There could be no doubt that the Japanese army in Manchuria had been eminently successful. At relatively small military cost, and with only a temporary loss in exports to China because of boycott activities, the army had brought a vast new area under Japanese control, rich in natural resources and inhabited by some 30,000,000 industrious Chinese. It was a promising first step toward the creation of the self-sufficient economic empire which would make Japan invulnerable to economic or military attack.
The people as a whole accepted this act of unauthorized and certainly unjustified warfare with uncritical admiration. Many of the business men and bureaucrats, instead of denouncing the militarists for acting against the will of the government and therefore against the will of the emperor as interpreted by the government, happily accepted this expansion of the national domain and attempted to justify the acts of the military before a critical world public. The Japanese government, in fact, steadfastly maintained the fiction that there had been no war and called the whole conquest of Manchuria simply the “Manchurian incident.”
Meanwhile, other military extremists at home had brought a sudden end to party rule by another form of direct action—political assassination. A group of young army and navy officers, claiming they were attempting to free the emperor from evil advisers, assassinated the Premier on May 15, 1932. The government leaders, while condemning this act, tacitly accepted it as judgment against party government, and set up a compromise “National Government” with a cabinet made up of a central bloc of professional bureaucrats, with other