Word: kwantung
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...explosive force in the midst of this ferment was Japan's fractious Kwantung Army, originally sent to the Kwantung Peninsula just east of Beijing to protect Japanese rail and shipping interests in Manchuria. After ultranationalist Kwantung officers murdered the Chinese overlord of Manchuria, Tokyo installed a puppet regime in 1932 and proclaimed the independence of what it called Manchukuo. Despite calls for sanctions against Japan, outgoing President Herbert Hoover had no enthusiasm for a crisis, and the incoming President Roosevelt was preoccupied with the onrushing Great Depression...
...with the Cabinet on Sept. 3, they insisted on an October deadline for Konoye's diplomatic efforts. The Prince asked for a meeting with Roosevelt, but Hull was opposed, and Roosevelt, preoccupied with the increasing likelihood of war with Hitler, never answered. Konoye resigned on Oct. 16. Tojo, a Kwantung Army veteran who was then War Minister, became Premier...
...Japanese officer assigned to organize the overthrow of all this Blimpism was Colonel Masanobu Tsuji. A hard-eyed veteran of the Kwantung Army who made an intense study of jungle warfare, he tested what he had learned by training his troops in fierce heat, with little food or water. When they were crammed onto transport vessels for the stormy southward voyage, they carried pamphlets that said their mission was to free "100 million Asians tyrannized by 300,000 whites." To military headquarters in Tokyo, Tsuji confidently -- and pretty accurately -- predicted that if the war started on Nov. 3, "we will...
...after, a Japanese patrol checking the site reported that it had been fired upon by Chinese troops, even though the local warlord, an ally of China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, had kept his soldiers in their barracks to avoid clashes. At 11:30 p.m., Japan's Manchuria-based Kwantung army began attacking Chinese positions. By dawn they were joined by planes from the imperial colony of Korea. Quickly, Mukden was effectively under the empire's control. In the following months, the resource-rich region, more than thrice the size of prewar Poland, would be annexed. As for the railway...
Actually, the Mukden Incident of 1931 was not the first time Japan's Kwantung army had tried to seize Manchuria. In 1928 the army assassinated the Chinese warlord who ruled the region in hopes of grabbing the territory outright. But the Japanese government squashed any further moves and hushed up the army's involvement in the killing. In 1931, Tokyo again tried to stop the army. But renegade officers arranged for a geisha to distract and delay the envoy sent by the central government. Overtaken by events and well aware that the Manchurian offensive had won acclaim for the militarist...