Northeast Normal University occupies a campus that includes former Manchukuo government buildings — including the former Ministry of Justice — alongside later construction. The university is one of the five national key normal universities in China and has a large and active student population that gives the area around it a different energy from the more administrative parts of the city.
The Manchukuo buildings on campus, like those at Jilin University, can sometimes be explored during open hours. The architectural hybrid they represent — official grandeur built by an occupying power for a puppet state — has a quality that is hard to describe but easy to sense: too formal for the actual power that inhabited it, designed to project permanence that never arrived.