sive Japanese government in power ready to use
military force in China to prevent northern China
from falling under Chiang Kai-shek’s control, the
Kwantung army had overreached itself and its
attempt to take over Manchuria was disavowed.
The murdered warlord’s son took over control of
the Chinese Manchurian administration and
army. A more moderate Japanese government
came to power in 1929 and the pacific Shidehara
returned to the Foreign Ministry. The army
smarted under its humiliation. But the Kwantung
army was not punished – the colonel in command
was merely retired – and two years later, in
September 1931, it struck again more effectively.
Meanwhile the new Cabinet of Prime Minister
Hamaguchi was soon involved in a confrontation
with the navy. The government had consented to
a new treaty of naval limitation at the London
Conference of 1930, this time applying to cruis-
ers. The Japanese navy had not secured the ratio
of cruisers that the chief of the naval general staff,
Admiral Kato Kanji, and those naval officers
who supported him, considered indispensable.
The navy minister, another admiral, supported
the prime minister, who won after months of
bitter debate.
The split into factions even within the armed
services themselves is illustrated by this whole
episode. It ended tragically when a nationalist
fanatic shot Hamaguchi, who lingered several
months before succumbing to his wounds.
In September 1931 the insubordination of the
Kwantung garrison army in Manchuria attracted
the attention of the world. Its plot to seize
Manchuria by force from theoretical Chinese
suzerainty and the warlord’s actual control was an
ill-kept secret. The government in Tokyo was
powerless. Shidehara received worthless assur-
ances from the war minister that the plot would
be quashed. In fact, there was sympathy within
the army general staff for the plotters. During
the night of 18 and 19 September the Japanese
themselves blew up the tracks of the South
Manchurian Railway just outside Mukden in
Manchuria. On this flimsy pretext the Kwantung
army attacked the Chinese and occupied Mukden.
The Japanese army in Korea now concerted with
the Kwantung army, and units crossed into
Manchuria. Soon the whole of Manchuria was
under military administration.
If this action had been the work of only
the middle-ranking subordinate officers of the
Kwantung army, then the government in Tokyo
might have re-established its authority. The con-
spiracy at Mukden extended to the army leader-
ship in Tokyo. Government was disintegrating.
Shidehara tried to hide this fact from the outside
world and to make the diplomatic best of it. The
difficulty that Shidehara and the politicians, sup-
ported by big business, faced was also in part self-
made. While they strongly disapproved of the
armies’ insubordination and interference in
politics, as well as their resort to force, they held
in common with the army the belief in Japan’s
China destiny. The army was pursuing essentially
the same goals as they. Only their means differed.
Internally the army was out of control and fol-
lowed its own policy of solving Japan’s China
policy by force. In February 1932 it set up a
puppet state which it called Manchukuo and so
declared that Manchuria was severed from
Chinese sovereignty. Then it placed the last boy
emperor of the ousted Manchu dynasty, with the
unlikely name of Henry Pu-yi, on the puppet
throne. Possibly the motive for this bizarre move
was to have a useful symbol under their control
who might be put forward as a Japanese-backed
emperor of China. During the next few years the
army’s ambitions were not limited to securing
Japan’s rights in southern Manchuria. The
Kwantung army was soon extending Japanese
influence beyond Manchuria, which was com-
pletely conquered by 1933. The Great Wall, the
ancient traditional defensive boundary which the
Chinese had built to keep out the northern bar-
barians, proved no barrier to the Japanese. The
Japanese army crossed the Great Wall along the
railway line running from Mukden in Manchuria
to Peking.
Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government
was far too weak to oppose the Kwantung army
by force. In many provinces warlords persisted in
exercising power and the communists, from the
bases they had established, disputed the Kuomin-
tang’s right to speak for and unite China.
Resistance against Japan would be hopeless unless
1
THE MOUNTING CONFLICT IN EASTERN ASIA, 1928–37 199
