The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, 1931-33

Sandra Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134532032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios regionales

This book explores the reactions to the Manchurian crisis of different sections of the state, and of a number of different groups in Japanese society, particularly rural groups, women's organizations and business associations. It thus seeks to avoid a generalized account of public relations to the military and diplomatic events of the early 1930s, offering instead a nuanced account of the shifts in public and popular opinion in this crucial period.

Part I
Managing the crisis

At home and abroad

1 The Manchurian crisis, 1931–33

The explosion on the South Manchurian Railway on 18 September 1931 was undeniably the starting-point for a new stage in relations between Japan and Manchuria. Equally, however, it takes its place in the longer history of Sino-Japanese tension in the region. This chapter outlines the context within which the Manchurian Incident occurred, before proceeding to an overview of its consequences and reactions to it both within Japan and internationally.

Japanese interests in Manchuria

Agreements imposed upon Russia in 1905 and China in 1915 had ceded to Japan substantial control of Manchuria, or the three north-eastern provinces of China: Liaoning (formerly Fengtien), Kirin and Heilungkiang, which together constitute an area roughly equal to that of France and Germany combined.¹ Most importantly, in 1905, after defeating Russia in war, Japan gained a rail network in southern Manchuria and the right to station troops to consolidate and protect Japanese interests in the region, including the railway. The military force sent to Manchuria, which came to be known as the Kwantung Army, remained there until 1945,² operating in conjunction with the Kwantung Government administration, which had been set up by the Japanese after the Russo–Japanese War to police the railway lines and to take responsibility for the administration of the territory in the southern tip of Manchuria, formerly known as Liaotung, which was now to be leased by Japan.

In 1906, the semi-governmental South Manchurian Railway Company was established by Japan with a capitalisation of 200 million yen. Important Japanese political leaders participated in the planning of the company, which became Japan’s largest firm and ‘the economic spine of Manchuria’.³ While maintaining the appearance of an independent private corporation, it also acted as an instrument of Japanese political power.⁴ Thus the South Manchurian Railway Company, like the East India Company before it, represented an unusual fusion of political, military and business interests. The Company controlled not only 700 miles of railway, but also the great majority of all Japanese economic activity in Manchuria, including mining, industry, commerce, power supply, foreign trade and shipping. It claimed almost exclusive authority in the towns and cities that grew up along the railways, of which there were more than a hundred in 1931. The company also acquired other lands outside these towns, including significant deposits of coal and iron at Fushun and Anshan, and various port and harbour works. Moreover, the railway zone itself traversed the most fertile land in Manchuria.

The agricultural importance of the region for both China and Japan was enormous. The soya bean, Manchuria’s major crop, was exported to Japan for fertiliser and fodder, and to Europe as raw material for manufacturing vegetable fats and oils, used for lighting as well as food. By 1927 nearly half the world’s supply of soya was coming from Manchuria, which also accounted for a high proportion of China’s total coal and iron output and of its foreign trade.⁵ By the 1920s the railway and its supporting industries had become the symbol of the Japanese presence in Manchuria, and the South Manchurian Railway Company’s interests were so large that they ‘greatly limit[ed] and condition[ed] successive Chinese administrations’ in the region.⁶ The company’s assets exceeded 1 billion yen by 1930.⁷ The controller and beneficiary of most of this development was of course Japan, not China. By the 1920s, it was an established canon throughout decision-making circles in Tokyo that Manchuria was vital to Japan, for strategic as well as economic reasons, and that the Japanese had inviolable rights in Manchuria which had been legitimately won by treaty. A few independent voices warned against this view, as we shall see in later chapters, but they were a distinct minority.

Some within the Japanese army, on the other hand, had long maintained that only direct control of Manchuria was sufficient for Japan’s needs. The idea of an ‘independent’ Manchuria recurred regularly within the Japanese army between 1911 and 1932, and was also propounded in certain civilian rightist circles.⁸ This argument seemed stronger by the middle and later 1920s, when the growing force of Chinese nationalism prompted Tokyo elites to speak of a ‘crisis’ in relation to Japanese interests in Manchuria, especially after 1928, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops completed their Northern Expedition, having established a new ‘national’ government in Nanking. The Japanese government’s nervousness about potential threats to its power in the north-east was plainly revealed in 1927 and 1928: though Chiang Kai-shek had showed his willingness to compromise with Japan, the Seiyūkai Cabinet of Tanaka Giichi sent Japanese troops to Shantung province in both May 1927 and April 1928 in an attempt to prevent Northern Expedition troops from moving into north China and eventually Manchuria.⁹

Moves to establish firmer Japanese control in Manchuria gained momentum. One month after the first incursion of Japanese troops into Shantung, the Tanaka Cabinet convened an ‘Eastern Conference’ (Tōhō kaigi) to discuss Japan‘s policy towards China. After ten days of deliberation by diplomatic officials, bureaucrats, military officers and others, a new policy was announced which declared the right of Japan to intervene positively in the affairs of Manchuria and Mongolia. In fact, according to Yoshihashi, the ‘undisguised object’ of the whole conference was ‘to hammer out a course of action . . . [leading to] Japanese seizureof Manchuria’.¹⁰ Fear that Japan was about to lose control of Manchuria and a desire either to provide a pretext for Japanese occupation or to install a new leader there who would be more sympathetic to Japan led a group of Kwantung Army officers to assassinate the Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin in June 1928. The plotters’ goals were not achieved, however: orders for the mobilisation of the Kwantung Army in the aftermath of the assassination were not forthcoming, and Chang Tso-lin’s successor, Chang Hsueh-liang, far from becoming a Japanese puppet, was flying the Nationalist flag in Manchuria by mid-November 1928. Meanwhile, the political consequences in Japan of Chang’s assassination had forced the resignation of Tanaka Giichi as Prime Minister in July 1928.

