Japanese Aggression 1929-1939 

The desire for expansion, which many Japanese felt was vital to ensure national survival, was increased by the onset of the worldwide Depression in 1929. Japan suffered severely from the slump, with its rural economy particularly badly hit. As a direct response to the distress at home, the first move was made by the Japanese army of occupation in southern Manchuria, the strongly pro-nationalist Kwantung Army. In September 1931, an alleged act of aggression by Chinese troops at Mukden (actually fabricated by the Japanese) was used as a pretext for the Kwantung Army to occupy the whole of Manchuria. 

The invasion, which was widely popular in Japan, had two important consequences. It demonstrated the weakness of the civilian government, which had been powerless to stop the campaign, and began a period where the armed forces were the predominant influence in Japanese politics. It also had a profound effect on Japan's international situation. Despite further Japanese aggression, against Shanghai in January 1932, Britain and America did little. Strategically, military action was not feasible as Japan was too far away. Economically, neither country wanted to damage the valuable trade they had built up by the 1930s. However, to the West, it was now clear that Japan, which had defied the League of Nations by moving against Manchuria, was a danger to the status quo. 

Japan left the League in 1933 after being censured for its actions in Manchuria. In 1933 and 1935, Japan annexed further territory to gain control of China north of the Great Wall. In 1934, in violation of the international "open door" agreement, Japan warned other powers that it considered China as within its commercial sphere of influence. In January 1936, having failed to win equality with Britain and America, Japan withdrew from the naval limitation agreements first signed in Washington in 1921. In November 1936, in an attempt to check Soviet expansionism in the Far East, Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany. 

On 7 July 1937, after a minor incident at the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking, war broke out between Japan and China. Any remaining vestiges of Western tolerance evaporated; Japan had now renounced all the elements of the collective security system established at Washington in 1921. Peking and Tientsin fell quickly but, with the stiffening of Chinese resistance, the Japanese soon realised it would not be the short campaign they envisaged. In August, bitter fighting broke out in Shanghai. In December, the Japanese captured Nanking, the Nationalist capital, amid scenes of savage brutality. The Japanese Army, which by now had over 700,000 troops in China, won impressive victories in 1938. But the vastness of the country and the increasing use of guerilla tactics by the Chinese inexorably sucked the Japanese into a war of attrition, which would endure until 1945. 

By 1939, the war was costing $5m per day, adversely affecting Japan's industrial expansion and restricting its ability to pay for the vital finished goods and raw materials it needed from the rest of the world. Clashes with Soviet forces in Mongolia brought heavy defeats. In August the Anti-Comintern Pact fell into abeyance as Nazi Germany signed a Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union. By September 1939, little credibility remained in Japan's policy of expansion. Then on the other side of the world one event transformed the situation: war broke out in Europe.

top