Historical Background

As a result of the Russo-Japanese War Japan acquired the Guandong Leased Territory (to be returned to China in 1923) and the South Manchuria Railway from Lüshun to Changchun (scheduled return in 1939). Japan gained additional concessions with the Beijing Treaty (Treaty and Additional Agreements Between Japan and China Related to Manchuria December 1905) such as the right to construct the Andong-Mukden Railway (between what is now called Dandong and Shenyang). Also, construction of a competing line parallel to the South Manchuria Railway was clearly forbidden in the secret articles of the treaty and the right to construct and operate the Jilin-Changchun Railway was one of the enumerated items for ongoing negotiation. The exceedingly vague delineation of these South Manchurian rights provided the scope for conflict between Japan and China.

Later, with the second Ōkuma Shigenobu cabinet’s Twenty-One Demands (1915), Japan forced the government of China to swallow a term extension for, and enlargement of, its South Manchurian rights, which stoked intense Chinese nationalism and gave rise to “revolutionary diplomacy,” a coercive Chinese diplomatic approach for rights recovery (Naraoka 2015).

Starting with Hara Takashi’s (1918–1921), successive Japanese administrations sought to secure the country’s interests in Manchuria by using the local military leader, Zhang Zuolin, as a buffer, since he had adopted a position of coexistence with Japan. But Zhang Zuolin was not a man to be satisfied by staying quiet in Manchuria. He made frequent forays into the Central Plains of Northern China, seeking to gain hegemony there, and returned to Manchuria and Japan’s protection when he failed, a performance he repeated several times. This resulted in a gradual buildup of friction with Japan, which sought stability for its South Manchurian interests (the remainder of this chapter draws heavily from Kobayashi 2010).

The Shandong Expedition and the Assassination of Zhang Zuolin

In 1926, Zhang Zuolin skirmished with the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), led by Chiang Kai-shek, that had come north. The Seiyukai cabinet of Tanaka Giichi dispatched troops to Shandong three separate times (1927–1928). Although the troops did protect the Japanese residents there, their objective was to stop China’s national revolution from spreading to Manchuria. They also allowed Zhang Zuolin to withdraw peacefully back to Manchuria. However, the Kwantung Army (the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) garrisoned in Manchuria) had already given up on Zhang; Kōmoto Daisaku and other senior staff officers had decided to back his son, Zhang Xueliang, as the new leader of Manchuria.

Kōmoto and his Kwantung Army comrades blew up Zhang along with his whole train carriage in the outskirts of Mukden (Fengtian) on June 4, 1928 (known in Japanese as “A Certain Important Incident in Manchuria”). Instead of becoming a puppet of the Kwantung Army, however, Zhang Xueliang joined forces with the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek.

Kōmoto’s objective was to replace the head of the Northeast China military clique and nothing more; any idea of using military force to combine Manchuria and Inner Mongolia and create an independent state was not even a consideration at first. The fact that he and his comrades were not punished by a court martial for the method they used, political terrorism, is related to the trend of that era growing within the IJA, especially the Kwantung Army—a lack of military discipline and actions taken arbitrarily without prior authorization.

Prime Minister Tanaka and the IJA senior ranks had intended to hold a military trial as a matter of course. However, they encountered strong criticism from anti-foreign hardliners among the civilian bureaucracy and the Seiyukai. Like at the time of the Shandong Expeditions, there were more hardliners in the influential political parties than in the military; Tanaka, who had a difficult time trying to control his own party, gave in to their demands and dealt with Kōmoto and comrades with administrative punishments. Since that decision angered the emperor, the Tanaka cabinet was left with no choice but to resign en masse in July 1929.

The Hamaguchi Cabinet’s New China Policy

The two Minseito cabinets that followed—led by Hamaguchi Osachi (his army minister was Ugaki Kazushige) and Wakatsuki Reijirō (his second; Army Minister Minami Jirō)—made a major shift in Japan’s policy toward China. They supported the Nationalist government’s push to modernize and construct a nation of laws by providing Chinese policemen training for public officials in Japan, lifting the ban on arms exports to the Nationalist government and the Northeastern Army, and similar measures (Kobayashi 2004). Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijūrō and Finance Minister Inoue Junnosuke believed that, as Japan’s South Manchuria interests were economic interests, bilateral political frictions would resolve themselves so long as Japan and China strengthened their economic coordination.