The perception that Chinese nationalism posed a serious threat to Japanese control of Manchuria was not misplaced. Labour strikes against Japanese firms, disruptions to railway operations and other protests occurred in Manchuria, while a nation-wide anti-Japanese boycott took place in 1928.¹¹ In addition, the Chinese were engaged in developing Manchuria outside the South Manchurian Railway zone; Japanese investments in Manchuria were particularly threatened by the construction of new railway lines, according to claims by the Japanese government and other interests.¹²

From the late 1920s Manchuria began to appear in the Japanese press more often; until then there had been little media interest in the region. Within Japan, the murder of Chang Tso-lin and its political consequences in 1928–29 attracted a great deal of attention. Japanese residents in Manchuria after 1928 were also showing signs of restlessness, and expressing frequent criticism of ‘Shidehara diplomacy’, or the relatively conciliatory China policy implemented by Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijūrō .¹³ Late in 1928, Japanese residents in Manchuria formed the Manchurian Youth League (Manshū seinen renmei), a pressure group dedicated to the defence of Japanese rights and interests in Manchuria. Comprising mostly junior members of the South Manchurian Railway Company and independent Japanese businessmen in Manchuria, the League attracted 3,000 members in its first year. In the summer of 1931 it embarked on its first lecture tour to Japan. Critical of Japanese foreign policy and party politics and advocating the creation of an autonomous state in Manchuria, the group aimed ‘to awaken the brothers at home’ to the plight of their compatriots in Manchuria and the need to strike against the Chinese government.¹⁴ In Japan, meanwhile, popular journals were by now featuring articles on ‘the Manchurian–Mongolian problem’ (Manmō mondai) with some frequency.¹⁵

On the whole, however, it is unlikely that the ‘problem’ as yet impinged greatly on the consciousness of most Japanese outside of the Kwantung Army and the South Manchurian Railway Company. Japanese business interests, like those of Great Britain, the United States and other nations, were on balance much more interested in the commercial and trade opportunities in the Shanghai area than in Manchuria. For the general public, rural depression, unemployment, elections and allegations of political corruption were more prominent issues than events in Manchuria, which, for many, was little-known and remote.

Even in 1935–36, women in one Kyūshū village, albeit a comparatively remote one, ‘had only the vaguest notion of where and how far away Korea, China and Manchuria might be’.¹⁶ It is unlikely that they were much better informed a few years earlier. Among the decision-making elites in Japan, the threat to Japanese control of Manchuria was recognised from the late 1920s onwards, but outside the army, military force was not considered an appropriate way of dealing with it at a time when the ideal of international co-operation still prevailed. When the Manchurian Incident did occur, there was initially an almost universal concern among the elites that the military action should not be allowed to escalate, even if that concern did not translate into effective action.

By contrast, certain members of the Kwantung Army still believed a forceful solution to the ‘Manchurian problem’ to be an urgent necessity, in view of the twin threats of Chinese nationalism and growing Soviet power. Despite the failure of the Chang Tso-lin Incident to escalate in the desired manner, many, perhaps most, in the Kwantung Army continued to believe that such methods would be necessary. The most ardent exponents of this view included Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, Lieutenant-Colonel Itagaki Seishirō and the members of a study group organised by Major Suzuki Teiichi. Ishiwara in particular believed that the international environment by 1931 was uniquely favourable to military action by Japan in Manchuria, as no other country would have both the capacity and the will to intervene against Japan. Furthermore, Ishiwara and Itagaki were both facing possible transfer out of Japan in the near future. For these reasons, the Manchurian Incident was instigated by members of the Kwantung Army in September 1931.¹⁷ Their action, however, was in accordance with the views of most of the Japanese army, and the General Staff voiced no objection in principle to the Kwantung Army’s action.

The summer of 1931

Several events in the middle of 1931 heightened the sense that Japan’s relations with Manchuria had reached a crisis-point. The most significant were the Wanpaoshan Incident and the killing of Captain Nakamura Shintarō.

The dispute known as the Wanpaoshan Incident highlighted long-standing issues relating to Japan’s right to lease land and engage in commercial activity in Manchuria, and as an incidental bonus it also allowed the Japanese authorities to pose as protectors of the 800,000 or so Koreans who were resident in Manchuria. In July 1931 conflict broke out between Chinese and Korean farmers over irrigation rights in Wanpaoshan, a village near Changchun in Kirin province, and a group of Chinese attacked the Korean farmers. The Chinese farmers were backed by Chinese police and the Koreans by Japanese consular police, who fired over the Chinese crowd at one point. The Koreans and Japanese eventually prevailed without bloodshed on either side. However, anti-Chinese riots immediately broke out in Korea, incited by propaganda by Japanese extremists seeking to promote a more aggressive Japanese policy in Manchuria. Over one hundred Chinese were killed; in retaliation, the Chinese carried out anti-Japanese activities in a number of Chinese cities.¹⁸ The League of Nations commission of enquiry later set up to investigate the Manchurian Incident considered the ‘intrinsic importance’ of the Wanpaoshan Incident to have been ‘greatly exaggerated’,¹⁹ but many Japanese observers saw it as incontrovertible evidence of Chinese infringements of Japan’s legitimate rights in Manchuria. On the other hand, the incident infuriated many Chinese, and an anti-Japanese boycott was initiated in Shanghai as retaliation.

Relations between China and Japan ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Note on names
• Abbreviations used in notes
• Introduction
• Part I: Managing the crisis
• Part II: National perspectives
• Part III: Interest groups and local perspectives
• Conclusion
• Bibliography