Word: manchuria
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...BRIGHT-EYED 14-YEAR-OLD, AKIRA OGASAWARA JOINED THE JAPANESE army, partly because the recruiters promised him a ride in an airplane. Instead of getting his flight, he was assigned to a secret medical unit that performed experiments on prisoners in Manchuria. Now 65 and a construction worker, he is still tormented by the memory of his two years with Unit 731 as it worked on developing a "germ bomb," which Tokyo hoped would help win World War II. "I myself did not put any prisoner under the knife," he tells a mostly middle-aged audience of about 50 people...
Reading about the events before the Second World War, a few events have always puzzled me. Why, for instance, did Europe's most powerful nations allow Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia to stand unopposed? Up until that point, the new League of Nations had succeeded in ensuring that several conflicts did not explode...
Couldn't the great powers see that allowing aggression to stand would only lead to a wider war? Apparently not. Their rationale for inaction against Japan was that Manchuria was a disputed area anyway and that intervention was not practical. Britain and France were consumed by internal worries and not in the mood for a far-flung foreign adventure. When 1935 rolled around and Italy invaded Ethiopia, the League did have the backbone to impose sanctions. But they lacked the will to make sure they struck, and Italy swallowed up its catch...
...over the future of China, which had been in turmoil ever since the collapse of the Manchu Empire in 1911. Though Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek claimed that his Canton- based Kuomintang represented the entire republic, local warlords ruled much of the country, notably the huge northern territory of Manchuria. The Japanese, who had blocked a number of Russian incursions into Manchuria, were moving in to gain control of the region's plentiful coal and iron, which Japan sorely lacked...
...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...