The lynchpin in this policy framework outlined above was Japan’s lifting of the gold embargo (Japan’s return to the international gold standard took place in January 1930). That move presumed a stable regional order in the Far East; an essential pre-condition to lifting the embargo on gold was keeping the IJA under control at home and abroad. Hamaguchi had more confidence in his own ability to govern after the army, under Ugaki’s lead, made its position clear of supporting the cabinet in the wake of allegations that the government’s signing of the London Naval Treaty on disarmament violated the emperor’s prerogative of supreme command (1930).

However, the political scenarios that Hamaguchi and his supporters had envisioned were starting to go awry. Zhang Xueliang made another incursion into Northern China, prompted by the Central Plains War. His Northeastern Army had made progress strengthening its aerial warfare capabilities and modernizing its armaments, such as poison gas equipment. Its anti-Japanese stance was also striking. A plan to lay a rail line originating in Huludao that would run parallel to the South Manchuria Railway is an example of its increasingly aggressive political propaganda. Anti-Japanese leaflets distributed around Mukden that looked like and were called “lost maps” designated Taiwan and Korea as well as Okinawa, Amami Ōshima, and even Tsushima as territories that should be restored to China.

“Economic Diplomacy” Hits a Dead End

Tensions increased rapidly in Manchuria between the Northeast Army and the Kwantung Army. A group within the Kwantung Army centered around staff officers Itagaki Seishirō and Ishiwara Kanji started looking for realistic possibilities to use armed force to split Manchuria and Inner Mongolia off from the rest of China. They held absolutely no illusions about economic diplomacy. They believed it self-evident that the interests and rights in South Manchuria were imbued with a political significance, and just calling them economic interests did nothing to alter the situation. Even supposing Japan and China could construct a win/win economic relationship, unless that were linked to an easing of political and military tensions, you could not hope for stability with respect to the Manchuria question.

Ishiwara concluded that the leaders of the Northeast Army clique, whoever they may be, would always hold ambitions of advancing into the Central Plains. In other words, the Northeast Army clique’s very existence was a cause of instability in the Manchurian situation, and so to overcome this vicious circle the only course left for Japan was to take bold action, separate Manchuria from mainland China, and either establish an independent state or a new Japanese territory.

Political Leadership in Flux

In the meantime, the Great Depression had started with Western stock market crashes in October 1929 emanating shockwaves that hit Japan, leading to growing discontent in the Japanese home islands as well as in Manchuria regarding the policy package of fiscal retrenchment and cooperative diplomacy of the Shidehara/Inoue team. In October 1930, Prime Minister Hamaguchi was felled by a right-wing assassin’s bullet in Tokyo Station (he died the following August). The second Wakatsuki cabinet that followed tried to find a way out of this predicament by cutting the IJA budget. Within the IJA, a political trend that opposed arms reductions was gaining momentum; seeing which way the wind was blowing, Ugaki resigned as army minister and became the governor-general of Korea.

To summarize the political power situation post-Hamaguchi/Wakatsuki: party cabinet dysfunction brought with it a reduction across the board of integrated institutional capabilities. Emperor Shōwa tended to abstain from active involvement in politics, an aftereffect of his personal rebuke of Prime Minister Tanaka; his advisors, the genro (elder statesman) Saionji Kinmochi and Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Makino Nobuaki, held different opinions on whether the emperor’s role in politics should be indirect or direct. There was factional discord within the IJA and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) and the embers of conflict were smoldering within the Kwantung Army. Unlike their predecessors Hara Takashi or Katō Takaaki, prime ministers Wakatsuki Reijirō and Inukai Tsuyoshi sorely lacked the ability to control their own parties, which set the stage for popular opinion to exert a growing and remarkably powerful influence on national politics in the run-up to a general election.

From an overall perspective, the IJA was becoming more active politically even as it was riven internally by widening discord and conflict among various schools and ranks, between the headquarters and the field armies, within the Kwantung Army, between the Ministry and General Staff Office, and among the senior and middle grade officers.

