Colonial Academics and Japan’s Inner Asia Ambitions: Keijō Imperial University and Studies of Mengjiang or Inner Mongolia

This paper illustrates the role of Seoul-based researchers within Japan’s efforts to expand fieldwork and scholarship into central Inner Mongolia, and the creation of the puppet state of Mengjiang (Mōkyō) in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Academics based at Keijō Imperial University (the antecedent institution to Seoul National University) made efforts to document economic and geographical aspects of the empire’s expanding Inner Asian frontier, at times taking on Koreans as researchers rather than subjects of research. The present piece therefore lays the groundwork for the uncovering of further narratives of Korean academic involvement in Northeast Asia within the spheres of intellectual history and histories of science.