THE MUKDEN INCIDENT

Japan’s opening to military expansion began with the notorious Mukden Incident. On September 18, 1931, Japanese troops sabotaged with explosives a section of track belonging to Japan’s South Manchuria Railway. The explosion was “heard” in Washington. A few days later, U.S. secretary of state, Henry Stimson, wrote in his diary: “Trouble has flared up again in Manchuria. The Japanese, apparently their military elements, have suddenly made a coup.”1 Stimson was correct. The Japanese army officers who wanted to be more powerful than the cabinet had launched this attack. A group of active officers, linked to the nationalistic Nichiren movement, and influenced by the millenarianism of Tanaka’s Kokuchūkai, decided to start a war during which Japan would expand its territory through the Pacific and East Asia by taking advantage of increasing ultra-nationalism in the Japanese society.
For many historians, Japan’s road to World War II began on September 18, 1931, with the Mukden Incident.2 In the spirit of the Japanese concept of gekokujō, by provoking the armed conflict, Col. Seishirō Itagaki and Lt. Col. Kanji Ishiwara made a plan to prompt Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. They chose to sabotage the rail section at 800 meters away from the Chinese garrison of Beidaying under the command of Zhang Xueliang. The two officers, with the support of two other members of the Kwantung Army, Col. Kenji Doihara and Maj. Gen. Takayoshi Tanaka, had arranged the attack. The plan was executed by 1st Lt. Suemori Kawamoto of the independent garrison of the 29th Infantry Regiment, which guarded the South Manchuria Railway.3
The attack on the night of September 18, 1931, was not just an act of rebellion of a group of officers of the Kwantung Army. It had been a sophisticated operation that had been orchestrated by Army General Staff in Tokyo as well as at Army Headquarters in Korea.4 The morning following the sabotage, a message from Gen. Shigeru Honjō, commander of the Kwantung Army, reached Lt. Gen. Senjūrō Hayashi, commander of the Korean army at Seoul, asking for immediate reinforcements of the Kwantung Army. A few hours later, a detachment of Japanese fighter planes from Pyongyang, Korea, took off for Mukden. Troops of the 20th Division at Seoul and Pyongyang had deployed by train for the Korea-Manchuria border to stay there and await instructions.
The same day, early in the morning, Gen. Jirō Minami called a meeting with the vice minister of war, Gen. Hajime Sugiyama and the chief of the Military Affairs Bureau of the War Ministry, Gen. Kuniaki Koiso. The three officials were on the same page. A few hours later, early in the afternoon, Prime Minister Wakatsuki Reijirō called a meeting of the cabinet. The Diet approval was requested before troops in Korea would move. After the meeting, Wakatsuki had failed to get support from the cabinet and the commander of the army to stop the rebellion.
American secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, wrote in his diary, on September 19, 1931, “The situation is very confused in Manchuria, and it is not clear whether the army is acting under a plan of the government or on its own.”5
The next day, September 20, a new military oligarchy had seized control of the army in Japan, while, in Manchuria, 12,000 troops assigned to the Kwantung Army were moving out and engaging the Chinese. No serious effort was made from Tokyo to stop the invasion. Gen. Yoshitsugu Tatekawa, the emissary sent from the War Ministry to stop the incident, encouraged the enlargement of the field of action.6 Taking full advantage of Yoshitsugu’s position, Lieutenant Colonel Kanji
proposed to move the army north. After Japanese troops took Hardin, they continued their advance inside of Manchuria. Next, they attacked Kirin and captured it without resistance. General Tamon, commander of the Japanese forces, compelled the local general, Hsi Ch’ia, to proclaim “independence.” Without waiting approval of the cabinet, the Korean army moved across the border into Manchuria and joined the revolt.
At this point, Japanese Prime Minister Wakatsuki Reijirō tried to obtain Hirohito’s disapproval for what had been done in Manchuria. He secured an audience at the Imperial Palace with the emperor and asked him to condemn the action. Hirohito refused. As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the emperor was not a partisan of strong action against the conspirators. Since 1929, as soon as he had revoked Tanaka’s cabinet over the incident of Zhang Zuolin’s assassination, he had already made his choice, “strengthening the power of the army over civil government.” By 1930, the right wing of the army was pouring hundreds of thousands of yen into propaganda against the civilian government. Several newspapers had been bribed with secret army funds to hide the information.