Political power was in a state of flux. Enough potential remained for political parties to come out on top of the military through a process of realignment, with political actors making and breaking temporary alliances. The situation regarding the military’s ascendancy remained highly unpredictable until the summer of 1931.

Politicization of the Imperial Japanese Army

Stepping back for a moment, let us examine why the IJA became so politicized.

Created amid the turbulent Meiji Restoration, the IJA was designed and set up as “the emperor’s army,” a concept based on the public fiction (tatemae) that the supreme being of the emperor was detached from sundry political disagreements. That means that the emperor’s army was created as a civil service-style, nonpolitical military force.

We begin to see minute cracks in this apparatus to maintain systemic stability, which the emperor’s army was intended serve as, after the appearance of series of “dangerous ideologies” that flatly rejected the monarchy (the 1910–1911 High Treason incident: a socialist-anarchist plot to assassinate the Emperor Meiji), a trend that energized activities consistent with the international Communist movement (Japan Communist Party founded in 1922).

A crisis of the National Polity (kokutai) roused a band of young commissioned officers, who organized a range of study groups in 1927–1928: the Double-Leaf Society (Futaba-kai); the Thursday Society (Mokuyō-kai); and a merger of the two, the One Evening Society (Isseki-kai). These groups vigorously debated the Manchuria-Inner Mongolia question, the system and institutions necessary to support total war, and other ideological issues. This did not mean, however, that they were already on the path to fascism and war. Core members, like Nagata Tetsuzan, held fundamental doubts concerning the plan to use armed force to carve off Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, questioning the merits of taking these regions if it meant going to war; even the talk of a system for total war was, at the start, merely a search for how to create a support structure under party cabinet control.

Economic disruptions caused by the Shōwa Financial Crisis and similar events aggravated Japan’s existing internal and external crises. Some younger officers, inspired by increasingly radicalized, highly idealistic interpretations of the National Polity, formed anti-bureaucratic groups, and in the style of men of high purpose at the end of the Tokugawa era (shishi), began to get involved in various plots for a coup d’état. One of these groups was the Cherry Blossom Society (Sakurakai) in which Hashimoto was a central figure. This group of political soldiers who would not submit to bureaucrat control was the very type that the Meiji army had purged from its ranks.

The Formation of Linked Crises: Korea, Manchuria, North China, Shanghai

An “arc of instability” (Korea—Manchuria—North China—Shanghai) was taking shape on the continent during this period. If a conflict happened at one of these points, it had the potential to send sparks flying immediately to neighboring regions. Apart from Shanghai where the IJN had its Yangtze River Fleet, the IJA had area armies garrisoned in these regions (Japanese Korean Army, the Kwantung Army, and Tianjin Garrison Army); whenever one of these mechanisms to protect the empire was engaged in operations, it carried the risk of inducing an enlargement of the incident.

Frictions were growing between Japan and Chinese authorities over managing problems in the Korea-Manchuria border zone, which had become the military stronghold of the Korean independence movement. The Wanpaoshan Incident occurred in July 1931: Japanese and Chinese authorities intervened in a violent altercation over water rights between Chinese residents and Korean migrants at Wanpaoshan in the outskirts of Changchun. As news of the incident was reported in Korea, in exaggerated form, there was a rash of sudden occurrences of persecution of and violence toward ethnic Chinese throughout the country, most seriously in Pyongyang (the Korean Incident).

Contributing factors underlying these incidents were the widening income gap that accompanied economic growth in Korea and the surge in the number of Koreans from lower income levels immigrating to Manchuria. The Japanese government, abhorring an influx of these Koreans to the home islands, planned their discharge into Manchuria, which caused a massive increase in tensions between ethnic Chinese and Koreans where they ended up, setting the stage for such incidents to occur.

It seems likely that the longer it took to deal with the incident, the anti-Chinese uprisings might evolve into a movement for Korean independence. Even though the Korean Incident quieted down before long, it did not imply that the original issues were resolved. And so, the issues of Koreans in Manchuria later proved to be a growing constraint on the Wakatsuki cabinet’s policy of non-expansion (Kobayashi and Nakanishi 2010).

