Mukden Incident, History and the Senkaku islands

Anti-Japan protests reignited across China on Tuesday, forcing Japanese firms in the country to suspend operations, as a crisis over a territorial dispute escalated on the anniversary of Japan’s pre-war invasion of its giant neighbor.
Relations between Asia’s two biggest economies faltered badly on the anniversary, with emotions running high on the streets.
The dispute over the uninhabited group of islands in the East China Sea—known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China—led to a day of anti-Japan protests which Japanese expatriates fear could peak later on Tuesday.

 Tuesday marks the Sept 18, 1931 “Mukden Incident” in which Japanese soldiers blew up a railway in Manchuria as a pretext to take control of the entire northeastern region.

 “Today is September 18, the anniversary of when Japan invaded China’s northern area, it is a good time to show them that we are prepared to fight,” said Fan Li, 31, wearing a T-shirt reading: “Diaoyu Islands are Chinese”.

On the evening of September 18, 1931, an explosion occurred on the tracks of the South Manchurian Railroad north of the Chinese city of Mukden (today Shen-yang). The railroad was owned and operated by an arm of the Japanese government and its tracks were patrolled by Japanese soldiers. Military leaders immediately blamed Chinese nationalists for the incident and began an occupation of the area; no authorization for this offensive had been given by the government in Tokyo.

Japanese soldiers, dispatched from the neighboring colony of Korea, were teamed with railroad security forces, then rapidly and methodically extended their control ever deeper into Manchuria. Mukden and Changchun fell quickly; all of Jilin was in Japanese hands by September 21. The Japanese moved with such precision that it was clear that the offensive had been carefully planned in advance and was not a spur-of-the-moment reaction to a provocative act.

The plot

Kwantung Army Colonel Seishirō Itagaki and Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara devised a plan to invade Manchuria. Ishiwara presented the plan at the Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, and it was approved to be launched, but only following a major incident started by the Chinese. However, when the Japanese Minister of War Jirō Minami dispatched Major General Yoshitsugu Tatekawa to Manchuria for the specific purpose of curbing the insubordination and militarist behavior of the Kwantung Army, Itagaki and Ishiwara knew that they no longer had the luxury of waiting for the Chinese to respond to provocations, but had to stage their own.
Itagaki and Ishiwara chose to sabotage the rail section in an area near Liǔtiáo Lake (柳條湖 → liǔtiáohú). The area had no official name and was not militarily important to either the Japanese or the Chinese, but it was only eight hundred metres away from the Chinese garrison of Beidaying (北大營 → běidàyíng), where troops under the command of the "Young Marshal" Zhang Xueliang were stationed. The alleged Japanese plan was to attract Chinese troops by an explosion and then blame them for having caused it, to provide a pretext for a formal Japanese invasion. In addition, to make the sabotage appear more convincingly as a calculated Chinese attack on an essential target – thereby masking the Japanese action as a legitimate measure to protect a vital railway of industrial and economic importance – the Japanese press labeled the site "Liǔtiáo Ditch" (柳條溝 → liǔtiáogōu) or "Liǔtiáo Bridge" (柳條橋 → liǔtiáoqiáo), when in reality, the site was a small railway section laid on an area of flat land. The choice to place the explosives at this site was to preclude the extensive rebuilding that would have been necessitated had the site actually been a railway bridge.

The incident

Colonel Seishirō Itagaki, Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, Colonel Kenji Doihara, and Major Takayoshi Tanaka had laid complete plans for the incident by May 31, 1931.^[8] An important part of the scheme was to construct a swimming pool at the Japanese officers' club in Mukden. This "swimming pool" was actually a concrete bunker for two 9.2-inch artillery pieces, which were brought in under complete secrecy.^[8]

A section of the Liǔtiáo railway. The caption reads "railway fragment".

The plan was executed when 1st Lieutenant Suemori Komoto of the Independent Garrison Unit (独立守備隊) of the 29th Infantry Regiment, which guarded the South Manchuria Railway, placed explosives near the tracks, but far enough away to do no real damage. At around 10:20 PM (22:20), September 18, the explosives were detonated. However, the explosion was minor and only a 1.5-meter section on one side of the rail was damaged. In fact, a train from Changchun passed by the site on this damaged track without difficulty and arrived at Shenyang at 10:30 PM