Academic Conference at CMU

I did my first road trip on the North American continent to participate in an academic conference happening at Central Michigan University (CMU). As a person who grew up in the East concrete jungle, Tokyo, I was pretty shocked when I arrived there. The CMU campus was enormously huge and the entire town Mt. Pleasant was so empty. Especially because it was a Saturday morning during a Spring break, I was almost the only one driving on my way to the school.

I rented an Airbnb to stay during the conference. Surprisingly, the Airbnb hosts were both CMU graduate students and they just got married. It seems like people tend to get married at an early age in central Michigan and they are pretty satisfied with their currently lives. I remember when I was small, I had always been told to explore the world before I make any decisions because the world is so big and there might be many opportunities out there that I don’t even know. Unlike the environment where I grew up, central Michigan is very comfortable, peaceful and serene.

Finally the Graduate Student Conference started. I had a chance to present my paper about the social status of Japanese settlers who moved to Manchuria in 1932. The reason why this topic was unique was because people always pay close attention to how much local Chinese people suffered during Japanese colonialism, because history is often shaped by winners of the time. Therefore, not much research has been done on how Japanese settlers’ lives changed after they moved to Manchuria. Throughout my paper, I was trying to answer these questions chronologically: (1) under what situation were these Japanese settlers sent to Manchuria; (2) what were their lives like and how did they feel after they moved to Manchuria; (3) how did they understand their relationships with both Chinese landlords and local farmers; (4) how were the settlers educated and how did they interact with the Chinese people in Manchuria; and (5), the social status of Japanese settlers while they were ruling Manchukuo.

Since I myself was born in Manchuria (current Harbin), I believe that I have a unique opportunity to do research on Manchuria and tell an unbiased story from both Japanese and Chinese perspectives. Many in the audience were shocked at the fact how much Japanese settlers (most of them were agrarians) sacrificed when they moved to Manchuria and how much the Japanese government betrayed them back then. It was great to receive constructive and meaningful feedback/comments from other panelists to further develop my thesis. At the end of the conference, I was honored to be granted the best paper from CMU, which I did not expected at all.

Written by Megumi Yoshinaga, M.A. candidate in East Asian Studies at Stanford University. She received an FSI conference grant in winter 2017.