How the Manchurian Incident Came About and Played Out

On September 18, 1931, the Kwantung Army blew up the South Manchuria rail line at Liutiao Lake in the suburbs of Mukden (Fengtian) and, calling it the handiwork of the Chinese, assumed total control over Mukden. The Liutiao Lake Incident was the start of the Manchurian Incident. As is widely known, the Kwantung Army pushed past the Japanese government’s non-expansion policy to seize the whole of Manchuria and ultimately wound up inventing a “Manchukuo,” which declared independence in March 1932. But the Manchurian Incident is not about the Kwantung Army’s electrifying military actions. It is about the political battle, full of twists and turns, between the Kwantung Army and the government. That political process can be divided into the following three periods:

  • First period: the period of chaos from the outbreak of the Liutiao Lake Incident through the October Incident (mid-September through mid-October of 1931). The second Wakatsuki cabinet laid down its “non-expansion policy” and kept the Kwantung Army’s area of operations restricted to the land belonging to the Manchurian Railway and the area along the leased railroad.

  • Second period: the period of the second Wakatsuki cabinet’s counteroffensive (mid-October through mid-December of 1931). The Kwantung Army sought to break the non-expansion line by going north to Qiqihar or south to Chinchow but was prevented from doing so by temporarily delegated orders from the chief of the IJA General Staff Office. The emperor temporarily delegated his supreme command authority to the chief of the Army General Staff, who then exercised this authority to issue orders to troops in the field without needing the emperor’s approval, on an ad hoc basis, for instance, in the middle of the night.

  • Third period: the period of confrontation between the Inukai cabinet and the Imperial Way Faction (anti-Chōshū faction) in the army (mid-December 1931 through May 1932). Inukai had persistently refused to recognize Manchukuo, but he was assassinated in the May 15 Incident.

This signaled the end of a practice of the two major political parties taking turns governing, an era called kensei no jōdō (the established procedures under the constitution), and it raised the curtain on the era of “Shōwa Restoration” driven by young army officers. Let us examine the features of each of these periods, below.

The True Status of the Kwantung Army

Proclaimed as the elite, the Kwantung Army was actually nothing more than divisions rotated in from the Japanese main islands (the second Division from Sendai at the time) and its effective strength was just 8800 soldiers; moreover, its rear logistics units (the Transportation Corps) that supported the army’s operations in the interior remained behind in Sendai. Being an armed force meant to protect Japanese special interests in Manchuria, the Kwantung Army was basically only able to fight along the route of the railroad.

The opposing Northeast Army possessed a huge fighting force of about 220,000 men but was saddled with a mishmash of troops and many mounted bandits. The Japanese predicted that, if they could strike Mukden and paralyze its chain of command, the Northeast Army would probably fall into disarray.

Even if that were so, occupying the whole of Manchuria would require additional troops dispatched from Korea and the main islands. The budget for reinforcements that the Wakatsuki cabinet (with Shidehara and Inoue) approved was quite small.

No sooner had the Liutiao Lake Incident occurred than the Wakatsuki cabinet very clearly laid out its policy of non-expansion, flatly rejecting the Kwantung Army’s requests for additional troops and support. Without having an order from the emperor to act, Japanese Korean Army commander Hayashi Senjūrō decided on his own initiative to provide “critical emergency assistance” to the Kwantung Army, ordering his subordinate 39th Mixed Brigade to advance on Mukden. This action was obviously illegal. Yet, fearing chaos in Manchuria, Wakatsuki gave his approval on the condition that the Kwantung Army pull back to the territory belonging to the Manchurian Railway (September 21, 1931).

Policy of Non-expansion and “Peace Keeping” Deployments

Coinciding with the rout of the Northeast Army, peace and stability in the Manchurian interior suddenly worsened. There were frequent reports that remnants of the defeated army were looting and committing violent acts against ethnic Koreans residing in Manchuria. Strict application of the non-expansion policy was able to lower the risk of the Kwantung Army running rampant, but it did not put a brake on the decline in security in Manchuria, especially in the interior. As Shidehara put it, if the situation were left alone, “it would give rise to a situation where control of Korea would not be easy.”

The Wakatsuki cabinet had to work to restore peace in Manchuria while skillfully controlling the Kwantung Army, a situation that caused the occasional slight ripple in his government’s policy of non-expansion. The public safety issue, itself, was a suitable tool prepared by Ishiwara and his comrades to get the government to swallow the bitter pill, their requisitions for military reinforcements. During this period, the Kwantung Army gradually enlarged the area in which it dispatched troops, nominally for the purpose of keeping the peace, going as far as Jilin and places along the railroad leased by the South Manchuria Railway.

