{"id":65545,"date":"2024-02-10T01:00:54","date_gmt":"2024-02-10T06:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=65545"},"modified":"2024-02-09T10:16:51","modified_gmt":"2024-02-09T15:16:51","slug":"qotd-when-manchuria-became-manchukuo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/02\/10\/qotd-when-manchuria-became-manchukuo\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: When Manchuria became Manchukuo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Back around the turn of the 20th century, the Russians decided to build a railroad across Siberia<\/a>, the better to (among other things) supply their spiffy new naval base at Port Arthur, on the strategic Liaodong Peninsula<\/a> (linking up with their Chinese Eastern Railway<\/a>). This pissed off the Japanese, who claimed the Peninsula by right of conquest in the First Sino-Japanese War<\/a>. Unpleasantness ensued<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Further unpleasantness ensued in the wake of World War I, when both Imperial Russia and Republican China collapsed. The Japanese had a big railroad project of their own going in the Kwantung Leased Territory<\/a>, which was threatened by the chaos. Moreover, the big Japanese railroad project had grown \u2014 as Japanese industrial concerns tend to do \u2014 into a ginormous, all-encompassing combine known as Mantetsu<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So far, so recondite, I suppose, but stop me if this part sounds familiar: Mantetsu was so big, and so shady, that it was all but impossible to tell where “the guys running Mantetsu” ended and “the Japanese government” began. And it gets better: Thanks to the Japanese Empire’s distinctive (to put it mildly, and kindly) administrative structure, it was equally hard to tell where “the Japanese government” ended and “the Japanese military” began. Even better \u2014 by which I mean much, much worse, but again feel free to stop me when this sounds familiar \u2014 “the Japanese military” was itself composed of several wildly different, mutually hostile chains of command, all competing with each other for political power, economic access, and glory. Best of all \u2014 by which, again, I mean worst \u2014 since Mantetsu was so big, and so wired-in to every level of the Japanese government, it basically got its own army<\/a>, which was effectively separate even from the Army High Command back in Tokyo.<\/p>\n

Here again, the granular details are insanely complex, and I’m not qualified to walk you through them, but the upshot is: Thanks to all of the above, plus the active enmity of the rapidly-rearming Soviet Union and the rapidly-accelerating chaos of the Warlord Period<\/a> in China, Japan’s foreign policy ended up being dictated by the Kwantung Army, with almost no reference to even the High Command, let alone the civilian politicians, back in Tokyo. A particular warlord giving the Mantetsu Board of Directors \u2014 or, you know, whoever \u2014 grief? No problem \u2014 boom<\/a>! Oh, that didn’t solve the problem, and now the politicians are dragging their feet? Might as well blow up a different<\/em> part<\/a> of your own railway, seize a whole bunch of territory on that flimsy pretext, and set up a puppet government<\/a> to give you cover …<\/p>\n

I don’t expect y’all to follow all the links right away, so trust me on this: Nobody involved in any of that stuff ranked higher than colonel. Indeed, the guy most “responsible” \u2014 if that’s really the word \u2014 for all of this stuff was a staff pogue, also a colonel, named Kanji Ishiwara<\/a>. He and another staff pogue, Seishiro Itagaki<\/a>, who was head of the Kwantung Army’s intelligence section, orchestrated the Japanese invasion of China, and while it’s oversimplifying things a bit too much to say those two clowns started World War II in the Pacific, I’m not stopping you from saying it.<\/p>\n

From there, events took on a logic of their own. The rest of the Army was soon committed to the war in North China, which rapidly became<\/a> the war in all the rest of China. The Navy, not wanting to let the Army hog all the glory, had gotten in on the war<\/a> a few years prior to the Marco Polo Bridge, and soon enough they were causing all kinds of international grief<\/a> on their own account. Put simply, but not unfairly, you had the Navy chasing the Army, and the Army chasing itself<\/em>, all across China, with the civilian politicians lagging way behind in the rear, desperately trying to catch up, or even just figure out what the hell was going on …<\/p>\n

Severian, “Lessons from Manchuria”, Rotten Chestnuts<\/em>, 2021-04-21.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back around the turn of the 20th century, the Russians decided to build a railroad across Siberia, the better to (among other things) supply their spiffy new naval base at Port Arthur, on the strategic Liaodong Peninsula (linking up with their Chinese Eastern Railway). This pissed off the Japanese, who claimed the Peninsula by right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,7,24,5,41,237,1119],"tags":[31,1308,1418,1462],"class_list":["post-65545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-history","category-japan","category-military","category-quotations","category-railways","category-russia","tag-army","tag-manchuria","tag-russojapanesewar","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-h3b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65545"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87273,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65545\/revisions\/87273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}