CHAPTER 6
IN September 1931 the Japanese Army operations in Manchuria rapidly developed beyond the South Manchurian Railway zone. The movements of the Kwantung Army after the bomb incident (which the Chinese were not slow to accuse them of contriving) were so systematic, orderly and comprehensive that they obviously had been considered long in advance. Army field commanders were openly flouting normal civilian controls, and the Japanese Government floundered in the wake of events, responding sluggishly to news from the front.
The Japanese quickly overran Manchuria. Efforts both by the Japanese Government and Lieutenant-General Honō, Commander-in-Chief of the Kwantung Army, to contain the affair and to restrain the advocates of a ‘forward policy’ were unavailing, and as Honjō’s own orders were disregarded and his officers led their forces across Manchuria, the private doubts in Japanese official circles were laid aside amid scenes of public jubilation. Although vastly outnumbered 20:1 by Chang Hsueh-liang, the Manchurian armies were routed by the Japanese. In the fighting, only one of Chang’s generals, Ma Chan-shan, resisted skilfully. Originally he seems to have been relatively well-disposed towards the Japanese until it became obvious that the Japanese wanted him to step down for another Manchurian war-lord, Chang Hai-peng, to become the provincial governor of Heilungkiang. Ma showed, by his field tactics, that he had studied the teaching of the old Chinese military texts on how to feign and double-cross. He won momentarily a great deal of popularity in the national press of China by the ‘successful’ action which he fought on the Nonni River. The importance of his actions was exaggerated. It was a campaign of delay. There was precious little fighting. He received no support, either from other Manchurian generals or from the Chinese central Government, which did not use its forces to support him. This is far from difficult to understand. Ma had regular forces twice as numerous as the total numerical strength of the Japanese troops then in the whole of Manchuria, his tactical position was more secure than his ability to seize the offensive, and the main struggle at the Nonni River bridges was anyway not a direct contest between ‘the Chinese’ and ‘the Japanese’ but between the assembled forces of two rival Manchurian generals, one of whom was favoured by the Japanese. As the subsequent report of the League of Nations Commission of Enquiry pointed out, the feuds between rival generals and their gangs were a critical factor in the unfolding of these and other events.
The complete evacuation of Manchuria by the troops of Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, practically without striking a blow, was not unconnected with the internal conditions of China south of the Wall.∗
A full appreciation of the Japanese achievement in Manchuria can be approached only through an understanding of the immense geographical obstacles which had to be overcome by the Japanese forces. Chang Hsueh-liang not only had governed the whole of Manchuria, a country extending 900 miles in length and the same in breadth (encompassing some 380,000 square miles of territory, much of it mountainous, equivalent in size to the combined area of Germany and France). His rule also extended to control of the province of Jehol, an adjacent fiefdom which added a further 60,000 square miles to his domains and which left him in military command of the northern approaches to Peking beyond the Great Wall. While it is true that railway construction in Manchuria was far more developed than that of China Proper in 1931, communications were difficult and depended chiefly upon river and road traffic. Many of the rivers in Manchuria were navigable only by small craft at the best of times and all were generally frozen between October and March each year. With winter temperatures well below freezing throughout the land for six to eight months of the year, followed by summer temperatures rising to 38° C (100° F) in conjunction with widespread monsoon floods over many parts of the country, the climatic environment of Manchuria varied from bad to intolerable, certainly utterly inhospitable to the alien Japanese invaders.
By January 1932, however, the Kwantung Army, exploiting the divisions between Chang Hsueh-liang’s lieutenants and supported by units of the Korean Army, had established a complete mastery over the whole of South Manchuria and had made serious inroads into Russian-dominated North Manchuria, too. Most of the time the Kwantung Army struck first and informed Tokyo afterwards. As Prime Minister Wakatsuki recalled afterwards:
It was the unanimous sense of the Cabinet that these operations in Manchuria must cease immediately and War Minister Minami agreed to put this Cabinet policy into effect with the Army at once. However day after day expansion continued and I, the Prime Minister, had various conferences with General Minami. I was shown maps daily on which Minami would show by a line a boundary which the Army in Manchuria would not go beyond, and almost daily this boundary was ignored and further expansion reported, but always with assurances that this was the final move.∗
War Minister Minami strove to make excuses for the continuing disobedience of the Kwantung Army. He also strove, in vain, to reason with that Army’s headquarters. The Army General Staff, meanwhile, may have had an underlying sympathy for the objectives of the Kwantung Army, but it issued a stream of orders intended to bring operations to a halt. There was some discussion as to the feasibility of cutting off military expenditure on the Kwantung Army, but this came to nothing when it was pointed out that such a course would produce an extremely dangerous situation for all concerned. The efforts of the authorities in Tokyo to stem the tide of the Japanese advance continued up to the end of 1931. The Kwantung Army was outraged, for instance, when the Army General Staff took exceptional steps to order the immediate evacuation of Tsitsihar, lynchpin for the control of the whole of North Manchuria, in mid-November 1931. Later still in November, after riots broke out in the northern Chinese city of Tientsin in the wake of political activities fomented by the Kwantung Army’s ubiquitous secret service agents, the Army General Staff in Tokyo not only refused a request by the North China Garrison Army for reinforcements but also demanded that the Kwantung Army withdraw 150 miles back from the Chinchow area on the alluvial plains of south-eastern Jehol (where it had planned to advance on the pretext of seeking to relieve the garrison forces at Tientsin). That was about as much as any Japanese central authorities could have done towards reimposing control upon the troops in the field, for it was appreciated that all moves of this kind not only undermined military discipline in Manchuria but provoked extreme political unrest at home.
Caught in this cleft stick, the Wakatsuki Cabinet finally collapsed in mid-December 1931, at which time the moderate General Minami was put out to pasture and replaced as War Minister by the much more charismatic figure of Lieutenant-General Araki Sadao, who recognized together with Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi and the Ministers of Finance and Foreign Affairs that in the absence of a ‘fixed policy’ by the new Government it would be powerless to prevent the further spread of hostilities in Manchuria. Araki convinced first his senior ministerial colleagues and then the rest of the Cabinet that the only practical alternative to a drift into chaos was for the Government itself to resolve to occupy the whole of Manchuria together with Jehol, Chang Hsueh-liang’s last foothold north of the Great Wall. As the Imperial Diet was not in session, the matter was submitted directly to the Privy Council which reluctantly consented to the plan and approved the necessary expenditure.
The first experience of Japan’s adventure in the conquest of mainland China did not impress much of the outside world. What the Japanese would do in Manchuria had been awaited with some curiosity. Some countries had been ready to be tolerant. The development of Manchuria under Chang Hsueh-liang and his father before him had been arbitrary and exploitative. The Changs were reported to have kept a standing army of 300,000 men, greater than the regular forces of the Japanese Empire. They had created a huge munitions factory 1 1/2 miles long by half a mile wide, said to be the largest arsenal in the world after the old Krupp complex in Germany. Some foreign experts estimated that more than 85 per cent of Manchuria’s state revenue of 133 million Chinese dollars for the fiscal year 1930 was spent on Chang Hsueh-liang’s brand of militarism. The exploitation of Manchuria’s rich natural resources had been devoid of imagination or enterprise. It would not have needed any exceptional skill in administration for the Japanese to do better. What they achieved, however, was little short of miraculous.