The Wakatsuki cabinet, having established its non-expansion policy, resisted this move by geographically restricting the Kwantung Army’s area of operations. Army Chief of Staff Kanaya Hanzō cooperated with Shidehara to try and squelch the Kwantung Army’s maneuvers and mischief making.

The Movement Toward Forming a Political Majority: October Incident and the Movement to Cooperate with the Cabinet

Meanwhile domestically, radical elements of the Cherry Blossom Society tried to overthrow the Wakatsuki cabinet in a military coup d’état. But they were all rounded up in advance (the October Incident of October 17, 1931), which resulted in a reshuffling of the radicals in the IJA General Staff Office, making it easier for Kanaya to take control of the office.

The October Incident shocked the political world. Joining forces, the two major political parties formed a Seiyukai/Minseito coalition cabinet that included army moderates (Kanaya, Ugaki, Shirakawa Yoshinori). It was accompanied by a gathering momentum to take greater control over the whole army. This movement to cooperate with the cabinet soon went out of fashion because Finance Minister Inoue, who was increasingly confident of his ability to control the Kwantung Army, made an economic policy U-turn (reimposing a ban on gold exports), which generated a strong backlash. Thus, the opportunity for uniting political forces was lost.

Incidentally, that the Wakatsuki cabinet did not make the October Incident public, and just let Hashimoto and the other perpetrators off with very light punishments, was a political expedient to avoid Kanaya’s resignation (the Imperial Way Faction had been scheming Kanaya’s transfer). Even though the circumstances were what they were, this was yet another instance where the importance of military regulations and discipline was ignored, as was the case of the incident involving Zhang Zuolin’s assassination.

Meanwhile, Zhang Xueliang had established a military government in Chinchow (Jinzhou) in the southern part of Manchuria, in an effort to maintain his nominal authority to rule over Manchuria. Ishiwara Kanji, and his comrades plotted a Chinchow offensive and the Japanese Tianjin Garrison Army also decided to attack Chinchow. Were that garrison army to be mobilized, the theatre of conflict would have expanded into Northern China. Without consulting others, Ishiwara had Chinchow bombed on October 8, a development that stunned the international community. Some League of Nations members loudly called on Japan to withdraw its troops by a certain deadline. On October 11, army headquarters strongly admonished the Japanese Tianjin Garrison Army, narrowly preventing the Manchurian Incident from escalating to the “North China Incident.”

The Kwantung Army, Boxed In: The Exercise of Supreme Command Authority and the Depletion of Military Force

Over the next month, a fierce tug-of-war played out between the Kwantung Army, which sought to break through the non-expansion policy line with excuses of needing to improve public safety and safeguard Japan’s special interests, and the cabinet and IJA General Staff Office, which was trying desperately to block it.

The following list of chains of events illustrates this tug-of-war:

  1. 1.

    the dispatch of the Nenjiang detachment (800 men) to the outskirts of Qiqihar, which resulted in a skirmish with Ma Zhanshan’s army, which led the Kwantung Army to deploy the main force of the second Division without consultation (November 4, 1931), ended with a temporarily delegated order to stop the advance (November 5).

  2. 2.

    the second Division’s advance into Qiqihar (November 17) ended with a temporarily delegated order to pull back.

  3. 3.

    the fourth Mixed Brigade’s advance on Chinchow under the pretext of an uprising in Tianjin further south (November 27) ended with a temporarily delegated order to withdraw the troops (November 27–28).

The only case where the government’s consent was received before the fact was the first: the dispatch of the Nenjiang detachment was for the purpose of repairing the railway. The rest were instances of Ishiwara and his comrades acting without proper authorization. Shidehara and his colleagues were overly optimistic about their ability to control the Kwantung Army, thinking that they had stymied its plots. In fact, its engagements with Ma Zhanshan’s army and the brutal cold weather of northern Manchuria were depleting the Kwantung Army’s (second Division’s) fighting force. To ensure the Kwantung Army’s ability to maintain the peace, the government allowed the fourth Mixed Brigade’s deployment to Manchuria in exchange for the 39th Mixed Brigade’s return to Korea (November 7). The measure was careless, to say the least, for Ishiwara took these fresh, well-honed young troops and immediately sent them to attack Chinchow. But this action, too, was prevented by a temporarily delegated order.

