Word: itagaki
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Japan's other enemies were Russia and China. Itagaki as War Minister, excusing his protracted failure to close the "Chinese Incident" and justifying bigger & bigger war budgets, stamped China's Chiang Kai-shek as a personal enemy to be exterminated. He repeatedly pointed to the U.S.S.R. as a Communist peril and an Asian rival to be driven from Japan's ordained sphere. Less often, less pointedly in the middle '30s, when Japan was shaping the final blows to come, did he and other military spokesmen refer to the U.S. as an enemy. But the U.S. never...
Sharpen the Blade. A unique segment of the Japanese army is the Kwantung army, and Itagaki is its master. He and his companions in conquest shaped it for a single purpose: the extension of Japanese sway over northern Asia. The creation of Manchukuo achieved part of this aim; only attack on Russian Asia can complete the scheme...
...special status of Itagaki's army testifies to the quality of his military and political planning, the importance of his sphere. His Kwantung army is responsible, not to the War Office in Tokyo, but to the Emperor himself. In this-to the Japanese-vital respect, the Kwantung army is on a par with the Japanese army as a whole...
...attack: by land and air from northwestern Manchukuo, by land across the wide but easily passable Gobi (which, for all its fearsome reputation, is more like Nebraska and the Dakotas than the Sahara). An alternate rail line, several hundred miles inside the Russian border, is far from completion. Itagaki's invaders, attacking the Trans-Siberian, will also be assaulting Russian Asia's key cities: Chita, a junction point on the Trans-Siberian; Khabarovsk, a new factory center which is also the headquarters of General Stern's armies; Blagoveshchensk, now almost within shell range of the Japanese...
...Fool and His Power. Thus does Seishiro Itagaki preach the possibilities and rewards of North Asian conquest. For this he has prepared his Kwantung army. Now he weighs the coming of August and September, the two months of all the year when climate along the border best favors assault. Now, if ever, Russia is weak...