Japan Invades Manchuria
Japanese officers blew up a section of their own railway near Mukden on 18 September 1931 and used it as the pretext to occupy Manchuria. The explosion was small enough that a train passed over the track minutes later. It was arranged by staff officers of the Kwantung Army — the force guarding Japan's railway concession in southern Manchuria — acting without authorisation from Tokyo, and blamed on Chinese soldiers. The army had the whole of Manchuria within five months. Manchuria was worth taking. It held coal, iron and soybeans, was three times the size of Japan, and offered room for settlement at a moment when the Depression had destroyed the silk trade and rural Japan was in acute distress. The civilian government in Tokyo learned what had happened from the newspapers and ratified it, because the alternative was to discipline an army that had already shown it would act alone. That is the significant fact. Junior officers had made national policy by presenting a fait accompli, and were rewarded, which is the pattern of the following decade. The puppet state of Manchukuo was proclaimed in 1932 under Puyi, the last Qing emperor, who had been on a throne before at the age of two. The League of Nations sent the Lytton Commission, which reported that Japan had been the aggressor and that Manchukuo was not a genuine independence movement. Japan walked out of the League in 1933 rather than accept the report, and full war with China began in 1937. The League's failure to act is the standard case against collective security without enforcement.
- Year: 1931 CE
- Category: Military
