Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 607, The Final Frontier, Part

3.

In retrospect, the year 1911 was a watershed moment in terms of the trajectory of Japan's

position in Manchuria.

Up until that point, the South Manchuria Railway Company, Montetsu, was clearly a vehicle

for Japanese influence, the center of a sphere of economic influence over the southern

half of Manchuria, but the SMR was also explicitly a business operating to make money.

It was not a directly colonial enterprise in the sense of being a spearhead for Japanese settlement

or conquest beyond the initial territorial concessions Japan had already gained.

In fact, before 1911, one of the most common complaints against Montetsu came from Japanese

businesses already operating in China, such as the East Asian Tobacco Company, whose board

complained vigorously to the Japanese consulate in the region that the South Manchuria Railway

was giving better shipping rates to its chief rival, the British American Tobacco Company.

To which the South Manchuria Railway Board answered that British American tobacco shipped

out of Dalian, which was the SMR's main port that its charter required it to make use of.

East Asian tobacco, meanwhile, shipped from the older Chinese-run port of Yinkol outside

of both the army-run Guandongleast territory and

Montetsu's own territory.

Montetsu's goal simply put was to make as much money off the land and infrastructure it

controlled as possible.

It was not interested in helping out other Japanese businesses or advancing the general

interests of Japan as a whole,

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