Through close coordination, the party cabinet and IJA General Staff Office successfully thwarted the Kwantung Army from breaking out of the non-expansion line to the north or south in the last part of November. International opinion was gradually shifting and there was increasing talk in the League of Nations of the concept of a mandate for Manchuria to be administered by Japan.

“I’m at my wits’ end.” Having concluded that it was not feasible to create an independent Manchuria or a Manchuria/Inner Mongolia territory, Ishiwara suddenly began to insist that they needed to make Manchuria a League of Nations mandate (December 2, Ishiwara, “Whither the Manchuria-Mongolia Question?”) The Kwantung Army had been driven into a box.

Reversal: Foreign Minister Shidehara’s Infringement on Supreme Command Authority

The situation with the United States suddenly changed, however, with Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson’s remarks to the press (the morning of November 28, 1931 in Japan). Stimson had spoken about his understanding, based on Foreign Minister Shidehara’s assurances passed through US Ambassador to Japan William Cameron Forbes, that the Kwantung Army would take no hostile operations toward Chinchow. When the Japanese evening newspapers reported Stimson’s remarks and the assurances that Shidehara, of his own accord, had made to Stimson about Kwantung Army operations, it was met with deafening criticism that he had violated the emperor’s prerogative of supreme command over the military (Banno 1985).

Charging a violation of the prerogative of supreme command was like bringing out a secret weapon or playing a trump card; many powerful politicians heard the allegations, turned their backs on Wakatsuki’s Minseito cabinet, and began to attack it simultaneously. This proved to be a fatal blow to Shidehara, Army Minister Minami, and Army Chief of Staff Kanaya Hanzō who were the cabinet’s unifying political force. They lost the authority to use temporarily delegated orders. The supposedly finished Kwantung Army gained new life; the return of the 39th Mixed Brigade to Korea was postponed on December 10. Itagaki Seishirō, a high-ranking staff officer in the Kwantung Army, seized the initiative for the planning and organizing of Manchukuo. Within the IJA, Araki Sadao and others of the Imperial Way Faction denounced Minami and Kanaya (who was transferred on December 23). After Wakatsuki’s second cabinet was forced to resign en masse, Inukai Tsuyoshi established a Seiyukai cabinet on December 13, in keeping with the established procedures under the constitution (kensei no jōdō).

The Inukai Cabinet’s Secret Negotiations with China

Concurrent with the formation of the Inukai cabinet, Army Minister Araki and Deputy Chief of Staff Masaki Jinzaburō, both Imperial Way Faction members, assumed their posts and seized power. As they had always shown favor toward the Kwantung Army, it now truly became impossible for the IJA General Staff Office (headed by Prince Kan’in Kotohito) to keep the Kwantung Army under control.

Inukai cunningly intended to pull back on the reins and gain greater control after briefly increasing the number of troops in Manchuria. Reinforcements were dispatched on December 17, the first Independent Mixed Brigade to the Kwantung Army and the first Independent Mixed Regiment to the Japanese Tianjin Garrison Army. However, the Tianjin Garrison used these new forces in its attempt to put its “North China Strategy” into operation.

It was time to fight poison with poison. The Inukai cabinet announced December 27 that it would exercise its right, recognized by the League of Nations, to pacify its territory (“suppress bandits”), and the Kwantung Army seized Chinchow on January 3, 1932. This was a desperate measure to prevent the Japanese Tianjin Garrison Army from taking unauthorized actions, which would have meant enlarging the theatre of conflict to include Northern China.

During this time, Inukai had been coordinating with the Guomindang government of Sun Fo (or Sun Ke, son of Sun Yat-sen) regarding support for a new government in Manchuria. He was seeking a policy to control the situation in Manchuria through an international police force to keep the peace, with the IJA providing the bulk of the force. There was a push on the Chinese side, in fact, to use the Kwantung Army to get rid of Zhang Xueliang, and its occupation of Chinchow was the first step (Katō 2007).

