Japan Invades Manchuria

SEP 18 1931 · 12:00

Japanese troops of the Kwantung Army in the field near Mukden, October 1931, weeks after the staged railway incident of 18 September. Place: Liutiaohu, near Mukden (Shenyang), southern Manchuria Figures: Lieutenant Colonel Suemori Komoto and Colonel Seishirō Itagaki, conspirators · Kwantung Army staff · the Wakatsuki cabinet, informed after the fact · Victor Bulwer-Lytton, leading the League commission · Yōsuke Matsuoka, walking Japan out of Geneva The Mukden Incident Just after ten p.m. on 18 September 1931, Kwantung Army officers detonate a small charge on the South Manchuria Railway near Liutiaohu, north of Mukden. The damage is so minor that a Dalian-bound express passes the spot minutes later without incident. The conspirators blame Chinese saboteurs and order an immediate punitive advance. The Mukden garrison is taken by morning. Within five months the Kwantung Army has occupied all of Manchuria, an area larger than France and Germany combined, and installed the deposed Qing emperor Puyi as figurehead of a new puppet state, Manchukuo. The civilian government in Tokyo is informed after the operation is underway and cannot reverse it. The army acts; the cabinet ratifies; the constitutional question of who actually controls Japanese foreign policy is answered for the rest of the decade. Geneva Condemns, Tokyo Leaves China appeals to the League of Nations under Article 11 on 21 September. The League commissions a five-member inquiry under Lord Lytton, which travels to Manchuria in 1932 and reports in October that Japan's actions cannot be regarded as legitimate self-defence and that Manchukuo is not the product of genuine independence movement. The League Assembly adopts the report 42 to 1 (Japan dissenting) on 24 February 1933. Yōsuke Matsuoka, the Japanese delegate, walks out of the chamber and Japan formally withdraws from the League the following month. No sanctions follow. No state recognizes Manchukuo except Italy, Germany, and (later) the Vichy regime, and yet it persists for fourteen years. It is the first major demonstration that the League cannot constrain a Great Power (see [[league-of-nations-founded-1920]]). The Sino-Japanese war that begins formally in 1937 grows out of this opening; so does the road to Pearl Harbor. Video: Indy Neidell on the Mukden Incident of 18 September 1931, the Kwantung Army's runaway war, and the puppet state of Manchukuo.