Learning in 1939
I’m up to my ears in work and haven’t even had time to post anything here. But to keep things moving, here is (a few days late) a picture from the archives of the North China Transportation Company (華北交通株式会社, Kahoku Kōtsū Kabushiki Gaisha), which I mentioned and briefly described right at the start of this series.
The title of the picture noted on the card is 蒙古の小斈校 (Mōko no shōgakkō), meaning simply ‘Mongolian Primary School’. The location of the photograph is noted as ‘West Sunit’, the tribe of Teh wang, the then undisputed leader of the Inner Mongolian independence movement, who was forced, willy-nilly, to collaborate with the Japanese, who were increasingly setting the tone in Inner Mongolia as well. This earned him imprisonment and re-education in China after the end of the war and a brief interlude in Outer Mongolia.
No exact date is given, but the year seems to be 1939, judging by the serial number of the card. However, given the distance in both time and space, it is probably no longer possible to identify the teachers and pupils in the photograph.