Harbin Deployment: Shifting Political Mood Over Supreme Command Authority

Emperor Shōwa impatiently urged the government to start negotiations with Zhang Xueliang and to withdraw the independent mixed brigade from Manchuria. Though it upset Inukai’s plans, he could not go against the emperor’s wishes. The IJA General Staff Office moved ahead with arrangements to reduce some of the forces in Manchuria, and officers in the IJA senior ranks, like Uehara Yūsaku and Ugaki Kazushige, expressed their agreement (January 6–11, 1932). The shock from the Stimson incident was rapidly being repaired.

On January 8, there was a failed assassination attempt on the Emperor Shōwa by a Korean man (the Sakuradamon Incident). The Imperial Way Faction worked out a plan to force the whole cabinet to step down, but the emperor’s confidence in Inukai did not waiver. The state of affairs rested on a foundation of the emperor, Inukai, and the Control Faction in the IJA.

The only thing that could restore these declining fortunes was to use strong medicine of deploying troops to Harbin. Honjō Shigeru, the commanding officer of the Kwantung Army, sounded out Araki and Army Chief of Staff Kan’in about the Harbin dispatch on January 27, and Kan’in immediately approved. Unlike with the Qiqihar operation the year before, he had not sought approval in advance from the cabinet.

Following the Stimson incident, civilian officials were sensitive to the issue of infringing on the supreme command authority, so no one complained about the army’s high-handedness. The political mood as regards supreme command authority was clearly shifting. In the end, even the IJA General Staff Office’s plans for a partial troop withdrawal were retracted (February 1), and Imamura Hitoshi and other Control Faction members were reshuffled all at once (February).

Outbreak of (First) Shanghai Incident

Yet another major incident occurred on January 28: the (First) Shanghai Incident.

Many parts of this incident remain unclear. Evidence of plots can be found on both the Japanese and Chinese sides (Roku 2001). But, if we recall that there were military officers seeking political ties within the Kwantung Army, the Imperial Way Faction, the Fleet Faction/Naval aviators group, and the perpetrators of the May 15 incident (see below), I believe it highly unlikely that the outbreak of the (First) Shanghai Incident and events in Manchuria were completely unrelated.

The incident stemmed from a clash between Japanese residents and local Chinese; the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) made the initial response. The incident escalated from January 29 to February 2, becoming a skirmish; encountering stiff Chinese resistance, Japan quickly mobilized one army division (the ninth) and sent in the IJN’s first Air Fleet (aircraft carrier Kaga). In early February, the IJN carried out a personnel purge against members of the Treaty Faction, which did not favor deploying troops. The Chinese army, firmly believing it was waging the war of resistance, forced the IJA into such a hard fight that, in the end, Japan had to reorganize and dispatch the Shanghai Expeditionary Army (the 11th and 14th Divisions) commanded by Shirakawa Yoshinori. “The Imperial Japanese Army must never suffer a defeat to the likes of the Chinese army.” Now, even Inukai longed for a “ceasefire through victory.” At the time, the emperor had verbally conveyed his wish for a ceasefire to Shirakawa, and so keeping that in mind, Shirakawa managed to secure a ceasefire after the general offensive (March 3).

The Founding of Manchukuo

The state of Manchukuo in Manchuria, which took the Xuantong Emperor, Puyi, for its leader, declared its independence on March 1. As this is the date memorializing the 1919 Manse Demonstration (the Korean Sam-il independence movement), it naturally stoked the anger of Korean nationalists. Japanese general Shirakawa became one of the victims of a terrorist bombing on April 29 (the Shanghai Emperor’s Birthday Celebration incident).

Yet, the incident did not lead the Japanese side to renege on the Shanghai ceasefire agreement. Inukai requested the support of Ugaki and Uehara so that talks with the Nationalist government would continue. After the chain of tragic events in Shanghai, however, it was not realistic to think it was possible to successfully complete negotiations. While simultaneously dragging out the recognition of Manchukuo, Inukai intimated that he was settling the situation in Shanghai according to the emperor’s wishes, which incurred the wrath of civilian right-wingers and naval young officers. Inukai, too, became a victim of political terrorism in the May 15 incident.

