The Manchurian Incident — Why the Runaway Could Not Be Stopped

When we think of war, we tend to assume it is something a nation resolves upon and then begins. Yet at the entrance to the Manchurian Incident, the opposite occurred. Even as the central government tried to stop it, troops on the ground moved on their own initiative, and the front, far from halting, kept expanding. Textbooks record it in a single line: ‘the Kwantung Army caused the Manchurian Incident.’ But the question truly worth asking is why no one could stop it. This is at once a story of the ambition of a few individuals and a story of an organization whose mechanism for stopping had broken down.

Who Set Off the Explosion?

On the night of September 18, 1931, near Liutiaohu on the outskirts of Mukden (present-day Shenyang) in China, a section of the South Manchuria Railway was blown up. The Kwantung Army immediately announced that ‘this is sabotage by the Chinese army’ and, in the name of self-defense, embarked on military action. This was the Liutiaohu (Mukden) Incident that touched off the Manchurian Incident.

Through later research and testimony at the Tokyo Trial, however, the view has become established that this explosion was not the work of the Chinese side but a plot engineered by the Kwantung Army itself. Said to have been at its center were Kanji Ishiwara and Seishiro Itagaki, staff officers of the Kwantung Army. The explosion itself is said to have been small enough that the South Manchuria Railway could repair it in a short time, yet by framing it as ‘a Chinese attack,’ a pretext was manufactured to justify military action.

What is worth pausing over here is why troops on the ground were able to act so boldly. Behind it lay Japan’s attachment at the time to its vast interests in Manchuria: the railways and concessions gained in the Russo-Japanese War, the residents living there, and the conception of Manchuria as ‘Japan’s lifeline.’ Compounded by economic deadlock and a sense of impasse at home, a mood of wanting to break through the situation all at once in Manchuria swirled strongly within part of the army. The plot is better understood not as a sudden eruption but as something carefully prepared within that atmosphere.

The Government Tried to Stop It, Yet It Would Not Stop

Here lies the most uncanny part of the Manchurian Incident. The Japanese government did not, by any means, wish for the front to expand.

The day after the incident, the cabinet of Reijiro Wakatsuki resolved in a cabinet meeting on a policy of non-expansion — a declaration of the government’s will not to spread the conflict further. Yet the Kwantung Army on the ground did not follow this policy. On the contrary, it steadily widened the scope of occupation. More decisively, on September 21, Senjuro Hayashi, commander of the army garrisoned in Korea, crossed his troops into Manchuria on his own initiative without waiting for the emperor’s orders. By the army’s regulations of the time this was a plain violation, but once the army had moved, the center could no longer hold it back.

Why did such a thing happen? The key lies in the institutional problem of the prerogative of supreme command. Under the Constitution of the Empire of Japan at the time, the authority to move the military (the prerogative of supreme command) was held to belong directly to the emperor, not the cabinet. In principle it was an authority held by the emperor, but in practice the military organs that assisted him wielded great power, and the government (cabinet) was structurally ill-placed to intervene. In other words, there was a structural division between the government, which held the budget and diplomacy, and the supreme command, which held military affairs. Even when the government said ‘do not expand,’ that had little force to bind military operations themselves.

This ‘dual structure of government and military’ had originally arisen from the idea of making the military independent of politics. In reality, however, it inverted into a precariousness in which, even when troops on the ground acted unilaterally, there was no central locus of responsibility to control them. Everyone thought ‘this is outside my authority,’ and as a result no one bore responsibility for the whole. The Manchurian Incident can be called the event in which this institutional gap was first exposed on a large scale.

Fervor Blocked the Road Back

The army’s unilateral action and the institutional gap. By themselves, perhaps the runaway would not have remained unstoppable to this degree. There was another force at work that cannot be overlooked: the fervor of the people, and the media that fanned it.

When the Manchurian Incident broke out, the newspapers competed to report stirring accounts of the war. One major paper of the time is said to have greatly increased its circulation around the incident, and for the press, war was also a ‘sellable’ subject. Editorial lines that had until then been critical of the military shifted greatly with the incident, leaning toward supporting the army’s actions and denouncing the government’s diplomacy as ‘spineless.’ Radio, too, played a part in building the mood that cast Manchuria as a ‘lifeline.’ Newly emerged bulletins and war photographs drew people into events on a distant battlefield.

What is worth viewing calmly here is that it cannot be simplified into the media unilaterally manipulating public opinion. The fact that circulation rose also indicates an aspect in which the people sought stirring coverage. Amid a prolonged recession, difficulty finding work, and rural hardship — within an impasse with no exit in sight — ‘victory’ in Manchuria brought people elation. It is closer to reality to see public opinion and the media as raising the temperature while amplifying one another.

The Unstoppable Mechanism Called the ‘Accomplished Fact’

What the Manchurian Incident thrusts at us is the inconvenient fact that a runaway has a ‘mechanism that will not stop.’

Once those on the ground move and the occupied territory widens, it becomes an accomplished fact. Since soldiers have already shed blood and territory has been gained, to turn back now would unleash voices at home asking, ‘what then were their sacrifices for?’ A politician who speaks of withdrawal amid an enflamed public opinion is reviled as spineless. In this way, even in scenes where, reasoned out, one ought to turn back, face and atmosphere block the road back. In 1932 the founding of Manchukuo was proclaimed in the occupied territory, and the incident was being fixed in place as something that could not be reversed.

It is easy to end by blaming the Manchurian Incident on the abstract evil of militarism. But what is truly frightening is not some single malicious individual; it is that when such mechanisms combine — an institution that cannot stop unilateral action, a public opinion that amplifies fervor, and an accomplished fact that makes turning back impossible — the whole nation drifts in a direction no one wished for. Merely condemning the people of that time from the present will not yield this lesson. We must keep asking where the mechanism for stopping had broken down.

And the price of this incident did not stay within the country alone. When Japan chose to settle matters by force in Manchuria, how did the world see it? Next, we will trace how Japan deepened its isolation within international society, and why it chose, of its own accord, the path of leaving the League of Nations.