Crossing Empire’s Edge JOSHUA FOGEL, GENERAL EDITOR For most of its past, East Asia was a world unto itself. The land now known as China sat roughly at its center and was surrounded by a number of places now called Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia, and Tibet, as well as a host of lands absorbed into one of these. The peoples and cultures of these lands interacted among themselves with virtually no reference to the outside world before the dawn of early modern times. The World of East Asia is a book series that aims to support the production of research on the interactions, both historical and contemporary, between and among these lands and their cultures and peoples and between East Asia and its Central, South, and Southeast Asian neighbors. series titles Crossing Empire’s Edge Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia, by Erik Esselstrom Memory Maps The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, by Mariko Asano Tamanoi THE WORLD OF EAST ASIA Crossing Empire’s Edge Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia Erik Esselstrom University of Hawai‘i Press HONOLULU © 2009 University of Hawai‘i Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Esselstrom, Erik. Crossing empire's edge: Foreign Ministry police and Japanese expansion in Northeast Asia / by Erik Esselstrom. p. cm.—(The world of East Asia) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3231-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Intelligence service—Japan. 2. Consular police—Japan. 3. Japan—Foreign relations—Korea. 4. Korea—Foreign relations—Japan. 5. Japan—Foreign relations—China. 6. China—Foreign relations—Japan. I. Title. JQ1629.I6E87 2008 363.28—dc22 2008010427 An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access ISBN for this book is 9780824887643 (PDF). More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. The open access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. 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For my parents, Calvin and Sandra Esselstrom N Hailar Qiqihar Sapporo Harbin Changchun Aomori Shenyang Sendai (Mukden) Beijing P’yongyang To kyo Tianjin Seoul Nagoya Osaka Hiroshima Jinan Qingdao Pusan Nagasaki Kagoshima Nanjing Shanghai Fuzhou Taipei Xiamen (Amoy) TAIWAN Guangzhou (Canton) 0 200 400 mi 0 200 400 600 km Northeast Asia (map produced by Bill Nelson) Harbin N Changchun Zhengjiatun JIANDAO REGION Hunchun Longjincun Tieling Shenyang Maoershan (Mukden) Liaoyang Yingkou Songjin (Kimch’aek) Andong P’yongyang Dairen Wonsan Chinnamp’o Kwantung Peninsula Seoul In’chon Kunsan Masan Pusan Mokp’o 0 50 100 mi 0 50 100 150 km Northeast China and the Korean Peninsula (map produced by Bill Nelson) Contents Acknowledgments | xi Introduction | 1 1 Patterns of Police Work in Late Chosõn Korea | 13 2 A Disputed Presence in Late Qing and Early Republican China | 39 3 Policing Resistance to the Imperial State | 65 4 Opposition, Escalation, and Integration | 92 5 The Struggle for Security in Occupied China | 119 Conclusion | 147 Notes | 155 Bibliography | 203 Index | 229 ix Acknowledgments I owe a great debt to so many people who supported me during the years it took to research and write this book, but I must place Josh Fogel, Luke Roberts, and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa at the top of the list. From the three of them, I learned so much about how to be both a disciplined scholar and a passionate teacher. E. Bruce Reynolds of San José State University and Jeffrey Hanes of the University of Oregon also deserve special recognition, as the time I spent working with them during the early years of my academic training had an indelible impact on the his- torian I am today. Special gratitude also goes to Mark Peattie, Frederick Dickinson, Daniel Botsman, Tak Matsusaka, and Bill Sewell for their enthusiastic participation in several conference sessions related to this project and to David Ambaras for his close and insightful reading of the original manuscript. For their involvement in many other workshops and meetings where I presented my research on the Japanese consular police, let me thank in particular Jun Uchida, Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Robert Cribb, Joseph Yick, Rustin Gates, Emer O’Dwyer, Robert Per- rins, Aaron Skabelund, Thomas DuBois, and Marieke Bloembergen. From my years as a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, special thanks go to Shao Dan, Laura Nenzi, and Chip Dewell for their friendship and advice. I also feel so fortunate now to be a part of an intellectually rich and personally supportive group of col- leagues in the Department of History at the University of