348 Chapter NineChina was quite unable to match Japan’s military and economic
upthrust. Neither the United States nor the League of Nations was
able through remonstrance to prevent the Japanese army from ex
panding its operations into north China in 1937 and then occupying
the entire coastline by 1939– Collisions with Soviet troops along the
Manchurian border, however, led to Japanese defeats in 1938 and
again on a larger scale in 1939– Vivid recollection of the Russians’
formidability in these battles deeply influenced Japan’s policy towards
the USSR during World War II.^71
Japan’s development towards a war economy between 1930 and
1941 owed less to World War I experience than to the larger pattern
of Japan’s response to the West since 1853. Management of national
effort so as to achieve military power had been central to Japan’s
entire modernization. World War I represented a phase in that effort
when successes at German and Chinese expense had been easily won,
only to be compromised after the war when Chinese resistance to
gether with American and European diplomatic pressure persuaded
the Japanese to relinquish some of their wartime gains on the Asian
mainland, and induced them also to back away from an all-out naval
race by subscribing to the Washington Naval Treaties of 1922.^72
Territorial aggression after 1931 therefore simply reaffirmed a pol
icy that had deep roots in the Japanese past.^73 Peasant land hunger
easily translated itself into a public policy of expansion and conquest,
especially among junior army officers, who were themselves often of
peasant birth. Distrust of greedy capitalists and men of the market
place also had peasant roots and was abundantly evident among the
officers of the Kwangtung army who managed Japan’s ventures in
Manchuria and China.^74 More generally, command economy,
Japanese-style, like command economy Russian-style, had the advan
tage of building upon patterns of rural life which had never been
- Ericson, The Soviet High Command. pp. 494–99, 517–22, 532–37, offers a clear
account of these relatively little known battles. - These treaties also headed off an incipient Anglo-American rivalry. They were
formally denounced by the Japanese in 1934, with effect in 1936. Competitive naval
building therefore escalated sharply as of 1937. Cf. Stephen Roskill, Naval Policy be
tween the Wars, vol. 1, The Period of Anglo-American Antagonism (London, 1968), and
vol. 2,The Period of Reluctant Rearmament, 1930–1939 (London, 1976). - Cf. Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan Past and Present (New York, 1964), pp. 158–68.
Within the Japanese islands themselves the Japanese people expanded from an initial
base in the south through a centuries-long process of conquest and colonization. Hok
kaido in the north was settled intensively by Japanese only in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. - Yoshihashi, Conspiracy at Mukden, pp. 116–18.