Construction (Kensetsu), Volume 1, Issues 1-2: Journal of the Manchuria Road Research Society, 1936

Description & Historical Context

Construction (Kensetsu) — Volume 1, Issues 1 and 2, 1936

The first two issues of Construction, the journal of the Manchuria Road Research Society, the research body of the region's road engineers, housed within the New Kyoto (Shinkyo) National Highway Bureau. Issue one appeared in May 1936 and issue two in July of the same year, together forming the opening run of a technical periodical devoted to the roads and bridges of Manchukuo.

The inaugural number opens with congratulatory addresses from the society's president and a senior civil-administration official, followed by papers on the roads of Manchukuo, on aerial photographic surveying contributed by an army engineering officer of the Kwantung Army survey corps, and on the great Nen River bridge, together with bulletins on river-control and embankment works. The second number gathers studies on recent trends in road works, on a survey of bridge sites along the Korea-Manchuria border, on street lighting, and on the history of road development within Harbin contributed by a municipal works engineer, with a frontispiece photogravure section recording six bridge- and embankment-construction projects.

As a primary engineering source, these founding issues document the infrastructure ambitions of the Northeast at first hand — the surveys, bridges, and roadways through which the frontier was being remade. Technical serials of this kind rarely survive from their opening run, making the pair a specific and uncommon resource for historians of Manchurian civil engineering and Northeast Asian development.

A genuine period document, well suited to a serious collection of Manchuria and Northeast Asian historical materials.

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