The Road to International Isolation — Withdrawal from the League of Nations

In February 1933, at the General Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva, Japan stood isolated from the world as virtually a single nation. The vote was 42 in favor, with only one against: Japan alone. In response, the Japanese delegation rose from its seat, and before long Japan would leave the League of Nations of its own accord. Textbooks often record it briefly as ‘isolated Japan withdrew from the League.’ But what is truly worth considering here is the question of whether there was no road back at all. In fact, a slight margin for turning back remained. So why did Japan, rather than that narrow road, itself open the door to isolation? This time we examine that structure.

The Lytton Report Was Not a Total Rejection

When considering the road to isolation, the first key is the content of the Lytton Report, which is often misunderstood.

To investigate the Manchurian Incident, the League of Nations dispatched to the field a commission headed by Britain’s Lord Lytton. The report published in October 1932 did indeed contain content harsh for Japan. It did not recognize the actions of the Japanese army since the Liutiaohu Incident as self-defense, nor did it recognize Manchukuo as the result of a spontaneous independence movement by local residents. The report did not accept the logic of justification that Japan asserted.

But the report was not only that. It recognized Japan’s interests in Manchuria themselves as legitimate, and presented a compromise plan: to build, under the sovereignty of China and under international administration, an autonomous system that also gave consideration to Japan’s interests. In other words, the report was not a document that unilaterally condemned Japan; it left, however slightly, a ‘way out’ to remain within international society while preserving face.

This fact is important. Looking back on that time, we tend to think ‘Japan became isolated because the world cornered it.’ But at least at the stage of the Lytton Report, the option for Japan to compromise diplomatically and remain in international cooperation while protecting its interests in Manchuria was not entirely closed off. And yet Japan did not choose that road. The question shifts to what was happening on the inside, not only the pressure from without.

The Domestic Atmosphere That Allowed No Compromise

So why was the narrow road not chosen? The greatest reason lay not outside in Geneva but within Japan, at home.

Since the Manchurian Incident, public opinion at home had risen strongly toward the view that Manchukuo must be defended to the end. As we saw last time, the newspapers increased their circulation with stirring coverage and amplified one another with the people’s fervor. In such an atmosphere, a compromise that would reconsider the very existence of Manchukuo was politically all but impossible. To accept the slight compromise plan the Lytton Report presented would have meant being fiercely attacked at home as ‘spineless diplomacy that betrays the efforts of the army and the people.’

What was at work here was the force of face and atmosphere, which institutions alone cannot fully explain. Once the whole nation has come to believe that ‘Manchuria is Japan’s lifeline,’ and an accomplished fact gained by soldiers shedding their blood has taken shape, to withdraw it before international society becomes hard to accept beyond rational calculation of gain and loss. Even when one understands intellectually that turning back is right, the moment one turns back one is reviled as spineless and loses one’s political life. So no one could bring themselves to say, ‘let us turn back.’ Decision-making came to be governed not by calculation of gain and loss but by face and atmosphere.

Symbolic was the fact that in February 1933, on the eve of the vote at the League’s General Assembly, the Kwantung Army was launching a new military action, the Rehe operation. At the very moment the world was taking issue with Japan’s conduct, the front was moving further on the ground. The structure touched on last time — ‘the center cannot stop troops on the ground’ — kept crumbling the footing of diplomacy. Room for compromise was crushed from the inside, by both the fervor at home and the military action on the ground.

The Choice of Walking Out

On February 24, 1933, the General Assembly of the League of Nations voted on the recommendation against Japan. The result was 42 in favor, with only Japan against, and one abstention, Siam (present-day Thailand). Japan’s claims won almost no support from the world. After his speech, Japan’s delegate Yosuke Matsuoka walked out of the assembly hall. And in March of the same year, the Japanese government formally notified its withdrawal from the League of Nations.

At this time, Matsuoka is said to have spoken to the effect that mistaken public opinion will in time surely change. The world does not understand Japan now, but in due course its rightness will be acknowledged — such a sentiment underpinned the hardline choice of withdrawal. As a result, however, Japan stepped out, by its own will, from the framework of international cooperation established after the First World War.

Here one thing must be noted while avoiding flat assertion. Whether the withdrawal from the League was a decisive turning point that fated the later road to war, or merely one of many phases of retreat — views differ even among historians. There is also a view that isolation did not directly lead to ruin the moment of withdrawal. Still, it is hard to deny the aspect in which, by retreating from the venue of international dialogue, Japan let go of its own accord of the chance to relativize and reconsider its own actions from outside.

How a ‘Nation That Cannot Turn Back’ Is Made

Viewing the Manchurian Incident and the withdrawal from the League of Nations together, one disquieting pattern emerges: the process by which a nation becomes a ‘nation that cannot turn back.’

Troops on the ground create an accomplished fact through unilateral action. Public opinion and the media support it with fervor. Those who speak of compromise are buried as spineless. The diplomatic negotiators, bound by the domestic atmosphere, cannot concede. In this way, in scenes where, reasoned out, one ought to turn back, face and atmosphere sever the retreat one step at a time. Even with the narrow way out of the Lytton Report, Japan could not use it. What was at issue was not so much the decision of a particular evildoer as the structure that made the very choice of turning back impermissible.

What we can learn here from the present should not be to condemn the people of that time by asking ‘why did you not turn back.’ Rather, the psychology in which, amid fervor, compromise comes to look like ‘betrayal,’ and the group dynamics in which face takes priority over gain and loss — these are not matters confined to a particular age or country. To consciously keep open a road back before turning back becomes impossible: that very difficulty is thought to be the heavy lesson this event has left.

Having taken its distance from international society, Japan would, after this, seek a stronger ally while at the same time drawing closer to confrontation with a vast opponent. Next, we will look — from the very site of the decision to open war — at the pathology of decision-making behind why Japan took the final step toward a war it had little prospect of winning.