Before dawn on February 26, a group of young officers from a Tokyo regiment, leading fully armed enlisted men, went to the homes of several liberal statesmen and slaughtered them. The Premier and Prince Saionji narrowly escaped the assassins; but General Watanabe, the inspector general of military education, Takahashi, the venerable and able finance minister, and Admiral Saito, keeper of the privy seal and one of the closest advisers of the emperor, were all murdered.
The conspirators had hoped to seize the government by this bold move, and for a while Tokyo was divided into two armed camps. Within a few days, however, the rebels were persuaded to capitulate in the face of overwhelming military might brought against them by the group around the throne, which for once took a determined stand. The ringleaders of the revolt were severely punished, but the militarists as usual emerged from the incident nearer their goal of complete domination.
The next step in the extremist policy of direct action was to start another supposedly local war of conquest. The Japanese militarists, on one pretext or another, had been pushing from Manchuria into North China and Inner Mongolia, slowly winning control over the war lords and the business interests of these regions; but during these years the Chinese Nationalist government had been steadily growing stronger in Central and South China and even gaining influence in the north. The Chinese Nationalists were bitterly opposed to the special privileges of all foreign powers, and it was becoming evident that the old days of happy hunting for concessions and territories in China were