Japan decided to govern indirectly through friendly Manchurians rather than to establish direct administration. Thus far the choice was wise. We must not underestimate the change of attitudes which the Japanese had to undergo as they moved from being a mainly introspective, homogeneous race and culture to become the guiding spirit of a polyglot empire, from thence establishing a wholly new regional system. There were several mechanisms which effected these changes. We have seen how Japan after the Meiji Revolution had adopted and adapted western ideas and technology with quite extraordinary vigour and discernment. This was but one mechanism. Another mechanism by which the transformation was accomplished has been seen by some oriental observers to be little more than an exaggeration and adaptation of traditional Buddhist religious precepts that were held in common in nearly every territory that came under Japanese sway until 1945.
The concept of ‘racial harmony’ (minzoku kyōwa) between the Japanese and other Asiatic peoples first attracted attention in the late 1920s, when it was nurtured in Japanese intellectual circles in Manchuria and Mongolia. It was soon a topic for animated discussion everywhere among the Japanese settlers, and it became especially fashionable among second-generation Japanese residents in Manchuria who had known no life outside that of their adopted country. It was rather a natural expression of the attempts of these Japanese pioneers to achieve some enduring balance and stability in their relationship with the Mongolian, Manchurian, Chinese, Korean and White Russian populations that were more firmly ensconced in the area. At the root of the doctrine was a notion that bears a passing resemblance to that of the brotherhood of man in that it was certainly predicated upon a thirst for peaceful co-existence and co-prosperity. It was not, however, a doctrine indistinguishable from that preached by the Author of the Sermon on the Mount. It was no programme for racial equality nor for racial integration. On the contrary, it soon developed into a self-conscious programme for a social and economic re-stratification of Asian society by race. From the beginning, the Japanese in Manchuria perceived that their own special rights and privileges could not be preserved, much less extended, if Manchuria and Mongolia were subducted into the turmoil of Chinese politics. Yet there was ample scope for enlarging upon Japan’s share in the development and exploitation of Manchuria and Mongolia if the region could be made a ‘floating world’, regulated by its own autonomous government yet responsive to pressure waves generated by Tokyo and by local Japanese special interests as well as by legitimate Chinese interests. This was not only a political and cultural imperative for the many Japanese who embraced such ideas. It was above all a question of their economic survival.∗
Even at the earliest stage in the evolution of the idea of minzoku kyōwa, Japanese residents in Manchuria and Mongolia were thinking in terms of severing the ties that bound Manmō (Manchuria and Mongolia) to China Proper. But at that stage a purely Sino-Japanese ‘racial harmony’, nothing that need embrace other races, too, was favoured as the proper means to attain that end without recourse to military force. That soon changed. By 1930, as the effects of the world depression were felt in the region, a new sense of urgency was imparted as acutely vulnerable Japanese enterprises found themselves subjected to especially severe attacks. The anti-Japanese movement as a whole (to which nearly all the indigenous peoples of China, Manchuria and Mongolia responded wholeheartedly) and the discriminatory economic policies of Chang Hsueh-liang’s regime in particular, gravely prejudiced the Japanese communities notwithstanding the latent strength of the South Manchurian Railway and of the Japanese military forces garrisoned in the vicinity.
Many of those who could afford to do so left the Asiatic mainland and returned home to Japan. Others less fortunate found the attitude of the Japanese Government singularly unhelpful. As one spokesman for the Manchurian Youth League poignantly observed, ‘With the basis of our life destroyed by lawless Chinese officials and with no place to return to, we are treated like enemies by the so-called sovereign of Manchuria and like stepchildren by Japanese statesmen.’∗ Some form of self-reliance and unity obviously was required, and Japanese residents in Manchuria and Mongolia began to contemplate the creation of a Manchurian state genuinely independent of Japan, if that should be the only way to protect their persons and livelihoods. ‘In this way,’ as Hirano Ken’ichirō has pointed out, ‘the Japanese residents in Manchuria separated themselves from Japanese imperialism, the main target of Chinese nationalism, and at the same time identified themselves with the other racial groups living in Manchuria.’†
By the following year, 1931, the sense of abandonment which Japanese residents in Manchuria felt towards their motherland had become more acute. When the South Manchurian Railway announced plans to close its central teachers’ training college, the plight of the Japanese expatriate community became desperate. In short, the idea of racial harmony had gained a widespread popularity among Japanese residents in Manchuria over the course of several years before the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident. Thus came to hand, ready-made, a fit instrument for the purposes of the Kwantung Army. It gave the militarists within that Army a blueprint for the political mastery of an entire country. It was a concept within the capabilities of the comparatively small military force under their command. And it was familiar to the tens of thousands of Japanese civilians who regarded that country as their own. Manchurian politicians and generals could be bought and sold by the sackful. By accumulating such sackfuls, Manchurian political institutions, internal allegiances and external relations could be transformed, and when they were transformed, the Japanese would emerge as a race of managers.
The structural side of the concept of ‘racial harmony’, indeed, was no less important. From the early years of the century, successive Japanese governments and private venture capitalists had promoted the commercial and industrial development of Manchuria and had used the influence which their economic success brought them in seeking a special, and rather corrupt, relationship with the Manchurian civil bureaucracy. It was a relationship neither so very different from that which had existed in Korea prior to its incorporation into the Japanese Empire, nor in any way superior to the practices of the European merchant adventurers who had sapped the native energies of half a dozen continents during the previous half-millennium. Now the Japanese came to believe that it was imperative that the lingering apathy of the rural masses in Manchuria should be preserved. It was noted that the Manchurian peasantry traditionally were unmoved by affairs of state and by international relations. What mattered to them more were family, clan and local interests, which in turn were bound up in autonomous feudal relationships between landlords and tenants which had survived for centuries. So long as these traditional cultural values and constraints could be preserved intact, the indigenous population would pose no threat to Japanese economic or political enterprise.
Accordingly, it seemed to be in Japan’s interests to cultivate relations with the Manchurian landlord class and for this purpose to stress their common interest in Manchurian autonomy. It must be remarked upon that though thinly populated overall, the country did include nearly 34 1/2 million inhabitants. Fewer than 3 per cent of the population consisted of Manchus by race. Fully 90 per cent were Chinese. That formed a not inconsiderable number of potential antagonists to pacify and police. Fortunately for the Japanese, the bulk of the Chinese were recent immigrants from North China with little love for the southern-dominated Kuomintang, so the Japanese cultivated local and particularist sentiment on fallow ground. Since direct imperialism had acquired a bad name even in these remote regions by 1931, even the most ardently imperialistic Japanese could not hope to overcome this unless they succeeded in wrapping up reality in some more acceptable political form. Aside from the influential Japanese circles in Manchuria to whom the authorities looked for guidance, there were many in Japan who strongly believed in Pan-Asian ideals. For these and other reasons which we shall probe shortly, the thrust of Japanese policies towards Manchuria in the period following the military conquest of the country made a direct appeal to the sentiment of ‘Manchurians’ in general and especially of those conservative or reactionary elements within the country who inevitably possessed great power and influence in such a society.
