japanese masculinity over that of the other Asian and white masculinities. Towards the conclusion of The Boy Bandit, a massive battle unfolds, in which 1,500 bazoku confront Russian soldiers. During the fight, the Russian general ‘Kuropatokin’ recognizes Japanese figures at the vanguard wielding Japanese katanas, prompting him to flee. The victory is not attributed to the Chinese bandits; rather, the author frames it explicitly as Japan’s triumph, emphasizing that ‘the leader of the bazoku was Japanese’. Alongside Takeo’s strategic leadership, the heroic deeds of the Japanese young boy Fumimaru serve as a narrative device confirming Japan’s dominance over the Russians. By depicting even an immature Japanese boy as capable of defeating fully grown white men, this adventure fiction celebrates Japan’s ascendancy in the global contest of masculinities.Footnote 56
It is worth noting that the masculinity idealized in the narrative was more focused on ‘internal’ strength such as intellectuality and rationality, rather than physical prowess. The Japanese male hero in the story ‘leads’ and ‘supports’ the Chinese so that they can resist Russian ‘invasion’, thereby asserting a Pan-Asianist image of Asia under Japan’s leadership. In this way, imperial masculinity embodied the Japanese empire’s self-definition as the righteous leader of Asians, and a supporter in their struggle against Western powers. In other words, the expansionist and imperialist nature of this masculinity did not rest on the overwhelming power of conquest but the rhetoric of liberation. At the same time this imperialist narrative established hierarchies among other national masculinities while legitimating the Japanese version as superior.
This portrayal of imperial masculinity, the image of the Japanese man as a ‘liberator’ of Asia, culminated in a broader Pan-Asiatic vision. The fantasy of becoming a bandit hero on the Manchurian frontier was no longer confined to boys reading adventure fiction; by the 1920s, it had already permeated Japan’s popular media and imagination. ‘A Song of Bandits’ (Bazoku no uta), initially released in 1922, vividly illustrates the widespread popularity of this fantasy. The song’s selection in 2019 as one of the 41 iconic songs of the Taishō period attests to its enduring resonance and lasting influence on popular culture.Footnote 57
’A Song of Bandits’ reconstructs the imagined geography of the empire while sharing the narrative structure of the two preceding adventure fictions. A bondless and vulnerable Japanese man discovers and reclaims his masculinity in Manchuria by transforming himself into a bandit leader. The two adventure fictions viewed Manchuria as a space where Japan competes with global powers and engages with China to establish a foothold for advancing Japanese interests. In both fictions Manchuria is described as a dangerous and mysterious space where an immature Japanese man develops into a mature and masculine imperial subject. Nevertheless, the works always remembered that Manchuria was a part of China, even though the Chinese government could not exert complete control over it. However, ‘A Song of Bandits’ not only repositions Manchuria as a part of ‘Asia’ rather than of China but also provides a geographical sense of the boundary defining Manchuria. This ‘popular demarcation’ of Manchuria encompassed the Gobi Desert of Mongolia to the west, Changbai (Kr. Paektu) Mountain in the south, and the Heilong (Jp. Kokuryū, Kr. Hŭngnyong, Rs. Amur) River in the northeast. The 5,000 men under the Japanese bazoku’s leadership were from ‘the most rugged mountain areas of Asia’ rather than from a part of China. Here, ‘A Song of Bandits’ describes Manchuria as a demarcated landmass located in Asia and the cradle of a pan-Asian community that led by the Japanese.
Conclusion
Widespread descriptions of bandits in Manchuria across various Japanese media and documents in the early twentieth century often appeared contradictory in their evaluations. However, the seemingly arbitrary use of different Sinophone terms for ‘bandit’ was, in fact, deeply intertwined with the shifting political realities of the Japanese empire in Manchuria and broader Asia. The meanings and connotations of these terms fluctuated depending on how the Japanese empire reconceptualized Asia under its hegemony, transforming it into an imperial nation-state.
This article focused on the term ‘bazoku’ and examined how the fantasies of bazoku reflected and reinforced Japan’s vision of Manchuria as its imperial frontier. The Japanese media mobilized the term ‘bazoku’ as a powerful metaphor to characterize Manchuria as a distinctive geopolitical entity—one that existed both outside and potentially within the imperial nation’s domain. Since the Meiji period, the Japanese media consistently associated the term ‘bazoku’, originally meaning horse-mounted thieves or traitors, exclusively with Manchuria, transforming it into a symbol of heroic and righteous bandits. Intertwining with the representation of the Russo-Japanese War, this idea reconceptualized Manchuria as a site waiting for Japan’s Pan-Asian ‘leadership’. In this process, this fantasy revealed a distinctive form of imperial masculinity for the Japanese empire. The normative male subjects of Japan would mature by voluntarily serving the empire’s expansion, and the maturation was possible only on the empire’s frontier, such as Manchuria. The bazoku fantasy represented a Japanese imperial hero who would lead other Asian masculinities in saving Asia from the Western powers, thus becoming the winner in the global contest of masculinities. By the 1920s, within the bazoku fantasy Manchuria became increasingly intertwined with Japan’s national historical experiences, integrating it as an extension of the empire’s territory. Imagining Manchuria as a land of righteous bandits repositioned it as a part of ‘Asia’ rather than China, providing Japanese subjects with a geographical sense of the boundaries that defined Manchuria as a distinct landmass within Asia and as the cradle of a Pan-Asian community led by the Japanese.
Acknowledgements
I owe my deepest appreciation to Professors Takashi Fujitani and Andre Schmid. Without their guidance, this article would not have been completed. I also thank my colleagues, Sophie Bowman, Qi Hong, Seongpil Jeong, Sinhyeok Jung, Juwon Kim, Soomin Kim, Sunho Ko, Sung Soo Lee, Mark Lush, Chu Wang, and Boyao Zhang, for reading earlier drafts and offering valuable feedback. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of Modern Asian Studies for their constructive comments, which significantly strengthened the article.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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