From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who Was Responsible?

ASIANPERSPECTIVE, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2007, pp. 193-208. Document FROM MARCO POLO BRIDGE TO PEARL HARBOR: WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE?* YomiuriShimbun WarResponsibilityReexamination Committee© The Yomiuri Shimbun, 2006 Summary Why did Japan's military and government leaders trigger the Manchurian Incident and then launch the Sino-Japanese War? Why did the nation opt to go to war with the United States and continue to fight recklessly? Wasn't it possible to end the war before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? To find answers to these questions, we, the War Responsibili­ ty Reexamination Committee, an ad hoc in-house panel of the Yomiuri Shimbun, delved thoroughly into, combed through and examined historical developments during the period from the early 1930s to 1945. The Yomiuri Shimbun presented its readers with its findings of a yearlong "War Responsibility" series end­ ing on August 15, 2006, the 61st anniversary of the end of World War II. We comprehensively touch on Japan's mistakes commit­ ted at various key points from the Manchurian Incident to the Soviet Union's entry into a war with Japan and named those who should chiefly be held responsible for each event. We elaborate upon the accountability of those who were so deeply responsible * Excerpt from the book From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who Was Responsible?, this summary appears with permission and is copyright of The Yomiuri Shimbun, 2006. For details on the book, visit The Daily Yomiuri Online at www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/info/book/. 194 Yomiuri Shimbun War ResponsibilityReexamination Committee and we summarize a host of historical lessons from which we should leave for the future generations to learn. The Yomiuri Shimbun decided to define the wars in East Asia and the Pacific Ocean as the "Showa War." This series of wars has been called the Great East War or the Second World War, the Pacific War, the 15-Year War, the Asia Pacific War or the Second World War. Each of these titles has some justifica­ tion, but they are not necessarily appropriate when considering factors such as the sense of resistance against certain ideologies, the period of the wars and the areas where fighting took place. Sino-Japanese War The starting point of the Showa War was the Manchurian Incident that took place in September 1931. It escalated to the Sino-Japanese War and finally led to the Pacific War. Manchuria is now known as Northeast China, where Japan gained an opportunity to establish a stronghold following its vic­ tory in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. As a result of that war, Japan acquired the Russian leasehold on Kwantung (Guandong) in the southern part of the Liaodong Peninsula and the Russian rights to the South Manchurian Railway Company that ran between Changchun and Port Arthur (Lushun). To protect these new interests, Japan dispatched troops to southern Manchuria. From the very beginning of the troop deployment, the Imperial Japanese Army cherished an ambition—to control the whole of Manchuria. The Manchurian Incident took place as members of the Kwantung Army, a unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, blew up a section of the South Manchurian Railway in Liutiaohu (Lake Liutiao), outside Mukden (presently Shenyang). Taking control of Mukden in a single day, the army began advancing into Jilin Province beyond its original garrison area. The main instigators of the incident were Kanji Ishihara and Seishiro Itagaki, staff officers of the Army. At the core of Ishihara's militarist thinking was the pursuit of the "Final World War Theory" to determine the Number One country of the world in a war between Japan and the United States, which he considered to be the greatest nations of the Eastern and Western civilizations, respectively. From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor 195 He said," The nation could be in a state of war for even 20 years or 30 years if we have footholds all over China and fully use them." Shigeru Honjo, commander of the Kwantung Army, initial­ ly opposed sending troops to Jilin. But he eventually yielded to Itagaki's persistence and decided to give the go-ahead to the deployment. Senjuro Hayashi, Commander of the Korea Army, the Japanese forces in Korea...