Thus, in 1932, the Kwantung Army unwrapped its own plan for the creation of a radical state which was designed to secure the political autonomy of the Kwantung Army within all of the domains it now controlled and also to give comfort to the Chinese of the old days of the Empire. It was called ‘Manchukuo’, the state of the Manchus. To administer it, there were invited a number of families of the old régime, especially those who had been identified by the Kwantung Army’s secret service as friendly to Japan. The Kwantung Army’s ‘Lawrence of Manchuria’, Colonel Doihara Kenji, went south to discuss the situation with Aisin-Gioro Pu-Yi, known universally by his nickname of ‘Henry’, conferred upon him by his English tutor. Pu-Yi, who in infancy had been deposed by the Chinese Revolution of 1911 as the last Manchu Emperor of China, was persuaded to become the titular head of this new state as a willing tool of the Japanese. No doubt the two sides had differing expectations regarding the true meaning of ‘cooperation’.
‘Henry’ Pu-Yi was an extraordinary creature, undeflected by thought but not by ambition, whose admirable personal traits are difficult to discover. When he was brought before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East by hulking Soviet guards to stand as a star witness for the Prosecution in the early weeks of the Tokyo Trial, Pu-Yi wildly accused the Japanese of attempting ‘to enslave the people of the whole world, and they started it with their experience in Manchuria’.∗ He seemed notably short of gratitude for the favours that the Japanese had bestowed upon him. From the witness-box he recalled his visit to meet Emperor Hirohito in Tokyo during 1940, long after Japanese military, political and economic authority had been established in Manchuria, and however much the seriously discombobulated Pu-Yi sought afterwards to distort the facts, what he conveyed to listeners spoke volumes about the harmony which the Japanese had hoped to establish with Manchukuo. Accompanied by his Japanese military aide-de-camp, the Manchu Emperor had been received by Emperor Hirohito with every sign of goodwill. As a token of his esteem, Hirohito gave him two of the three treasures vouchsafed as sacred to the Japanese throne (a sword, a piece of jade and a mirror). Young Pu-Yi received the sword and the mirror. According to ancient Japanese legends, the magical sword had been discovered by the brother of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu Omikami, who had descended to earth to hack to death an eight-tailed serpent. The sword, found inside the monster’s eighth tail, was thereafter renowned as the Excalibur of Japan. According to Pu-Yi, Hirohito also related how Amaterasu Omikami had given the sacred mirror to her grandson, the first Emperor of Japan, and his heirs, ‘and told them that when you see this mirror, it is the same as when you see me’.† Pu-Yi took the two symbolic treasures back to Manchuria. He told the post-war Allied court, ‘That was the worst humiliation that I have ever faced.’∗ The Prosecution, although it never disputed the authenticity of the divine talismans, chose to regard this episode as evidence of a plot by Japanese war leaders to impose Japanese state shintoism upon Manchuria, and from thence throughout China and beyond, ‘to control the minds, the souls, the wishes, the movements of the people’.† In fact there was no such grand design, no such uniformity of ambition, and years after the trial Pu-Yi confessed that he had lied during his testimony to save his own skin. Nevertheless, the anecdotal story just described does betoken the Japanese Empire’s conception of the seriousness of its commitment to the struggle in which it was engaged on the continent. The sacred insignia offered to him by Hirohito effectively elevated Pu-Yi to a transcendental brotherhood between the two rulers and their realms, and it is therefore quite wrong to suppose that the Japanese conceived that Pu-Yi regarded the episode as symbolic of Japan’s subjugation of Manchukuo into slavery.
Meanwhile the Chinese Government, from its capital in distant Nanking, had reacted to the Mukden Incident and its aftermath by playing the card which it hoped would relieve it of danger without its being driven to resolute action. It appealed to the League of Nations. The League’s prestige as a peacekeeping machine had been growing in Europe. During minor European disputes in the previous dozen years, the Council of the League had at times intervened when peace was threatened. China was led to think that it might do so over Manchuria, too. The League had never yet been engaged in restraining a Great Power, and this was the task it was now set. Undoubtedly the Kuomintang leaders, though realist enough in home affairs, showed themselves surprisingly ingenuous in supposing that textbook methods of collective security could be followed, with effective results, in checking Japan.
Possibly the Kuomintang politicians were misled by a number of western enthusiasts who abounded in Nanking and Shanghai, and who were later to be joined by refugees from the rising storm in Europe. It had become a matter of prestige among the Chinese to become the patrons of expatriate dilettantes. A great (and venal) banker like T. V. Soong derived face from their permanent employment on his staff. This was reminiscent of a classical period in Chinese history; in the days before the establishment of the stable military empire, when China consisted of a group of warring feudal kingdoms, roving scholars offered themselves to the Chinese kings, who gladly employed them. Now, as then, the scholars, though cosmopolitan, had more influence on policy-making than most of the regular politicians. They were often dangerous or erratic advisers. Disillusioned by the western record, many of them made a cult of the Kuomintang because it was an apparently revolutionary power which was willing to experiment with new methods. They urged China to attach its fortunes to League procedures.
The League was embarrassed by the confidence shown in it. The skies were darkening over the world: the economic crisis had set in, and the Great Powers looked with alarm at being called to do anything which could further unsettle the world’s economy and might even lead to military conflict between themselves and the Japanese. Faced with awkward problems from the rise of Germany, and yielding to the advice tendered by their general staffs, Intelligence experts and economists, the Governments of the leading Powers were more concerned with what they could do to take the danger out of these problems by diplomatic fiddles than they were ready to risk ships, troops and treasure on some quixotic and hazardous experiment in a course so doubtful (and possibly misbegotten) as that of protecting China. The Foreign Ministers who composed the League Council therefore agreed that the situation was far too dangerous for them to gamble by a concerted resort to armed intervention against one of the Great Powers. They used the customary expedient. They appointed that international Commission of Enquiry to which reference has already been made. It was presided over by an Englishman, Lord Lytton, who had been Governor of Bengal and was the grandson of the Victorian historical novelist, Bulwer Lytton.
The Japanese military and the Japanese civil service, although often at cross-purposes and mutually antagonistic, worked uneasily with the tentacles of the South Manchurian Railway which were everywhere. Together they were supreme in Manchukuo. The Japanese, though they had little racial feeling compared to Europeans, were very arrogant: peoples who were subject to them saw their follies, feared their excesses, but secretly tended to despise them. Many Japanese showed their worst qualities in the lands they ruled. In Japan itself there were people of intellectual and moral distinction: but the Empire had proved a catalyst, sifting out men of coarser fibre from the finer sorts.
There was so much to be done. Since its inception the South Manchurian Railway had constructed no fewer than twenty-five company towns, complete with district steam-heating schemes, together with scores of schools, colleges, technical institutes, a university, hospitals and a public health system second to none. By 1931, largely due to the enterprise of the SMR, there were 240,000 Japanese residents in Manchuria. Now ambitious efforts were rekindled in Japan to attract Japanese settlers from farming districts on the Japanese mainland. The cost of this programme was shared between the SMR and the Japanese and Manchukuoan Governments. The scheme was administered initially by the East Asian Industrial Development Company and then successively by the Manchurian Colonization Company and the Manchurian Colonial Development Company established specially for this grand purpose. The Kwantung Army drew up plans for settling five million colonists within twenty years, but between 1932, when the programme began, and 1937 fewer than 5,000 braved the hardships in the five isolated settlements chosen for the first experiment: fewer than 70 per cent of them overcame homesickness, endured the harsh climate and survived the fearful toll taken by infectious diseases and Manchurian bandits. It was a complicated scheme, however, and much progress was made. The infrastructure of training centres, land development, road construction, sanitation and hydro-electric power was ambitious in the extreme. By the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, more than 100,000 new Japanese settlers, including women and children, lived in some 200 agricultural communities scattered over the Manchurian hinterland. One unforeseen consequence of this rapid development was that a marked labour shortage resulted in the rural communities of Japan Proper. Had the twenty-year programme developed as originally planned, it has been estimated that it would have cost Japan and Manchukuo ¥10 billion in treasure to complete. Small wonder that the Japanese Ministry of Finance and the Manchurian authorities were reluctant to proceed.
