Time: 16:00–18:00, October 2 (Thursday), 2025
 

Venue: Main Conference Room (3F), Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo
 

Title: “Improvement” Steppe by Steppe: Land and Livestock Management in Japanese-Occupied Inner Mongolia
 

Speaker: Sakura Christmas (Associate Professor in History and Asian Studies, Bowdoin College, USA)
 

Language: English and Japanese
 

Moderator: Khohchahar E. Chuluu (The University of Tokyo)
 

Abstract: 
   In the early twentieth century, the steppe borderlands between China and Mongolia erupted in violence. This contentious overlap between Han and Mongol communities posed fundamental problems in governance for imperial Japan as it expanded into the region. In response, Japanese militarists and Mongol leaders converged on a radical solution in 1932: Demarcating an autonomous territory for minority peoples in Manchukuo fifteen years before such zones would exist in the People’s Republic of China. 
   In this talk, Sakura Christmas explores the fraught delineation of this autonomous territory as not only ethnic, but also environmental in kind. In the 1930s, Japanese authorities relocated indigenous inhabitants and cultivated a pastoral ecology in Kingġan Province to reinforce corresponding identities. They viewed seasonal migration and native livestock as obstacles to making the region profitable for an imperial market. Under the banner of "improvement," they introduced engineered breeds to settle Mongol herders and maximize economic output, which led to land degradation under the conditions of total war. The disastrous consequences call into question the underlying purpose of "improvement" heralded by agricultural science.
 

※    Sakura Christmas received her PhD in history at Harvard University in 2016. Her book, Territorial Natures: Imperial Japan and the Mongolian Question is forthcoming from the Silk Roads series at the University of Chicago Press in 2026. Her work has also appeared in the American Historical Review and the Journal of Asian Studies. See here for more information: https://www.bowdoin.edu/profiles/faculty/schristm/index.html
 

Contact: Khohchahar E. Chuluu（echuluu[a]ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp）