Eighty-three years ago on Sept. 18, a Japanese Kwangtung Army lieutenant placed dynamite at a small section of Liutiaohu on the South Manchurian Railroad, which was owned and operated by the Japanese, to create a conflagration for which the Chinese would be blamed, thus creating an excuse to attack a Manchurian Army garrison in nearby Beidaying. The purpose of the plot was the conquest of Manchuria.

The plot concocted by the Kwangtung Army worked. The Liutiaohu Incident escalated into the Mukden or Manchurian Incident that lasted from Sept. 18, 1931, through May 31 the following year when the Tangku Truce was signed between Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. After the Liutiaohu Incident, the Kwangtung Army, with the support of Japan’s Korean Army, quashed Zhang Xue-liang’s Manchurian Army and drove it out of Manchuria in no time. It then crossed Shanhaiguan to invade China until the cease-fire was concluded at Tangku. In the meantime, Henry Puyi, the last Qing emperor of China, was made the emperor of Manchukuo.

China appealed to the League of Nations one day after the outbreak of the Liutiaohu Incident, whereupon a Lytton commission was formed to investigate the Chinese complaints. The Lytton Report, completed by the investigation led by Victor Bulwer Lord Lytton, the second Earl of Lytton of the United Kingdom, and approved by the League of Nations on Oct. 2, 1932, warned its member states against recognising Manchukuo because it was created as a puppet regime by Japan that was all but named the aggressor. Japan withdrew from the League of Nations when it adopted the Lytton Report, and went on its way to build an enlarged empire of the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere through an undeclared war against China first and by launching its Great East Asia War in 1941 to occupy the whole of Southeast Asia plus Burma. The Great East Asian War, kicked off by the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, destroyed the new Empire of Japan.

As the Mukden Incident occurred in 1931, quite a number of Chinese historians insist that the Second Sino-Japanese War lasted 14 years rather than eight years. As a matter of fact, the Japanese continued expanding their sphere of influence in north China in accordance with the Tanaka Memorial of 1927, an alleged strategic planning document submitted to Emperor Hirohito. Only five years after the Tangku Truce, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident started the four-year undeclared war between the Republic of China and Japan. After Pearl Harbor, the Republic of China declared war on Japan. Less than four years later, on Aug. 15, 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allies to end World War II. Incidentally, the Memorial was submitted by Prime Minister Giichi Tanaka, who laid down the strategy for Japan’s conquest of Asia first by taking over Manchuria and Mongolia and then China to establish its hegemony in the region.

Japan’s neoconservative leaders and their supporters haven’t learned the history of the 14-year Sino-Japanese war or tried to ignore it. Most of the Japanese people now do not know that the rogue imperial army colonels meticulously planned the Liutiaohu Incident for the conquest of Manchuria to realize the ambition of Tanaka, who was a general himself. They were taught that Japan restored Puyi to the throne to rule Manchuria where his ancestor Nurhaci was the emperor of the Manchu. Their school history textbooks teach that the Japanese imperial army made “advances” to China rather than invaded it to continue Japan’s new empire-building that wound up in an Allied occupation of Japan for six long years.

Would Prime Minister Shinzo Abe order a revision of the history textbooks to make sure that China, Korea and most of the Southeast Asian nations do not suspect Japan of resurrecting expansionist militarism?

(Editorial, China Daily)

(Asia News Network)