Meanwhile, other Japanese came out to Manchukuo as managers or trained technologists. Many of them were prepared to spend the balance of their careers in the service of the new state. Less admirable were many of the floating population of leech-like personalities who came to get rich quick. These camp-followers were the worst exploiters. One way or another, by 1939, the total Japanese population of Manchukuo had climbed to 837,000.
The dross found its way into many of the agencies of Japan’s foreign ventures. Soon they began to make a reputation which was to be a lasting impediment to the further spread of their rule. There were complaints of arbitrary actions, arrests, executions. Notwithstanding pledges in 1932 by the Manchurian puppet régime and by the Japanese authorities in Tokyo promising to respect the Open Door principle, occidental investors and trading concerns found themselves tied down under masses of Japanese red tape and pettifoggery or were squeezed out altogether.
One Japanese publicist for the new régime wrote with greater candour than one might suppose he intended: ‘The Open Door, as a practical matter, can be enforced only where law and order are maintained by stable and honest government.’∗ Western diplomatic protests met with indifference and inactivity. Manchukuo became a closed market for Japanese manufactures. And so whereas at one time all of the S M R’s rolling stock had been American made, now the SMR relied upon its own workshops at Dairen, Mukden, Hsinking, Harbin and Tsitsihar to manufacture and repair the equipment it required. Meanwhile other branches of the S M R concentrated upon the creation of integrated traffic systems involving port development, inland waterways, road networks, even shipbuilding. The machinery of government was used to promote the interests of the SMR and fostered a multitude of subordinate economic enterprises. Working together, the Japanese and Manchurian authorities built up an impressive road system in a country that in 1932 was conspicuously lacking in motor transport. In the nine years between 1932 and the Pacific War, Manchukuo doubled its road mileage to 70,000 km. At the same time military and civil airfields were constructed throughout the country and regular airline services developed between all of its principal cities. Telecommunications developed with similar speed: the size of the telegraph network trebled in the six years between 1933 and 1939. All of this was achieved while other experts unified the currency, reorganized customs collection, reformed and centralized the internal revenue services, and modernized the banking system. Conservative monetary policies were instituted by the Government of Manchukuo acting in concert with gifted Japanese economists. It was an intrinsically competent and efficient system which they devised, far more equitable than that which it replaced, but it fell hard upon the entire population.
Above all, it depended upon continuing Japanese capital investment and purchasing power. Japan became increasingly dependent upon Manchuria for basic raw materials. Gold mines opened up. Forests covered 36 per cent of the country and the timber industry thrived as never before. New coal and iron ore finds all helped to buoy up Japan during a period of increasing adversity. Japanese investment mounted. It came to more than ¥4 billion between 1931 and 1940. After a time, surplus Japanese capital began to dry up as Japan became enmeshed in the China Incident and slowly drifted towards the Pacific War from which there would be no turning back. Inflation began to bite as the Government of Manchukuo became obliged to borrow in order to meet current expenditure. Nevertheless, inflation never approached the levels that it did in unoccupied China. Japanese investment in Manchukuo during the whole period between 1931 and 1945 has been estimated at no less than £9 billion – an astonishing figure. That quite transformed a country of which it truthfully had been said for centuries: ‘Manchuria produces two crops, soybeans and bandits.’∗
Japan created in Manchukuo a state welfare system of a type never before seen in East Asia. Nevertheless, there were huge social costs in producing the economic miracle of Manchukuo, costs which beggar any attempt to describe the depravity underlying official policy.
Throughout Manchuria, Inner Mongolia and North China, Japan used its political influence and financial muscle to further all kinds of economic activity, some very detrimental to the indigenous populations. In particular it fostered the opium trade.
Opium had first become an issue in East Asia at the beginning of the previous century. The British, in forcing the trade upon China, had sought to counter the fact that China bought too little from the West, and thereby caused an adverse balance of trade, by creating a new Chinese want, opium. It was grown in great quantities in India, and could easily be shipped to Canton. The Chinese Government protested, and pointed to its duty to protect the Chinese people from the effects of the drug. Two wars had to be fought to overcome its moral objections.
The subsequent history of opium contains a number of unexplained matters. Why did the country as a whole take to opium smoking? What were the effects of the drug upon people’s efficiency? Why was the habit, which had been so widespread a few years earlier, checked so completely and with such ease when China eventually had its communist revolution? In the 1930s this ultimate solution of the problem was still far off. Opium had long ceased to be an article of western import: it had become instead a major Chinese product, and though it was not legalized, it was consumed everywhere throughout East Asia. The Kuomintang régime in China and the Manchurian warlords in their domains to the north drew from its trade a revenue which was outside the ordinary state budget, which was unpublished, but which was the most important item in the financing of their respective armies. The Japanese systematically set about cornering this market.
The evidence must speak for itself. According to reports by United States customs officers, amply confirmed by Japanese and Chinese witnesses at the Tokyo Trial, narcotics abuse in Manchukuo was used to stabilize the national budget, support the Kwantung Army’s swollen establishment and maintain Maw and order’. It was an extraordinarily cynical process. The practice of opium smoking, previously encountered mainly among the business and professional classes, saw a meteoric rise. Whereas less than twenty opium dens operated in the Chinese quarter of Antung, for example, prior to the Mukden Incident no less than five hundred were in business within the Japanese Concession there. By July 1932 the number of these establishments in the Chinese city had increased to more than eighty while 684 were licensed in the Japanese Concession. Out of a population of 130,000, over 20,000 had become addicts, and with profits at more than 600 per cent, it was estimated that the revenue derived from this traffic was worth $6.48 million∗ that year for this one city alone. Even in the surrounding rural areas, the number of addicts rose to approximately 15 per cent of the population. Networks of Japanese and Korean houses of prostitution and bars of every description were augmented by retail opium shops, smoking dens, heroin dens, even pawn shops which exchanged opium for clothing and other personal property.
Opium, as it was usually taken in China and Manchuria, is a comparatively mild drug, and the Chinese addiction to it probably did them no great harm. A quite different effect, however, is produced by the derivatives of opium: heroin and morphine.
The Japanese set themselves to flood the provinces of North China and the lands beyond the Great Wall with heroin and morphine. Partly they did so because of the very high profits obtainable, partly they had in mind the destructive effects of these two drugs. Their use would corrupt the population, cause them to become apathetic, and weaken their will to resist.
One Japanese agency alone was discovered to be dealing with 200 1b of morphine a day in the early part of 1932. This explosive growth continued. The number of opium addicts in Antung and its environs doubled to 40,000, 25 per cent of the population, in the single year of 1933. Unofficial estimates suggested that $19 million was wasted on drugs in that one small locality in that year. Much of that was ‘illegal’ rather than licensed, yet the total sold by the state Opium Monopoly Bureau in its first year of operation amounted to $33 million, a mighty surplus over the $5 million in receipts estimated in the Manchukuo national budget for the fiscal year 1932–3. The scourge continued to grow. So did the population of Antung and similar areas. The number of addicts there increased to 340,000, a third of the total population, by December 1934.
