imperial bridgehead in the late Meiji era; the expansion of Japan’s power to other parts of Manchuria in the 1920s; and it witnessed the total annexation of Manchuria in 1932 under the Manchukuo puppet state, and the emergence of a totalised urban empire in Northeast Asia prior to the Second World War. This dissertation investigates the formation of the Ohiroba Circus through key buildings as an architectural metaphor and means of understanding Japan’s empire building process in Asia from 1905 to the eve of the Second World War. Due to the complexity of Dairen’s political infrastructure and the coexistence of different political forces, the analysis is arranged thematically rather than chronologically and is divided into three chapters, each relating to a theme in Japan’s empire building process and its architectural ideology. The first chapter examines the British Consulate and considers how this building reflected the shifting geopolitical relations in the region from a diplomatic perspective. The second chapter focuses on the public sphere and Japan’s transition from colonialism to imperialism through an analysis of Japanese public buildings. The third chapter focuses on the transformation of Japan’s self-image through the changing definition of modernity and modernisation by investigating three cultural buildings. Among the few existing scholarly works, research on Dairen’s architectural history and the Ohiroba Circus is uncommon and embryonic. In the West, due to the lack of relevant information and research, there are no monographs dedicated to the discussion of Dairen’s architectural history. However, scholastic works on the architecture of Manchukuo provide useful fragments of Dairen’s colonial architecture. Notably Edward Denison’s Ultra-Modernism: Architecture and Modernity in Manchuria, which discusses Dairen’s architecture in relation to the context of modernisation prior to the
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WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018