From Gekokujo to Manchukuo: The Kwantung Army’s Rogue Rise to Power in Manchuria

by Quin Cho

In 1905, Japan and Russia signed the Treaty of Portsmouth, ending the Russo-Japanese War. Through this treaty, Japan secured effective control over Korea, as Russia relinquished its claims, and gained the Liaodong Peninsula, home to vital ports and railways. To protect these strategic assets, Japan established the “Kwantung Garrison” in 1906, comprising one infantry division and six independent railway guard battalions.[1] By 1919, the Kwantung Garrison was renamed the Kwantung Army due to an administrative restructuring that made it responsible to the Army Ministry as opposed to the civilian government. The Kwantung Army gained a significant amount of autonomy from this new arrangement and took actions it deemed necessary for the maintenance and expansion of Japan’s empire in northeastern China.[2] 

At first, the Kwantung Army provided arms and advisors to the Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin to maintain Japan’s interests in northeast China.[3] However, by 1928, many within the Kwantung Army believed Zhang was no longer a reliable asset due to his unwillingness to cater to all of Japan’s demands and his support for independent Chinese economic initiatives.[4] Therefore, a different Kwantung Army officer, Colonel Komoto Daisaku, took it upon himself to plot and execute an assassination of Zhang Zuolin, although he did not have orders to do so from Tokyo.[5] Komoto’s assassination of Zhang was part of a broader Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) phenomenon known as gekokujo, which roughly translates to “insubordination” in English. “Gekokujo” was characterized by junior and field officers devising and implementing offensive plans on their own initiative, often in defiance of the government’s wishes in Tokyo. The Kwantung Army’s various acts of gekokujo in the 1920s helped set the stage for even greater acts of gekokujo in the 1930s, as Tokyo had failed to discipline its unruly subordinates.
The Kwantung Army’s gekokujo culminated on September 18th, 1931, with a false flag attack on the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway. This attack, which was planned for two years by Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji and Colonel Itagaki Seishiro, was once again performed without orders from the government, the IJA’s high command, or even the Kwantung Army’s commander. Rather, the false flag attack on the SMR was undertaken at the behest of Ishiwara and Itagaki, as a casus belli for a broader invasion of northeastern China. On the night of September 18th-19th, the Kwantung Army wasted no time in putting its plans into action, seizing the vital “North Barracks,” as well as vital cities along the SMR such as Mukden and Changchun.[7] Soon thereafter, the Kwantung Army used further false flag attacks on Japanese and Korean residents in Jilin province to justify an attack on the province on September 21st, with the 39th Mixed Brigade deployed from Korea in support. This attack secured Jilin and helped shore up the flank of the long, thin corridor the Kwantung Army occupied along the SMR. However, the attack on Jilin once again contradicted the government's and the Army General Staff's (AGS) orders, both of which had issued directives against expanding the incident.[8] While the government was able to temporarily prevent the Kwantung Army from further developing the incident to Harbin on September 24th, the Kwantung Army continued to contradict the government’s directives, bombing Jinzhou on October 8th, and attacking north into Qiqihar and Heilongjiang province in November. By late December, the Kwantung Army began its last push into northeast China, which it had completed by the beginning of February 1932. In that month, the Kwantung Army concluded its campaign in northeastern China by establishing the puppet government of “Manchukuo” with the “Last Emperor” Puyi as its leader.[9] The foundation of Manchukuo represented the effective incorporation of northeastern China into the Japanese Empire and the Kwantung Army’s finest hour.

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Sources
1.  Coox, Alvin, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939, (Stanford University Press, 1985), 3-4.
2. Coox, “The Kwantung Army Dimension,” in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937, edited by Peter Duus, Mark Peattie, and Ramon Myers (Princeton University Press, 2014), 398.
3. For more on the Kwantung Army’s covert support for Zhang Zuolin, see McCormack, Gavan, Chang Tso-lin in Northeast China 1911-1928, (Stanford University Press, 1977), 111-187.
4. Matsusaka, Tak Yoshihisa, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904-1932, (Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 327.
5. For more on Komoto’s assassination of Zhang and its insubordinate nature, see Dull, Paul S., “The Assassination of Chang Tso-lin,” The Far Eastern Quarterly, 11, no. 4, (August 1952): 453-463, https://doi.org/10.2307/2942022.
6. For more on the planning of the Mukden Incident, see Seki, Hiroharu, “The Manchurian Incident, 1931” in Japan’s Road to the Pacific War Volume I, 1928-1932, edited by James Morley (University of Columbia Press, 1984), 148-166.
7. For more on the Kwantung Army’s attacks on September 18-19, see Yoshihashi, Takehiko, Conspiracy at Mukden: The Rise of the Japanese Military, (Yale University Press, 1963), 159-169.
8. “Saionji-Harada Memoirs Re Manchurian Aggression (I),” Box 7, Saionji-Harada Memoirs from March-July 1947, Tavenner Papers and IMFTE Official Records, University of Virginia Law Library, 7-9
9. Behr, Edward & Peary, Gerald, The Last Emperor, (Bantam Books, 1987), 218.