Fanners were encouraged to grow opium as part of the Kwantung Army’s pacification programme in the countryside. While farmers who grew food crops were eligible for state loans of 5 cents an acre at 7 per cent interest per annum, those who grew poppies could borrow up to 33 cents an acre at 2.3 per cent interest. The poppy tax set at $1.66 to $2.32 in Chang Tso-lin’s day was reduced to 83 cents an acre in 1934. But even as the farmers stampeded to produce poppies, the state monopoly purchasing officials cut the producers’ profits so savagely each year that many of the farmers found themselves unable to repay their loans and so had their lands confiscated by the Japanese. Still, legal and illegal cultivation of poppies continued to spread as the years passed. Legal cultivation increased by 17 per cent from 133,333 acres in 1936 to 156,061 acres in the following year as demand continued to outstrip supply despite an officially admitted importation of a further 41,335 1b of opium into Manchukuo from the Korean Monopoly Bureau in 1936. Annual opium production in Korea was stepped up to meet that demand: in February 1937, the Director of the Korean Monopoly Bureau declared that it would increase from 57,870 lb to 82,670 lb per annum: 70 per cent of that would go to Manchukuo. Other imports came in from Turkey, Persia and elsewhere.
In mid-1937 the League of Nations Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs focused the world’s attention upon what was happening. As one speaker declared:
We should not be far short of the mark if we said that 90 per cent of all the illicit white drugs of the world are of Japanese origin, manufactured in the Japanese Concession of Tientsin, around Tientsin, in or around Dairen or in other cities of Manchuria, Jehol and China, and this always by Japanese or under Japanese supervision.∗
For a time the press was full of stories of the trade, of the protection illegally given the traders by the Japanese Army and Navy, and of the unfortunate inhabitants reduced to fawning submission to morphine and its paraphernalia. The world, startled by Japanese cynicism, reacted more deeply against it than Japan perhaps foresaw. The West, which had the opium wars on its conscience, was more scandalized by the Japanese re-enacting the events of the buried past than prepared to hail them as brothers in crime.
By the end of the 1937 season the Japanese were driven to promise reforms. They were heartless, empty promises. The harvest in Manchukuo alone that year amounted to a staggering 2,800,000 lb of raw opium. In 1937 the state monopoly budgeted $29,025,000 for the purchase of raw opium and recorded sales of $47,850,000. In 1938 it authorized an expenditure of $32,653,000 on raw opium and received $71,045,200 in revenue. By 1939 the cost rose to $43,470,000 and sales reached $90,908,400. The scope for racketeering in such a climate was virtually unlimited. This was an entirely new instrument of Total War, and it set the pattern for Japanese occupation forces elsewhere. Most disturbing of all, however, is the well-documented fact that this policy was approved and promoted not only by the Kwantung Army, by the Japanese Army General Staff and by the Japanese War Ministry but by the Japanese Cabinet as well.
Meanwhile, a handful of rogue Japanese industrialists began to pour capital into the exploitation of huge, newly discovered coal and iron ore reserves and then into prodigiously profitable investment in virtually monopolistic enterprises, keenly monitored and sheltered by the Kwantung Army, such as Ayukawa Gisuke’s Nihon Sangyō Company (better known as Nissan) and the great Manchurian Heavy Industries Company which he founded in 1937. The latter became all-powerful within its sphere of activities, hiving off interests which had formerly been the exclusive preserve of the far more paternalistic SMR. All of this greatly worried many of the giant financial and industrial combines on the Japanese mainland, such as the colossal family firms of Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, who not only showed a marked reluctance to invest in Manchuria but feared the emergence of potential competitors and tried in vain to persuade successive Japanese Governments to seek the orderly development of a purely complementary Manchurian economy under totally civilian direction.
The close collaboration between Japan and Manchuria, without doubt oppressive to its opponents, was welcomed in many quarters as an alternative to political disorder and economic instability. There had been an amazing drive towards modernization affecting one of the most backward frontiers on earth. The huge importation of Japanese capital and entrepreneurs had made it possible. The thousands of Japanese ‘advisers’ who forced themselves into every nook and cranny of the land guaranteed that there could be no resistance. These developments and the cost of the expanded military appropriations necessary to underwrite the whole endeavour increased the burden of defence expenditure to which the Japanese nation was already committed in the naval rearmament programme which successive Japanese Governments all regarded as an essential defence requirement in an uncertain world. The inevitable result of all of these commitments was to force the Japanese Government and taxpayer into an economy geared for war production. This in turn led Japan to reconsider its trading relationship with the rest of the world. Non-essential trade was sharply curtailed and strong preference for home-produced goods instead of the allure of foreign manufactures took root in the hearts of Japanese consumers and traders: it has remained a marked characteristic of Japanese society to the present day.
These new economic practices rapidly improved Japan’s balance of payments notwithstanding the depths of the great depression in the world at large. By as early as 1933 Japanese expenditure on armaments produced a boom economy in which most Japanese rejoiced. Japanese exports cut through the international economic doldrums and by 1936 had surpassed the record levels of 1929 by 60 per cent. Japan soon dominated the world market in cheap textiles of good quality, undercutting not only the recovery and historical ascendency of Britain’s Lancashire cotton mills but also the emergent textile industrial exports of India which on the eve of the depression had risen to prominence in the market stalls of Africa, Asia and South America.
The true cost of Japan’s military adventures on the Asiatic mainland, however, worried Japanese economists from the beginning. As a number of them foresaw, Japan found itself unable to escape a progressive dependence not merely upon the territories which it had conquered but also upon war materials imported from the United States. As imports of non-essential goods declined, strategically important commodities became an increasingly high percentage of Japanese imports. They were also politically sensitive. For the time being, this proved to be little problem. Isolationist sentiment in the United States counteracted the influence of those Americans who sought to intervene in the relations between Japan and her continental neighbours. The United States Secretary of State’s proclamation of the ‘Stimson Doctrine’ of ‘non-recognition’ of territorial changes achieved by the use of force failed to move that pragmatic economist President Herbert Hoover during the nightmare of the great depression, and after 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt occupied the White House, the attention of the United States administration was at the very least distracted by events in Europe, by his grand strategy aimed at improving relations with Latin America, and by efforts to effect an economic and political transformation within the United States itself. The United States had its finger on the jugular vein of Japanese military expansion so long as Japan had no other source for vital strategical commodities. Given the disparity in economic and material resources of the Japanese Empire compared with those of the United States, the Japanese Army appreciated that means should be sought to neutralize or to woo the United States away from its moral support for the Kuomintang. Since it appeared highly improbable that Japanese reassurances or efforts to appease the Americans would suffice so long as Japanese ambitions on the continent were unfulfilled, diplomatic and even military links with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy became increasingly attractive means of holding off the threat of intervention by the Anglo-Saxon Powers.
A particularly nauseating sanctimoniousness did arise in certain American and European political circles. Stripped to essentials, the cry was in support of ‘Collective Security and the League’. It depended upon a willingness by powerful states to hazard their own forces in support of economic and diplomatic pressure upon aggressor states. However, the human, material and financial costs of any such actions inherently bite back hardest at those Powers whose unswerving devotion to the cause is essential if success is to be achieved. Selflessness of that kind, always a rare commodity, generally disappears from the scene when the aggressor is a first-class Power and the issues are ‘exceedingly complicated’ – as they plainly were in this case.
