Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 606, The Final Frontier, Part 2.

In his book, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, Dr. Matsusaka Yoshihisa lays out a pretty clear

explanation of how Japan ended up as the predominant power in Manchuria after the Russo-Japanese

war.

Japan's leaders, he said, had followed a simple logic of opportunity.

In other words, one conquers Manchuria for the same reason one climbs Mount Everest,

because it is there.

Doing so proved easy enough to justify after the fact.

As he puts it, quote, strategic geography and the looming

threat of a vengeful Russia provided strong grounds to justify the commitment to Manchuria.

Moreover, aggressive concession hunting remained, at least in Japanese perceptions, the norm among

great powers active in China. Having failed to acquire a sphere of its own before 1905, Japan could only leap at the opportunity

offered in Manchuria to even the score.

For the more ambitious among Japanese imperialists, the thinly settled an underdeveloped

lands north of the Great Wall, promised room for the nation's growth, and the fact

that the territory was rather loosely controlled by the government in Beijing made it vulnerable

to encroachment in a manner not possible elsewhere in China.

But it is, of course, one thing to say, it is possible to take this land. It's another to

figure out what you're going to, you know,

actually do with it once you do. Who was actually going to run these new Japanese holdings,

consisting of the Liaodong Peninsula and the South Manchuria Railway? At least three different

groups tried to stake a claim. The army, the foreign ministry, and the home ministry, which managed much of the Japanese mainland from prefectural governments up to policing, and wanted a stronger hand in colonial affairs.

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