Manshukoku no ahensenbai: "Waga ManMo no tokushu ken'eki" no kenkyu (review)

On the morning of September 19, 1931, just hours after an explosion along the tracks of the South Manchurian Railway (SMR), Japanese forces began occupying the city of Mukden. We know from history that the bomb was planted and detonated by officers of the Japanese Guandong Army, a special unit of the military assigned to garrison the Japanese Guandong colony in southern Manchuria. All that was known by the public at the time was that Japanese military reservists, police, and male adults in Mukden were being armed by the Japanese military authorities, who said that they feared attacks from Chinese residents because of the bomb blast. Within days, all of the largest cities in the region, primarily those located along the tracks of the SMR, were occupied by Guandong Army troops.

In the cities, Chinese banks and large money-changing shops were immediately closed by the Japanese, Chinese government offices were occupied, and local police forces were disarmed. All of the top Chinese officials, including Zang Shiyi , the mayor of Mukden, were taken into custody. The major customs and salt-revenue offices at Yingkou, Mukden, and Liaoning along with those in Jilin Province were quickly taken over by Japanese officials. Finally, Chinese newspapers were shut down as were telegraph and post offices, and a general blockade of news or persons leaving Manchuria was imposed. Reinforcements from the Japanese troops occupying Korea were called in, and soon the occupying force was in control of the region. Five months later, in February 1932, the artificial state of Manchukuo (Manshūkoku in Japanese) was established.

As it turned out, physically taking control of Manchuria was relatively easy for the Japanese military, but finding a way to finance the new country of Manchukuo was far more problematic. For one thing, the Japanese had to keep paying off with handsome sums the scores of high-profile Chinese who agreed to become officials in the puppet state. One of those was Zang Shiyi, Mukden's former mayor and before that a cavalry officer in the warlord Fengtian Army, who became Manchukuo's Minister of Civil Affairs. (Each government office in Manchukuo was officially headed by a Chinese but was in fact controlled by a Japanese advisor.) Within a few years of accepting the Japanese offer, Zang got so rich from his post that he was buying land to the west of Tokyo in Hachiōji as a hedge against the day when he might need to make a quick exit from Manchuria to a safer haven. An even more prominent Chinese official, who had long served under the warlord Zhang Zuolin, was Zhang Jinghui , who became the premier and top-ranking Chinese official in Manchukuo.

In the countryside and the smaller towns where their forces were very thinly spread, the Japanese relied on small detachments of Chinese police, who had to be regularly paid in order to keep them in line. A number of local Chinese warlords brought their armies with them into the service of Manchukuo, and they also depended on the Japanese to finance them. Probably the strongest of these was Tang Yulin , a former Fengtian Army commander whose troops controlled neighboring Jehol to the west. Zhao Xinbo , who had served under Yang Yuting , the man responsible for creating the once-powerful Fengtian Army, became the Japanese-appointed mayor of Mukden and was expecting a handsome remuneration. There were even renegade military units formed...