A policy of forceful intervention commanded too little support to become a realizable possibility. The United Kingdom alone among members of the League of Nations possessed in the Royal Navy the means to enforce whatever sanctions might have been instituted, and there were good reasons to doubt suggestions by the American Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, that the United States stood ready to share the burden of any concerted sanctions to force Japan out of Manchuria. How would such sanctions be enforced? In this instance they could be made effective only by interposing naval forces between Japan and the Asian mainland or between Japan and her outside sources of supplies. What would any self-respecting nation do to defend itself against the first (or only) ships that might be mustered against it? The choice for such a nation was stark. It could lie low and wait for the tempest to subside, leaving the supporters of ‘Collective Security’ with egg on their faces and with no stomach for another such venture if further steps should be taken by the aggressor following the inevitable disbanding of such an expensive naval operation. Alternatively, it could sink or damage the interfering vessels, at the besieged nation’s selected moment, close to that nation’s own repair and supply depots, and far – very far – from the white knights’ bases.
Thus it was that British public and official opinion about the Manchurian Incident mattered more than the views of any other Third Power including the United States. The Manchester Guardian alone among prominent British newspapers argued that Japanese complaints in Manchuria were entirely unjustified. Most of the press held the contrary view, believing that the Japanese had a strong case against the Chinese. Wags among old China hands declared that the only thing worse than a Japanese victory would be a Chinese victory. Such attitudes remained prevalent throughout the crisis and were not confined to conservative press and political circles. The former Liberal Foreign Secretary Lord Grey, for instance, told an audience at the Central Hall, Westminster, on 11 December 1931, ‘Japan had a strong case in Manchuria, where her interests were being threatened by lawlessness, and if Japan had submitted her case to the signatories of the Covenant and the Pact [of Paris], it would have been the business of those signatories to see how the remedy could be applied.’∗ Even Lord Lytton long shared the same view, at least until February 1933. He then told an audience in Manchester, ‘Let me say to the partisans of China that the case of Japan vis-à-vis the League may be a weak one, but the case of Japan vis-à-vis China is a strong one.’ He developed this theme in an interview with the Daily Herald a few days later: ‘Japan has a case. She has a very strong case on merits. But she has no case at all for the action she has taken.’ While the Pact of Paris may have been violated, as all conceded, that was not yet regarded as tantamount to law-breaking. More importantly, it was far from clear that Japanese actions were in breach of the Covenant of the League of Nations. The Japanese Government had been trying for months to gain redress for its grievances from the Chinese central Government at Nanking and had shown great patience in the face of long-continued provocation. The Daily Telegraph in London, for one, suggested in October 1931 that ‘The right of a government to protect its interests against barbarism and anarchy is a well-recognized one, and if Japan is studious to keep within it, her position is a strong one.’
Thus when the League of Nations Council demanded the total withdrawal of all Japanese troops as a precondition to negotiations for the settlement of the dispute, many people in Britain – and virtually everyone in Japan – felt that this was to ignore reality and to prejudge the Japanese case. Moreover, when the League Council decided to affix a deadline for that withdrawal, that was seen – quite rightly – as a new obstacle to the resolution of the dispute, and as an insufferable slap in the face for the Japanese, who were already exceedingly resentful and irritated by the double standards of certain Western Powers. Mindful of the history of the area, this reaction by the Japanese was entirely appropriate. In a sense, therefore, League interference actually helped deliver the Japanese nation into the hands of hotheads who had no time or thoughts save for action.
The Army’s Manchurian adventure proved far from disappointing. The Japanese, despite their excesses, were slow to abandon the hope of sincere or large-scale cooperation with the Chinese. The Japanese embraced the idea of Sino-Japanese cooperation with such fervour that it seemed only logical to crush the influence of those who opposed it. The driving spirits of the Kwantung Army and kindred forces within the Army General Staff and War Ministry, far from meditating upon means of ending Japanese control over Manchuria, became increasingly interested in the provinces of China itself south of the Wall, at least in the provinces of the northern half of the country. The grass may not have seemed greener in that valley than it had turned out to be north of the Wall, but it was nevertheless green. It became fashionable in Japan for ambitious young officers to seek service in the Kwantung Army. Others of the same stamp chose to seek their future in the much smaller China Garrison Army and to build up their military experience while acquiring detailed local knowledge from the vantage points of places such as Peking, Tientsin and Shanghai, which were certain to acquire a critical importance if relations between the Japanese Empire and China were to degenerate into Total War. The hopes of these military adventurers grew, and it was in the nature of things that they were not deterred by the unfortunate end to which some of their colleagues came simply because the Chinese had grown anxious about the Japanese Army’s secret service.
While the Lytton Commission was preparing its report, the crisis took a new turn. The shock to China had been deeper, spread quicker and produced more results than many in Japan had expected. Events passed out of control. A commotion among the Chinese people, not any specific action by the Chinese Government, was the unexpected factor. A boycott of Japanese goods took place, which was partly spontaneous, partly organized by Chinese secret societies, and fully exploited by the competing political activists of rival Kuomintang and communist factions. Violence broke out in Shanghai as a result of the boycott and in consequence of street demonstrations that grew out of a curious mésalliance between religious extremists belonging to the Japanese Nichi-ren Buddhist sect and a few Kwantung Army agents provocateurs sent there to distract attention from events in Manchuria. Large-scale riots soon developed. Terror was met by counter-terror.
All of this provoked Japan to land a token force of about 700 marines on 28 January 1932 with the task of doing no more than protect the city’s 30,000 Japanese residents and the large commercial stake which they had built there over the decades. They met with something like the resistance of a Popular Front. Panic spread through the Japanese community. The Japanese Minister in China was Shigemitsu Mamoru. In all but name he was Ambassador: as befitted China’s third-rate status in the international world, few countries dignified their chief representatives in China with the rank of Ambassador, and Japan was no exception to this practice. Shigemitsu came to the conclusion that the only way to save Japanese residents and the beleaguered marines from annihilation from the now frenzied mobs was to request his Government to call up large-scale reinforcements. Even the post-war Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal absolved him of any guilt for his part in the affair. The Japanese Cabinet agreed with Shigemitsu’s assessment, and a marine brigade of 10,000 men hurriedly embarked the next day on a squadron of fast destroyers which set sail from Japan under the command of Vice-Admiral Nomura Kichisa-burō, a man later fated to serve briefly as Foreign Minister of Japan in the critical months following the outbreak of the European War in 1939, later still as Japan’s forlorn Ambassador to the United States between November 1940 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The marine reinforcements rapidly found themselves unable to cope with the situation despite gunnery support at point-blank range from Japanese warships which had steamed up the Wangpoo from the Yangtze fifteen miles downstream. Lieutenant-General Ueda Kenkichi, until recently Commander of the China Garrison Army maintained by Japan in North China in conformity with the old ‘Unequal Treaties’, was ordered by the Army to proceed from Japan with the Ninth Infantry Division to rescue the marines. Unexpectedly, even Ueda’s division proved unable to tip the balance. Two more divisions had to be sent from Japan, this time under the overall military command of ex-War Minister General Shirakawa Yoshinori.