While the conversation for peace continued between China and Japan, the Japanese army commander of the Chōsen Army, Lt. Gen. Senjūrō Hayashi, on his own authority, ordered his troops to continue the attack. Stimson sent a warning note to Japan and China, urging a cessation of hostilities. Baron Kijūrō Shidehara, the Japanese foreign minister, replied:
I have the honor to acknowledge receipt of your note of September 25, in which you were so good as to convey to me the views of the American government about the actual conditions of affairs in Manchuria. The Japanese government is deeply sensitive to the friendly concern, the fairness, and the attitude with which the American government has observed the recent course of events in Manchuria. Sharing with the American government the hope expressed in your note under acknowledgement this government has already caused the Japanese military forces in Manchuria to refrain from any further acts of hostility unless their own safety as well as the security of the South Manchurian Railway and of Japanese lives and property within the Railway zone is jeopardized by the aggression of Chinese troops and bands…7
Not wasting any time, on September 19, 1931, Gen. Shigeru Honjō, an ardent follower of Sadao Araki’s doctrines, ordered his forces to extend operations all along the South Manchuria Railway. Three days later, on September 22, Army Chief of Staff Hanzō Kanaya reported to the emperor that despite orders to stand by on alert, the Mixed Brigade of the Japanese colonial army in Korea, in accordance with the principle that the field commanders have such discretion, “had crossed the border and advanced on Mukden.”8 General Shigeru dispatched 10,000 soldiers in the region escorted by a squadron of bombers in advance on Chinchow from Mukden. Hirohito summoned Wakatsuki and told him to see that the Manchurian situation was aggravated. Having now understood the need to reinforce the vastly out-numbered Kwantung Army’s forward units, he accepted the situation as a fait accompli.9
Nara’s diary entry for September 22 reported Hirohito’s attitude at this critical moment:
In the afternoon, when I was summoned by the emperor, he asked me whether I had warned the chief of staff [Kanaya] not to broaden the action. I replied, “Yes, I did warn him, but even without my warning he understood very clearly both the cabinet’s intention and your majesty’s will, and he is already addressing each part of the problem in turn. Regrettably, it is touch-and-go with the outlying army, and they often go their own way.” …[Later] [ At 4:20 P.M. Chief of Staff Kanaya had an audience with the emperor and asked him to approve, post facto, the dispatch of the mixed brigade from the Korean Army. I heard the emperor say that although this time it couldn’t be helped [the army] had to be more careful in the future.10
For two more months, Japanese troops and Chinese soldiers clashed in Manchuria. On November 15, 1931, despite having lost hundreds of soldiers, Chinese Gen. Ma Zhanshan, acting as Governor and Military Commander-in-chief of Heilongjiang Province, in absence of Governor Wan Fulin, maintained his position at Qiqihar. Ma declined Japan’s ultimatum to surrender. On November 17, 1931, 3,500 Japanese troops, under the command of Gen. Jirō Tamon, commander of the IJA 2nd Division of the Kwantung Army, attacked the Chinese position. This attack forced the Chinese general to leave Qiqihar in November 19.11
Meanwhile, at the urging of Stimson, the League Council had invoked the Kellogg-Briand Pact against both China and Japan.12 The Council then passed a moral resolution setting a time limit for Japan to withdraw its troops from the occupied areas.13 On December 13, 1931, Prime Minister Wakatsuki was replaced by a new cabinet led by Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai. Inukai’s first assignment was to initiate negotiations with Hsueh-liang, the leader of the Kuomintang government. As those negotiations failed, the Japanese government authorized the reinforcement of its troops in Manchuria. At the end of December, the rest of the 20th Infantry Division, along with the 38th Mixed Brigade from the 19th Infantry Division, was sent into Manchuria from Korea; while the 18th Mixed Brigade from the 10th Infantry Division was sent from Japan. The total strength of the Kwantung Army was thus increased to around 60,450 men.
