Kenkoku Daigaku or simply Kendai [ˈkɛndaɪ] wasis an educational institution which was short-lived in Hsinking (modern Changchun, Jilin province), the capital of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in occupied Manchuria during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Because sheared off from China by the Kanto-kun in March 1932 and declared an independent country, Manchukuo existed as a client state of Japan on the margins of the international order, recognized by a handful of nations.

[6] Restoration of Puyi to the throne of his Manchu ancestors provided one such symbol, and emphasized Japan's stance in favor of tradition over communism and republicanism, and had tremendous propaganda value.

Conspirators within the junior officer corps of the Kanto-kun plotted and carried out the assassination of Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin in the Huanggutun Incident of 1928.

Presented with the fait accompli, Imperial General Headquarters had little choice but to follow up on the actions of the Kanto-kun with reinforcements in the subsequent Pacification of Manchukuo.

In 1932, the Kwantung Army was the main force responsible for the foundation of Manchukuo, the puppet state of Japan located in Northeast China and Inner Mongolia.

From Japanese sources come these numbers: in 1940 the total population in Manchukuo of Longjiang, Rehe, Jilin, Fengtian, and Xing'an provinces at 43,233,954; or an Interior Ministry figure of 31,008,600.

[10] The US sanctions which prevented trade with the United States (which had occupied the Philippines around the same time) resulted in Japan furthering its expansion in the territory of China and Southeast Asia.

[22] In general, students from Japan, China, Korea, the Soviet Union and Mongolia learned at Kenkoku University under the banner of "the harmony of five ethnicities", and sometimes-surprising friendships were forged at the Japan-run institution, even as imperial Japanese troops brutalised much of the region.

Japan’s wartime pan-Asianist exercise, being a folly and a lie, became totally bankrupt at the end of the war and disappeared into thin air.

The Cold War quickly rewrote the geopolitics of the region.But during its lifetime, the Japanese colony was a highly unusual exercise in the history of imperialism.

Japan’s tradition of technocratic modernization played a central role in Manchukuo’s governing bodies, like the Concordia Association, the one-party state’s governing apparatus, and in the so-called South Manchuria Railway Company Research Department, a RAND Corporation-like research institution which ended up running much of Manchukuo’s development.This interest in technocratic modernization did not remain within established ideological confines; many radical ideas, anything that could inform development, found a receptive audience.

These Marxist exiles drew up industrial Five-Year Plans and promoted agricultural collectivisation, until they too fell afoul of the army-led purges of the political left in the early 1940s.

Its intellectual legacy is exemplified by the Japanese “reform bureaucrats” of the 1930s and ‘40s, who saw a technocratic state leading national development—and embracing neither electoral democracy nor class struggle—as being the way forward for East Asia.

The Manchurian influence can be found in all the most significant cases of East Asian developmental success.The Manchurian model of forced industrialisation under single-party rule found post-war expression in China, North Korea, and South Korea during the Park Chung-hee years, directly influenced by people who had participated in the colony’s institutions.

The Japanese technocratic planners who worked in Manchukuo likewise returned to serve in the highest levels of government and economic and planning bodies in Japan after the war.

Across East Asia, alumni implemented their goals of national liberation and state-led industrialization in the region’s postwar states and on all sides of the Cold War divide.

This university, which was to be established in May 1938 in Hsinking (now Changchun), the capital of Manchukuo at the time, was scheduled to select a total of 150 students from six ethnic groups, including Korea, Japan, Manchuria, Taiwan, Mongolia and Russia.

[15] Chinese graduates of Kenkoku University were taken to Sibir or met a miserable end during the Cultural Revolution, but Koreans returned to Korea and adapted well.

Yuka Hiruma-Kishida reported more clearly that, for the first time in the world history, in a place that few people pay attention to (and even despise) like Manchuria, the combination of ancient East Asian political thought was planted with completely new social liberalization trends.

Kendai was the only institution of higher learning administered directly by the Manchukuo's governing authority, the State Council, which was dominated by Japanese officers.

Recent scholarship, however, has complicated the picture by identifying multiple and competing articulations of Pan-Asianism, while re-examining its effects on policy making and its reception by subject populations.

Taking Kendai as a case study and uncovering the interactions that shaped relations below the level of the state, I attempt to demonstrate that the idealistic and egalitarian version of Pan-Asianism exercised considerable appeal even late into World War II.During the Cold War era, former professors and students of Kenkoku University made great contributions to the evolution of the whole East Asia region.

This event not only helped People's Republic of China receive huge aid from Japan to promote economic reform, but also opened a whole new chapter for Kenkoku University alumni.

Initially, the name chosen was "construction" (建設, Jianshe, Kensetsu), but because the Chinese government considered it "politically sensitive", that idea failed.

In the decades after World War II, in general and basically, the legacies of Kenkoku University were completely forgotten due to overlapping conflicts in a turbulent Asia.

Even in Vietnam, a country with very little connection to what happened in Manchuria decades earlier, Kenkoku University and its legacy have become a hot topic of debate on youth forums.