Japanese invasion of Manchuria

• 1. Introduction

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  On the night of the 18th of September 1931, a bomb was placed near the tracks of the South Manchuria Railway outside Mukden. The explosion was small enough to cause no real damage. Within fifteen hours, the Japanese army controlled every major military installation in and around the city. The question is not just how a staged detonation became a war. The question is how a small act of deliberate deception by a handful of officers pulled an empire, a continent, and eventually the entire international order into a crisis that no one was fully able to stop.

• 2. The Staged Spark

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  Kwantung Army Colonel Seishirō Itagaki and Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara were the architects of the deception. Acting in the spirit of a Japanese concept called gekokujō, meaning the low overturns the high, they devised a scheme to force Japan's hand by manufacturing a pretext for invasion. Captain Imada Shintaro of the Army Special Service Agency was likely the man who placed the explosive near the railway tracks at Mukden.

  Rumors of a coming Manchurian expedition had circulated in August and early September 1931, with the civilian government repeatedly questioned about whether war was imminent. The operation had originally been planned for the 28th of August, but was brought forward. At around 10:20 pm on September 18, the charge was detonated. Before the night ended, fighting between Japanese railway guards and Chinese soldiers at a nearby barracks had begun. The pretext had worked.

  The Wanpaoshan Incident in July 1931 had already set the tone. Near Changchun, a dispute between Korean farmers and Chinese landowners over an irrigation project had escalated into violence, and Japanese extremists had seized on it to inflame anti-Chinese sentiment, even though no one had been killed or seriously wounded. Each small provocation was another layer of groundwork laid before the Mukden bomb was ever placed.

• 3. Insubordination as Strategy

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  Japanese Imperial General Headquarters had decided to localize the Mukden incident, communicating that policy to the Kwantung Army command on September 18. Kwantung Army commander-in-chief General Shigeru Honjō ignored it. Instead he ordered his forces to expand operations all along the South Manchuria Railway.

  By the end of September 19 alone, Japanese forces occupied Yingkou, Liaoyang, Shenyang, Fushun, Dandong, Siping, and Changchun. On September 21, Jilin City fell. By the 26th of September, the Governor of Kirin, Zhang Zuoxiang, had been deposed. A new administration friendly to Japan was installed with Xi Qia as acting chairman, allowing Japanese forces to enter Kirin city without bloodshed.

  Tokyo was shocked. The civilian government found itself paralyzed by a constitutional arrangement in which Army and Navy ministers were required for any cabinet to exist. Without their support, governments collapsed. Feeling it had no leverage, Tokyo sent three more infantry divisions into Manchuria, beginning with the 14th Mixed Brigade of the IJA 7th Division. The army had effectively taken foreign policy out of civilian hands, and the government followed where the army led.

• 4. Resistance and Its Limits

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  General Ma Zhanshan, the acting governor of Heilongjiang province and a Muslim commander, chose to disobey the Kuomintang government's explicit ban on further resistance to the Japanese. When a Japanese repair party advanced on the Nen River Bridge in early November under armed escort, Ma's troops fought back. He failed to hold the bridge, but the stand at Nenjiang Bridge was widely reported in the Chinese and international press, making Ma a national hero and inspiring more volunteers to join Anti-Japanese Volunteer Armies.

  On the 15th of November 1931, despite having lost more than 400 men killed and 300 wounded since the 5th of November, Ma declined a Japanese ultimatum to surrender Qiqihar. Two days later, in subzero weather, 3,500 Japanese troops under Jirō Tamon attacked. Ma was forced out of the city by the 19th of November.

  The last major Chinese regular force in northern Manchuria was commanded by General Ding Chao, who defended Harbin successfully until the arrival of the Japanese 2nd Division under Tamon. Japanese forces took Harbin on the 4th of February 1932. On the 27th of February, Ding offered to cease hostilities, ending official Chinese resistance. Guerrilla and irregular combat continued for many years as Japan worked to pacify the region, but organized military opposition to the occupation was finished.

• 5. War Fever at Home

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  American historian Louise Young described Japan between September 1931 and the spring of 1933 as gripped by what she called "war fever." Manchuria was framed as an economic lifeline, a region rich in natural resources that could rescue Japan from the chronic depression it had endured for three years. By the end of the 1920s, 39.4 percent of all colonial financial investments had flowed into Manchuria, and the public understood why it mattered.

  Censorship in Japan in 1931 was not yet the tight apparatus it would later become. The liberal journal Kaizō published a direct critique in its November 1931 edition, with journalist Gotō Shinobu accusing the Kwantung Army of a "two-fold coup d'état" against both Tokyo and the Chinese government. But mainstream papers like the Asahi found that anti-war editorial positions hurt sales, and shifted to a militaristic stance to increase circulation.

  Japan's most celebrated pacifist, the poet Akiko Yosano, had caused a sensation in 1904 with her anti-war poem "Brother Do Not Give Your Life," addressed to her brother in the Imperial Army and calling the war with Russia stupid and senseless. By 1932, even she had succumbed to the atmosphere. That year she wrote a poem praising bushidō, urging the Kwantung Army to "smash the sissified dreams of compromise" and declaring that dying for the Emperor in battle was the "purest" act a Japanese man could perform. The Japanese Communist Party denounced the invasion in the Red Flag and launched an anti-war campaign, but the effort met with little success. JCP leader Nosaka Sanzo delivered a speech in Moscow in 1933, calling on the Japanese people to rise up against the government.

• 6. The League of Nations Fails

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  The invasion attracted significant international attention from the beginning. The League of Nations dispatched a commission headed by British politician Victor Bulwer-Lytton to evaluate the situation on the ground. The Lytton Commission delivered its findings in October 1932. It acknowledged that China had to some extent provoked Japan and that Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria was not absolute, but it still recommended that Manchukuo not be recognized and that Manchuria be returned to Chinese sovereignty.

  Japan treated the report as an unacceptable rebuke and withdrew from the League of Nations entirely. The episode accelerated the decline of an organization already losing credibility. Critics of the League had long argued that it would be powerless against a determined major power, and the Manchurian Crisis proved them right.

  Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini both drew conclusions from what they observed. Italy moved against Abyssinia in 1935-37; Germany moved against Czechoslovakia in 1938-39 and Poland in 1939. The occupation of Manchuria lasted until mid-August 1945, when the Soviet Union and Mongolia launched the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation. It was that onslaught, not any action by the League, that finally ended the fourteen-year rule of the puppet state of Manchukuo.