The Nature of Japanese Imperialism, 1931-1945

From the Manchurian Incident in 1931 until surrender in 1945, the nature of the war Japan fought in East Asia and the Pacific changed drastically. Initially, the Japanese aimed to fight a limited war in Manchuria, where the goal was the creation of a model state (Manchukuo) and the exploitation of its natural resources to an economically depressed nation. Not satisfied with just Manchuria, the Kwantung Army launched a wider and far more brutal war against the whole of China in July 1937, where they intended to subjugate the Chinese people and shed any pretense of fighting a war of self-defense. While fighting the Chinese outside of Manchuria, the Japanese also broached upon American, British and Dutch spheres of influence and desired to rid China of these elements. Japanese politicians and soldiers remembered the racially discriminatory slights the West placed upon them and wished to create a utopian Asia, free of Western influence.

Fears ran rampant in Japan over the ascendancy of Chiang Kai-shek to the Chinese leadership. The Japanese were wary of a “nationalist Chinese regime emerging from the ruins of the warlord era.”¹ The Kwantung Army played a role in creating turmoil in the Japanese government with the shooting of Minseito Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi in November 1930.² Acting in concert with right-wing elements of the Japanese government, the Kwantung Army created plans to take over Manchuria, develop it as a Japanese farming area and transport its rich natural resources back to many of its impoverished citizens.

In an act of deception which would be replayed on the Polish border eight years later by the Nazis, the Kwantung Army under Colonel Ishiwara Kanji blew up much of the railroad track near Mukden and blamed it on the Chinese.³ The Chinese were incensed by this aggressive action and declared war on the Japanese with the intent of driving the Kwantung Army completely out of Manchuria. In Japan the response to the Chinese was in support of the Kwantung Army. “Communists denounced the Manchurian Incident, but to little effect”.⁴ Overall, hardly any significant criticism was mounted against the war in Manchuria and a surge of patriotism was felt among many Japanese.

Despite the positive feelings expressed by many Japanese for the war, elements of the Japanese government in 1931 remained skeptical in terms of how much success they could achieve in Manchuria. They hoped not to fight a war which extended far beyond the Manchurian frontier because the Kwantung Army was not large enough to successfully manage an area far greater than Manchuria. Minseito Prime Minister Wakatsuki Reijiro and his Cabinet “sought to prevent escalation of the fighting”.⁵ This sentiment failed to hold, and by the end of 1931, the Wakatsuki Cabinet collapsed and aerial combat expanded to Shanghai, far from the main theatre of operations.

Japanese casualties remained low in the early phases of the war. “According to official figures, 603 members of the armed forces were killed in action up to mid-July 1932”.⁶ The low cost of life on the Japanese side ensured that censorship would remain effective and the Japanese people would turn a blind eye to any future atrocities. By 1934, the Japanese virtually secured Manchuria, parts of Inner Mongolia, and issued the Amau Declaration, which proclaimed China as a Japanese protectorate.⁷ Sharp criticism of Chaing Kai-shek and the Nationalists ensued over war readiness and their ability to successfully defend the Chinese mainland.Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½ The failure of the Kuomintang in Manchuria and the anti-Communist stance of the Japanese aggressors also aided the rise of Communism in Manchuria and created a legitimate future third faction in the war on mainland China. As the 1930’s progressed, the Communists “established themselves in mountainous backwaters where the writ of authority, warlord or otherwise, did not run”.⁸ When the Japanese were finally defeated a power vacuum formed in China and MaoTse-tung’s Communists eventually filled it. The more widespread China-Japan War in 1937 further destabilized Chiang’s government which allowed Mao to take full advantage.

On July 7, 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident triggered the all-out war, which proved far more catastrophic in lives lost to all parties. By the end of 1937, there were at least fifteen active Japanese divisions at combat readiness on the Chinese mainland and they had the Chinese in headlong retreat.⁹ For the first 18 months of the war the Japanese totally dominated the fighting, capturing Tientsin, Peking, Shanghai and the Kuomintang capital, Nanking. Over 100,000 Chinese troops died defending Shanghai, and the Japanese lost more troops in that single battle than they did in the entire Manchurian conflict.