On January 3, 1932, Japanese forces occupied Chinchow. The following day, they occupied Shanhaiguan, completing their military takeover of southern Manchuria. With southern Manchuria secure, the Japanese turned north to complete the occupation of Manchuria. Col. Kenji Doihara requested collaborationist Gen. Xi Qia to advance his forces in order to take Harbin. The Chinese soldiers resisted and repulsed Japanese forces until the arrival of the IJA 2nd Division under Gen. Jirō Tamon. The Japanese troops had completed the occupation of Harbin on February 4, 1932.
NOTES

1. See Guide to a Microfilm edition of the Diaries of Henry Lewis Stimson in the Yale University Library. The diaries are most detailed during those years that Stimson held
   public office, as secretary of war under President William Howard Taft (1911–1913), colonel of field artillery with the American Expeditionary Force in France (1917–1918), special envoy of President Calvin Coolidge to Nicaragua (1927), governor general of the Philippine Islands (1928–1929), secretary of state under President Herbert Hoover (1929–1933), and secretary of war under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (1940–1945).
2. Leslie Alan Horvitz and Christopher Catherwood, Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide. Facts on File (2011), 128; Shin’ichi Yamamuri, Manchuria under Japanese Dominion, translate by Joshua A. Fogel, (University of Pennsylvania, Press, 2006), 10–13, 21–23; Robert H. Ferrel, “The Mukden Incident,” (September 18–19, 1931), March 1955.
3. James Weland, “Misguided Intelligence: Japanese Military Intelligence Officers in the Manchurian Incident, September 1931,” 1994, 445–460.
4. Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, (HarperCollins, 2016), 235. See also Eguchi Keiichi, Jūgonen sensō shōshi, shinpan (Aoki Shoten, 1991), 36–37.
5. In 1930, Stimson was the chairman of the U.S. delegation to the London Naval Conference of 1930. He was also the chairman of the U.S. delegation to World Disarmament Conference in Geneva. In 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, Stimson, as secretary of state, proclaimed the “Stimson Doctrine”. It said no fruits of illegal aggression would ever be recognized by the United States. See Henry Lewis Stimson, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Retrieved January 5, 2017. See also Henry L. Stimson, The First Wise Man. (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources Inc. 2001).
6. See Nish Ian Hill, Japanese Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period, (Greenwood Publishing Group), 75.
7. In October 1931, Shidehara was featured on the cover of Time with the caption “Japan’s Man of Peace and War.”
8. Hatano, “Manshū jihen to ‘kyūchū seiryoku,”114, citing “Nara nikki,” Sept. 21, 1931. Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, (HarperCollins, 2016), 239.
9. Ibid., 239–240.
10. “Nara Takeji jijūbukanchō nikki (shō),” in Chūō kōron (Sept. 1990), 340–41. See also Bix, 239.
11. See William Christopher James, Conflict in the Far East, (Brill Archive), 274–275.
12. Ostrower, Collective Insecurity, 94–96. See also Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, (HarperCollins, 2016), 242.
13. Edwin P. Hoyt’s Notes in Japan’s War: The Great Pacific Conflict, (McGraw-Hill, 1986), 469, secretary of state Henry Stimson’s recollection of the Manchurian crisis shows that at least this one American official was under no illusions about the direction in which Japan had begun to move. As the Mukden incident was developing, he and the Japanese ambassador, Katsuji Debuchi, were congratulating each other on the betterment of relations that had occurred in recent months, and Stimson was indicating his hope that in the new atmosphere of friendliness he could bring about U.S. repudiation of its harsh anti-Japanese immigration laws. The chances looked good. But after Mukden, there was no hope. The Stimson recollections indicate how hard he tried to show the Japanese the full extent and probable future of American disapproval of the Manchurian grab. They show how little long-range effect the disapproval by one nation of another’s policy has had; just as the United States did not “lose China” at the end of World War II, so U.S. diplomacy had no real influence in stopping Japan’s militarists in the 1930s. Even then, force would have been the only stopper.