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 7 Crisis over Manchuria If [the Japanese] will only consent to adopt the world’s way I believe they could get all they really want and have peace at the same time. —Lord Lytton, 1932 When the 1930s opened, Japan had been a charter member of the League of Nations and a permanent member of the League Council for a full decade. Japan had served conscientiously and effectively, and its diplomats and lay members of the Secretariat had carried out their tasks with distinction. Carping could be heard at home that the League was a European club and too distant to be a reliable mechanism to effect stability in East Asia, and continental adventurers in the Guandong Army schemed to extend the Empire in Manchuria. A few radical voices urged that Japan “return to Asia” and quit the League of Nations in order to break the international status quo.1 But no one in 1930 contemplated that Japan’s tenure in the world body was limited, and there was no palpable conspiracy afoot to extract the Empire from Geneva. The extension of Japanese power in East Asia was embraced as a given by nearly all Japanese, and the vision of expansive power replicated the worldview of the European powers who dominated the League. So long as Japan maintained reasonably good ties to the powers, League membership would present no insurmountable obstacle to Imperial destiny. Ogata Sadako, who produced pathbreaking scholarship on the Manchurian Incident, summed up Japan’s stance in this instance as follows: “The clue to the Japanese reading of international affairs lies in the distinction Japan made between the condemnatory action of the great powers as League members and their compromising attitudes as pursuers of individual national interests.”2 Nonetheless, the late 1920s had brought new challenges to Japanese security and vital interests. China was recovering from the governmental fragmentation that had attended the fall of the Imperial institution in 1912, and it was congealing politically under Nationalist leadership. It was asserting its territorial sovereignty with new determination and effective means. The popular movement that had erupted when Japan insisted on retaining Shandong at the Paris Peace Confer-  Japan and the League of Nations ence had spawned a Communist Party and invigorated the nationalist movement. New modes of communication and transport hastened the spread and enlarged the effectiveness of both citizen movements and centralized government. Events culminated in 1927–1928 in the Northern Expedition, when the Nationalist armies under Chiang Kai-shek united much of the fragmented republic. Some warlords were subdued and other provincial hegemons threw their lot with the new regime in Nanjing. Among the latter was Zhang Xueliang, the “Young Marshall” who succeeded his father, Zhang Zuolin, as the leading military power in the three northeastern provinces at the time of Zuolin’s assassination by Japanese Army adventurers in 1928. Robust patriotic feelings were increasingly expressed in anti-Japanese propaganda and economic boycotts. The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was growing in military strength, and Japan rightfully feared communist ideological influence on the Chinese nationalist movement. In 1929 the U.S. dollar collapsed, silk exports to the United States declined precipitously, and the economic props supporting international accommodationism were irrevocably weakened. In response to the altered international environment, anxious voices in Japan called for an autonomous diplomacy to secure reliable markets, dependable sources of raw materials, territory to absorb Japan’s excess population, and a stable and defensible regional order amenable to the Empire’s leadership. Japan’s military action in Manchuria in 1931 and subsequent establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo brought Japan for the first time into direct confrontation with the League of Nations. Eighteen months after the opening volley, Japan announced its withdrawal from the organization. The Manchurian Incident and the League The course of events in 1931–1933 that led to Japan’s exit from the League of Nations is, needless to say, a vital segment of the saga of Japan’s relationship with the organization. The subject has been treated with thoroughness by respected scholars in Japan and Europe, and their works are readily available.3 Let it suffice here to summarize the major components of the 1931–1933 history and then to treat in more detail the ways in which major internationalist figures, whom we have met in the preceding chapters, dealt with Japanese military action and estrangement from the League. On the night of 18 September 1931, Japanese railway guards reported that a bomb exploded on the...

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