The most appalling act of the China-Japan War took place at Nanking, where the Japanese conducted an unusually violent orgy of rape, murder and dismemberment of Chinese citizens. The number of murdered Chinese and rape victims vary, but the atrocity by all accounts was extremely widespread. A Japanese writer concluded that “by the second day of the Japanese capture of the city about 200,000 Chinese had been killed, and the figure had risen to 300,000 by February”.¹⁰ Other less organized atrocities occurred in other captured Chinese cities and captured perfectly the change in the tenor of the war from a plundering of natural resources in Manchuria to rape and slaughter of the Chinese people further south. The tide of the war changed only after the Japanese overextended in capturing Wuhan in October 1938. Only then did the Japanese fully commit themselves to an even wider war involving the West.

Japan encountered harsher resistance in China and Mongolia after 1938. The Chinese, through guerrilla tactics advocated by the Kuomintang, managed to reach a brutal stalemate in their war with Japan. Soviet intervention in mid-1939 forced Japan to retreat from parts of Inner Mongolia. After the Japanese sustained over 17,000 casualties against the Soviets, the two sides signed a truce.¹¹ “Japan’s rulers trapped their soldiers in the swamp of a continental war”¹² and felt it necessary to expand the scope of the war beyond China to acquire more natural resources necessary to break out of their Chinese morass.

The Anglo-American powers were perfect targets. In 1921, at the Washington Conference, they signed an unequal naval treaty with Japan where Tokyo could only build three-fifths of the naval tonnage of the USA and Britain. Japan despised American and British influence in the Far East. The Japanese felt they were more entitled to dictating terms to Asia than the USA or Britain, nations halfway around the world. In September 1940 Japan formed an alliance with Germany and Italy to place themselves in opposition to the Anglo-American powers. After Germany defeated France, the Japanese claimed French Indochina from the puppet Vichy government, extending their sphere of influence to a point where it threatened the Americans and British.

Britain was embroiled in a life and death struggle with Nazi Germany, so their Asian colonies in 1941 were virtually defenseless to a full blown Japanese assault. The Americans, not fully committed yet to war, responded to Japan’s moves in Indochina by organizing an oil boycott and supplying weapons to the Chinese Nationalists.¹³ Roosevelt’s response essentially cast the die for Japan. Either they would wither on the vine without a steady supply of oil or they would attack the Americans and British in the Pacific.

After four imperial conferences, the Japanese determined that a peaceful solution with the Anglo-American powers was impossible, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was authorized on October 18, 1941.¹⁴ The stunning strike against American and British territories in East Asia and the Pacific could not be fully anticipated. American war planners believed a Japanese attack would center around the Philippines, Malaya and Singapore. They did not believe the Japanese possessed the naval and air capability to strike as far as Hawaii. With the introduction of the United States into the war, the Japanese war aims changed again. The Japanese goal against the United States was to inflict as many casualties on American troops as possible to break the will of the American people and force a truce. They planned to create a Coprosperity Sphere where the nations originally under Western colonial influence would enjoy some independence, but under Japanese jurisdiction.

Due to the war turning quickly against Japan, the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere never took shape.�¯�¿�½ After the fall of Saipan in July 1944, the war aims changed for a third time. The Japanese government looked to escape with the imperial throne intact and their people not completely destroyed. They achieved both of these goals partially. Emperor Hirohito survived, but with far more limited powers than he possessed before the war and his cloak of divinity torn to shreds. The Japanese people were partially destroyed by the war after intense American firebombing and the two atomic bombs. They eventually recovered, but the scars of their wildly imperialistic exploits from 1931 to 1945 still remain.

Endnotes:

1.Haruo Tohmatsu and H. P. Willmott, A Gathering Darkness: The Coming of War to the Far East and the Pacific (New York, SR Books, 2004), p. 25.
2.Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (New York, Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 187.
3.Ibid, p. 188.
4.Sandra Wilson, The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society (New York, Routledge, 2002), p. 20.
5.Ibid, p. 22.
6.Ibid, p. 21.
7.Tohmatsu and Willmott, p. 32.
8.Ibid, p. 36.
9.Ibid, p. 57.
10.Dick Wilson, When Tigers Fight: The Story of the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945 (New York, Viking Press, 1982), p. 81.
11.Tohmatsu & Willmott, p. 81.
12.Andrew Gordon, p. 207.
13.Ibid, p. 208.
14.Ibid, p. 211.