In Conclusion

The Saitō Makoto cabinet recognized Manchukuo on September 15, 1932, and the Japanese and Chinese militaries exchanged treaty instruments for the Tanggu Truce in May 1933, aiming to bring the Manchurian Incident to a close. Yet conditions later escalated into what would become the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, as the Kwantung Army and its sympathizers forged ahead with schemes to partition Northern China.

That the First Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars had been concluded in a relatively short time was because none of the belligerents had lost their ability to govern. Also, Japan’s withdrawal of its troops from Siberia in 1922 was possible precisely because the Bolsheviks had established control over the Far East.

One major reason why the Manchurian Incident was not resolved completely, speaking from the Japanese side, was that power in Japan was dispersed—and the Kwantung Army’s series of uncontrolled actions is only one aspect of this situation. It would be quite an irony of history if one of the factors contributing to the ascendancy of the IJA in the 1930s was the dissolution of Yamagata Aritomo’s bureaucratic clique during the period of Taishō Democracy (established after the First Sino-Japanese War, it was the preeminent, pro-army clique composed of elements from the former feudal domains; it later split into the Imperial Way and Control factions).

Bibliography: For Further Reading

Banno, Junji. 1985. Kindai nihon no gaikō to seiji (Modern Japanese Diplomacy and Politics). Tokyo: Kenbun Shuppan.

Kobayashi, Michihiko. 2004. “Nihon rikugun to chūgen taisen—1929–31nen” (The Imperial Japanese Army and the Central Plains War: 1929–31) in Kitakyūshū shiritsu daigaku hōseironshū v32 n1 (2004-6): 1–34.

Kobayashi, Michihiko. 2010. Seitō naikaku no hōkai to manshū jihen: 1918–1932 (The Collapse of the Party Government and the Manchurian Incident: 1918–1932). Kyoto: Minerva Shobō.

Kobayashi, Michihiko and Nakanishi, Hiroshi. 2010. Rekishi no shikkoku o koete: 20-seiki nitchū kankei e no shinshiten (Beyond Historical Awareness: A New Perspective on 20th Century Japan-China Relations) Tokyo: Chikura Shobō.

Katō, Yōko. 2007. Shirīzu nihon kingendaishi, 5 Manshū jihen kara nitchū sensō e (Japanese Modern History Series (Vol. 5): From the Manchurian Incident to the Second Sino-Japanese War). Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho.

Naraoka, Sōchi. 2015. Taika nijūikkajō yōkyū towa nandattanoka: daiichiji sekai taisen to nitchū tairitsu no genten (What is the Historical Meaning of the 21 Demands? World War I and the Origin of Sino-Japanese Conflict). Nagoya: The University of Nagoya Press.

Roku, Shakushun [Lu, Xijun]. 2001. Chūgoku kokumin seifu no tainichi seisaku: 1931–1933 (Chinese Nationalist Government’s Japan Policies: 1931–33). Tokyo: The University of Tokyo Press.

Additional Bibliography

Kitaoka Shin’ichi. 2012. Kanryōsei to shite no Nihon Rikugun (The Japanese Army as Bureaucracy). Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō.

A persuasive study of the bureaucratization of the Imperial Japanese Army in the Shōwa period, which led to the outbreak of war and, ultimately, to Japan’s defeat by preventing the civilian cabinets’ effective control over the armed forces.

Shimada, Toshihiko. 2005. Kantōgun: zai man rikugun no dokusō (The Kwantung Army: Independent Action by the Imperial Japanese Army in Manchuria). Tokyo: Kōdansha gakujutsu bunko.

A historical overview of the Kwantung Army from its creation to its destruction. A classic work written in the 1960s.

Tobe Ryōichi. 2016. Nihon rikugun to chūgoku: shinatsū ni miru yume to satetsu (Imperial Japanese Army and China: Dream and Fiasco of the China Hands). Tokyo: Chikuma gakugei bunko.

A study the Army’s “China hands,” who represented the deep connection between the Imperial Japanese Army and China.

Usui Katsumi. 1974. Manshū jihen: sensō to gaikō to (The Manchurian Incident: War and Diplomacy). Tokyo: Chūkō shinsho.

A classic volume that made full use of diplomatic historical methods. The analysis of the (First) Shanghai Incident in particular is outstanding.