The Chinese ‘defence’ of Shanghai, improvised on the spur of the moment, was impressive. This was one of the first demonstrations in modern times of which the world took effective notice, that the Chinese, or some of them, were a martial people. Hitherto the Chinese had fought their wars by often incompetent professional armies or under bandit chieftains, operating from books of rules which, though they might give occasional apt counsel as they had done on the Nonni River, were hopelessly out-of-date. The people, who were sceptics by tradition, expressed their contempt for all things military. But in this, as in so much else, China was changing, and the Powers in contact with it grudgingly took notice of the fact.
The resistance was at first hampered by the ambivalent, cautious, lukewarm attitude of the Chinese Government. Perhaps by accident, there happened to be garrisoned, on the outskirts of Shanghai, a rather wayward left-wing unit of the Chinese Army known as the Nineteenth Route Army. This force was commanded by Tsai Ting-kan, an ingenuous, simple-minded man who had breathed in the simple slogans of the nationalists (and also, it appeared, of the communists). This officer, whose military training had been elementary, and who had received no indoctrination politically, and his troops, simple peasants with the most ordinary equipment, stiffened the resistance of the rest of the Chinese. As two more Chinese divisions, the ‘China Bodyguard Army, joined the struggle for control of Shanghai, the significance of the fighting increased. Large parts of the International Settlement were destroyed and the Chinese suburbs beyond were ravaged.
It must be stressed that the initial Japanese military aims were modest, and operations in Shanghai were conducted in the early stages with relative self-restraint. Japan was doing no more than acting fully in conformity with the old extra-territorial rights which Japan as well as the British Empire, France, Italy and the United States possessed in the International Settlement. In the beginning, Admiral Nomura even anticipated that a restoration of orderly conditions in Shanghai by his marines would be welcomed by the other international contingents in the city: the British had sent in their own troops to quell similar disturbances as recently as 1926. Whatever the moral issues underlying the whole affair, and notwithstanding the activities of provocateurs on both sides, there was certainly no intention on the part either of the Japanese Government or of the Army General Staff to ‘punish China’. Except within the headquarters of the Kwantung Army, the issue was seen in Japanese high circles as entirely one of ‘self-defence’. As the struggle continued, however, each side inflicted hideous atrocities upon their enemies. Japanese conduct especially became remarkable for its extreme cruelty. The dispassionate historian must reject the judgement of the Tokyo Tribunal ‘that the real purpose of the Japanese attack was to alarm the Chinese by indication of what would follow if their attitude toward Japan continued, and thus break down resistance to future operations. The Incident was part of the general plan.’∗ It is nevertheless indisputably correct that:
The needless bombing of Chapei [a squalid Chinese suburb tucked in a corner between the western edge of the International Settlement and the northern bounds of the separate French Concession], the ruthless bombardment by naval vessels, and the massacre of the helpless Chinese farmers whose bodies were later found with their hands tied behind their backs, are examples of the method of warfare waged at Shanghai.∗
The fighting lasted until 3 March when the Japanese at last broke through to the open country beyond the city. The confidence of the Japanese military received a setback from the unexpected resistance, and from the international stir which the crisis had provoked. The good offices of the United States, Britain, France, Italy and officials of the League of Nations helped to effect an armistice. Chief credit for the settlement, however, properly belongs to the British Minister, Sir Miles Lampson, and to Minister Shigemitsu, the very man who had called for the marines at the end of January. It was he who persuaded the Japanese Commander-in-Chief at Shanghai, General Shirakawa, to order a ceasefire on 3 March, on the very eve of a meeting by the General Assembly of the League of Nations which was due to consider the crisis. Negotiations to achieve a lasting peace were fraught with difficulties, but the final breakthrough sprang from the personal courage of Shigemitsu. As he and other Japanese dignitaries stood on a reviewing stand at a parade to mark the Emperor’s birthday on 29 April, a Korean nationalist threw a bomb which killed General Shirakawa, tore off part of General Ueda’s foot, blinded Admiral Nomura in one eye, and killed the chairman of the local Japanese residents’ association. Shigemitsu, too, was caught in the blast but refused to undergo life-saving surgery until a peace agreement was reached on 5 May. His own account of what happened was confirmed after the war by western diplomats and foreign correspondents who rallied to Shigemitsu’s defence during the Tokyo Trial proceedings:
The text of the agreement having been drawn up at the British Consulate-General, the scene of the negotiations, the document was brought round to my bed in the hospital, where, racked with pain and in danger of my life, I managed to complete the numerous signatures required. I said then to Chang the Chinese Secretary: ‘Relations between Japan and China must now enter a state of amity. I pray that this document may be the starting-point of future good relations between our two countries.’ At that moment it was a question whether my life could be saved. The Chinese Secretary returned to the council chamber and in impressive tones disclosed my message. When all the signatures were completed, the operating table was wheeled in and one leg was amputated.
Peace having been restored, the Japanese forces were withdrawn from the Shanghai area and conditions returned to normal.†
In fact, of course, conditions did not quite return to normal. Chinese morale everywhere was recharged by the stout resistance which their compatriots at Shanghai had maintained against crack Japanese troops for more than six weeks. It did not affect the outcome there or anywhere, but it gave the Chinese hope and gladdened the hearts of their friends.
Finally, the League of Nations Commission of Enquiry made known its findings, and as the British historian of Japan, Richard Storry, later remarked, these ‘included a sympathetic explanation of Japanese grievances that was more compelling than anything put out by Tokyo’.∗ The Report by Lord Lytton’s Commission was a thoughtful document. It cautioned that ‘[the] issues involved in this conflict are not as simple as they are often represented to be. They are, on the contrary, exceedingly complicated, and only an intimate knowledge of all the facts, as well as of their historical background, should entitle anyone to express a definite opinion upon them.’† After such a shot across the bows of public opinion, it is tempting to alter course, or heave to, for a discourse on the minutiae of the Japanese, Manchurian and Chinese claims and counter-claims. Happily, however, we need not dwell on the rights and wrongs that bemused contemporary observers were obliged to consider. It is sufficient to note that as a case study in international politics and in the misconduct of civil/military affairs, the period encompassing the Manchurian Incident and the foundation of Manchukuo is so rich, fascinating and, indeed, thought-provoking that we must regret the usual knee-jerk conclusion that Japan and its leadership were intent from the beginning upon nothing less than the complete subjugation of Manchuria and its incorporation into the Japanese Empire with as little fuss as possible. This is belied by the cracks that the crisis produced within the Japanese Government and its armed forces. It was understood, as articulated in the words of the Report of the League of Nations Assembly, adopted on 24 February 1933 (a month after Hitler’s rise to power), that ‘Past experience shows that those who control Manchuria exercise a considerable influence on the affairs of the rest of China – at least of North China – and possess unquestionable strategic and political advantages. To cut off these provinces from the rest of China cannot but create a serious irredentist problem likely to endanger peace.’‡ Nevertheless, the habit of disparaging the military prowess of all oriental races died hard. From a sociological as well as from a military point of view, the most curious fact remains that western observers generally failed to appreciate the magnitude of Japan’s feats of arms. There was still an inclination in many quarters to regard the Japanese as only marginally more civilized than the Chinese.