Vermont. The research for the dissertation that became this book was made possible by a fellowship award from the IIE Fulbright Program and the Japan-U.S. Education Commission. In Japan, Professor Hirano Ken’ichirô of the Graduate School of Political Science at Waseda University was a kind and generous host during my stay there as a graduate student re- searcher, and during the years since he has graciously sponsored several important short-term stints for me at Waseda to carry out follow-up work. Heartfelt thanks are also due to Professor Mizuno Naoki of the Institute for Research in Humanities (Jinbunken) at Kyoto University and the mem- bers of his consular police research group, especially Matsuda Toshihiko, Asano Toyomi, Soejima Shôichi, and Ishikawa Yoshihiro. I must also thank Professor Ogino Fujio of Otaru Commercial University for his advice and suggestions during our several meetings in Tokyo, and for his continued interest in and support of my work. Additional financial support over the xi xii | Acknowledgments years was provided by the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, the History Department and Graduate Division at UC Santa Barbara and the Regents of the University of California, the Asian Studies Program, Dean’s Office of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Depart- ment of History at the University of Vermont, and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. Passages within this book appeared previously in somewhat different form as segments of journal articles in Modern Asian Studies and Intelligence and National Security. I thank the editors of both journals for allowing me to reshape some of that content here. I am also so grateful for the consis- tently enthusiastic attention shown to this project by Patricia Crosby and her editorial team at the University of Hawai`i Press from the moment of my initial proposal until the final production of the book. The superb comments offered by the press’ anonymous reviewers, too, made this a much better book than it would have been otherwise. The weaknesses that might remain are my responsibility alone. Finally, this book (and my entire career as a professional historian) would never have been possible without the love, patience, and unwaver- ing support of my wife, Megumi. Without her and our children in my life, all of this would not mean a thing to me. Introduction On the evening of March 11, 1919, a minor scuffle broke out between a handful of plain-clothed Japanese police officers and U.S. Army personnel outside a Korean brothel in the Japanese concession zone of Tianjin, China. According to U.S. sources, the violence esca- lated at around midnight the next evening, when “a large group of ex- cited Japanese civilians carrying clubs and pistols invaded the French concession.” Following the mob into the French concession, “the acting Japanese consul, mounted on a horse, led a body of more than one hun- dred Japanese troops and officers armed with rifles with fixed bayo- nets.”1 In the ensuing melee, two American soldiers found themselves in the custody of Japanese consular police forces. One had been struck on the head by a Japanese soldier outside the Empire Cinema, a local movie house in the French concession, and then transported to the Japanese consular police station, during which time a Japanese mob thrashed him with sticks. The second had been overwhelmed, while trying to es- cape, still half-dressed, from a Chinese brothel in the French conces- sion, by a mob of close to sixty Japanese civilians who beat him severely. After taking him into their custody, a small band of Japanese soldiers later delivered him to the Japanese consular police station too.2 A pair of American military officers soon arrived at the Japanese con- sulate and demanded that any Americans being held in the jail be released immediately, but the Japanese police chief refused to take any action. Japa- nese consul Kamei Kanichirô further explained that he could not do any- thing before consulting with his American counterpart, Consul Stewart P. Heintzleman. By the time Heintzleman arrived, however, Kamei had al- ready gone home. When Heintzleman nonetheless inquired as to the whereabouts of the two American soldiers, consular police chief Kaneko denied that any Americans were being held in his facility. Moments later, however, no doubt much to Kaneko’s chagrin, one of the Americans who had accompanied Heintzleman “discovered Corporal Rohner lying almost stark naked in a side courtyard” bleeding severely from several bayonet wounds to his back, and “a search of the place resulted in the discovery of Corporal DeCordova in a cell.