The late 1920s and early 1930s was a period of violent political and military upheaval in Japan and Northern China, a simmering powederkeg which finally exploded in the Manchurian Crisis of 1931-32. In the early 1930s, there were around 80 French-Canadians Catholic missionaries living in Japan and Japanese-held territory. In Manchuria, French-Canadian missionaries were in the middle of a war-zone, while in Japan, an increasingly militaristic government kept missionaries under closer supervision. Despite some recent publications on the work of French-Canadian missionaries in Japan and China, there is still a rather incomplete picture of their experience in this turbulent period. Through recently discovered first-hand accounts of French-Canadian missionaries published in the Montreal newspaper, Le Devoir, this paper reveals their representation of the Japanese and Chinese in the Japanese Empire in times of war and peace.