The Lytton Commission did not scruple to say that Japan had been an aggressor, though in polite and reasoned language, and though it held that China had itself been provocative, and was therefore in part guilty. The Report was accepted by the League Council by a vote of forty-two to one, unanimously but for the dissenting voice of Japan. It was too much for Japan to swallow. It may be uncharitable if not inaccurate to say that Japan objected to China, the parvenu, being treated as equal with Japan, which thought of itself as one of the established imperialist Powers of the world. Nevertheless, its reply was to resign from the League of Nations in March 1933.
The final scene was enacted at Geneva by the Japanese Ambassador, Matsuoka Yosuke, a graduate of the University of Oregon, who was later to serve as President of the South Manchurian Railway between 1935 and 1939 and would thereafter reappear on the international stage as Foreign Minister of Japan. The drama was described as follows in The Times:
Mr Matsuoka announced immediately after the vote that his Government found themselves compelled to conclude that Japan and the other members of the League entertained different views of the manner to achieve peace in the Far East, and were obliged to feel that they had now reached the limit of their endeavours to cooperate with the League with regard to Sino-Japanese differences. The Japanese then walked out in a body. They maintained the self-possession of their race to the last, but many of them are known to have been cleft in their emotions.
Their departure was seen with ruffled feelings by some of the officials of the League of Nations, who, while they recognized that Japan was aggressive, felt themselves obliged to state that, on the various international committees and agencies which the League promoted, Japan had been a most valuable member. The hearts of some of them were heavy at what they felt had been the driving out of Japan from associating with enlightened governments, and at the increased opportunity which this gave to all the darker forces at work in Japan.
The Manchurian Incident, or rather the failure of the League of Nations to find an effective means of enforcing the moral precepts professed by the majority of states, seriously handicapped the League’s efforts to resolve subsequent international disputes elsewhere. No attempt was made by the League Council to organize sanctions against Japan, although Japan’s actions did not technically relieve it of the threat: but it is obvious that the Powers snatched at excuses eagerly. Also, by withdrawing from the comity of nations, Japan relieved the League of the effort to regulate internationally the privileged position of Japan in Manchuria, which the Lytton Commission had agreed that it should have. In fact, there was precious little that the League or any of its member states could have done to wrest the initiative from the hands of the Kwantung Army. Any economic, military or naval demonstration in support of China would only have undermined still further the efforts of moderate Japanese statesmen to bring the Japanese militarist factions under control. Moreover, China’s domestic upheavals and disregard for the ‘extra-territorial’ rights of Western Powers had aroused considerable apprehensions among many foreign governments in the years preceding the Manchurian Incident. Small wonder, then, that a fatal inertia overcame international outrage particularly in those countries where the initial response of public opinion had been favourable to Japan, especially since Japan at first did not seem intent upon displacing western investment and commercial interests whether in North China or Manchuria. The protection of that investment and those interests had always been a matter of great concern to western governments and was one of the principal objects of their policies towards China and Japan. Now those governments perceived that a major change was taking place in the relations between Japan and the outer world. It was not so much a change in Japanese aims as in the preparedness of the Japanese to defy western opinion in seeking the furtherance of those aims. And so while the personal integrity of Japanese diplomats abroad remained in high esteem, the opinion spread throughout the democratic nations of the world that the Japanese Government was itself out of control or that it was content to carry out its true predatory plans behind honourable professions which it intended to breach. European dictatorships, by and large little involved in the East Asian crisis, nevertheless drew the lesson that the use of force could pay considerable dividends for ‘have not’ nations who possessed the will to grasp the meat they craved.
Robert Osgood, in a book entitled Problems of Modern Strategy, defined Limited War as a conflict ‘fought for ends far short of the complete subordination of one state’s will to another’s and by means involving far less than the total military resources of the belligerents, leaving the civilian life and the armed forces of the belligerents largely intact and leading to a bargained determination’.∗ Berenice Carroll, another student of the subject, observed that a war regarded by the aggressor as a limited campaign may seem to be a Total War to the power upon whose soil it is waged, especially if the defending power succumbs to the invading forces.∗ Still another expert, Arthur Marwick, suggests four tests by which Total War may be identified: it must involve whole populations; the organization of the home front is as critical an influence as that of the military front; it shall mobilize all of the resources of science, technology and propaganda available to each side, and it shall be an ‘all out’ and ‘all-embracing’ struggle.† Looking back over the development of the Manchurian Incident and its aftermath, it becomes evident that these events involved the whole populations of Manchuria and Japan. Japan as well as Manchuria was thrown into immense upheaval. This has been underappreciated in most western historical accounts of the Greater East Asia or Pacific War, yet it is essential to grasp the fact that the Manchurian Incident marked not simply a military signpost pointing to a providential turn of fortune in a backwater territory encountered along Japan’s road to Hiroshima. It was that but more. It changed the political and social geography of both countries, creating a political and economic breakwater in the historical evolution of East Asia which only the unprecedented tide of changes endured in 1945 would sweep away. Japanese historians have long recognized this. So should we. As Kipling reminds us:
The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes;
The butterfly upon the road
Preaches contentment to that toad.‡
The Manchurian Incident and the transformation of Manchukuo into an industrial and colonial powerhouse had no real precedent in contemporary history. This experiment in colonial government by proxy deeply affected the Japanese, and it is instructive to link events there first with the China Incident and afterwards with the conduct and expectations of Japanese forces during the Pacific War. The Japanese were conscious of the fact that the Second World War, if it came, would be a Total War. They were keenly aware of their industrial and material shortcomings in comparison to the Western Powers. The Japanese counterpart of the ‘Yellow Peril’ was a nightmare in which the barbarian western hordes, possessed of unlimited money and manpower, would inexorably sweep across Asia and the Pacific. The Japanese knew that they must rely upon their own mental fortitude, physical self-sacrifice and traditional values embodied in their ‘national polity’ to escape defeat (indeed, this helps us to explain the tenacity of Japanese resistance – and suicides – during the war). For many decades there had been a wide measure of agreement, one certainly not confined to political extremists, that in the event of hostilities with any Third Power, it would be vital to harness all of the energies of Manchuria as well as of the Japanese Empire.
In Manchukuo the Japanese developed the first economy anywhere since the end of the First World War to be mobilized and dedicated to Total War. By the same token, the scale of Japan’s achievements in Manchuria went largely unnoticed abroad. The partnership, whatever its strains (and they were considerable), between the Kwantung Army and the South Manchurian Railway and its Research Department, technical institutes and training establishments, was hugely important in setting a pattern for the future both in Japan Proper and throughout Greater East Asia. Like some latter-day East India Company, the SMR possessed incalculable prestige and not inconsiderable influence. Yet there were other forces at work as well. It was a time of five-year plans and huge monopolistic enterprises, state-controlled in theory but run by highly entrepreneurial venture capitalists. One can find similar partnerships and attendant strains manifest in the South Seas Mandated Islands, in Japanese-occupied territories everywhere, in the Asian Development Board’s activities in China and beyond, in the evolving relationship between the zaibatsu and the Japanese political parties, and in the emergence of what is often regarded as a kind of totalitarian, non-party police state (in imitation, so it is said, of European fascist systems). It is true that many Japanese felt attracted by foreign political systems – although whether by democratic or totalitarian solutions depended upon the taste of the individual. Yet to dismiss the Japanese as imitators is to underrate the far greater importance of Japan’s own creativity and dynamism. Overriding all calculation, however, was a sense that the modern history of Japan inspired faith that somehow the Japanese would muddle through, and that their cause was just.