Quin Cho

“The Kwantung Army has its roots in the aftermath of the Russell Japanese War. According to the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russell Japanese War, Japan inherited a lease on the Liaodong Peninsula, of which the Kwantung or Guangdong Peninsula is a part. The Kwantung Garrison was founded in nineteen o six to protect these Japanese assets, especially, which was especially salient because of fears among the Japanese army general staff that the Russians would want to fight a war of revenge over Manchuria.”

“Silk was quite significant for many ordinary Japanese. Two in five rural households were involved in the silk trade and the collapse of export markets during the Great Depression led to a kind of evisceration of the peasantry and many of the kind of Imperial Japanese Army officers had were either descended from peasants themselves or knew men in the Imperial Japanese Army under their command that were of peasant origin. And this kind of familiarity with the peasantry led to many radical ideas proliferating most notably those of Kitaiki that advocated for a kind of national socialism that would redistribute much of the wealth from the corrupt oligarchs that were running the country and restore power to the emperor in the spirit of the Meiji restoration.”

“He finally believed that the West and the East were inevitably going to clash because these in his view were kind of shall we say diametrically opposite civilizations that had to essentially fight to establish custody over the world. And in Ishiwara's opinion, The US was the kind of leader of Western civilization. Japan was the leader of Eastern civilization and these countries would eventually go to war with one another. Now for Japan to triumph in its final conflict with The United States, in Ishiwadas opinion, it needed control of a massive hinterland in East Asia.”

“So the, so the concept of Gekokujo is a Japanese term that roughly means something along the lines of the lower overcoming the higher. It has its roots, I think, in kind of pre Tokugawa Japan and it's a concept that is kind of not that well known about outside of kind of World War II Kwantung Army specialists the Kwantung Army was the kind of foremost practitioner or was the foremost incubator for Gekokujo and basically in the twentieth century what Gekokujo was was these kind of middle ranking field officers majors and colonels taking the initiative on their own to conduct in offensive operations without the permission of their superiors in the army or in the government.”

“But one could certainly argue and I think I myself am more of the persuasion that the Mukden incident is the beginning of World War II in the Asia Pacific region because it leads to a series of events that eventually leads to the second Sino Japanese war and World War two in the Asia Pacific region as a whole. But in a broader sense, the Mukden incident directly leads to the kind of Kwantung army's annexation of or not annexation, the absorption of Manchuria, the establishment of a puppet state in Manchukuo. It's called the the fourteen year war. Right? That's how it's referred to.”

“For instance, Ishii Shiro, the head of unit seven thirty one, which was the Kwantung Army's bacteriological and biological warfare outfit in Manchuria that performed very heinous experiments on living, subjects, most notably, live vivisections, for example, was let go in exchange for the data he got being he gave it to the Americans and General MacArthur and, he was not prosecuted for his criminal activities.”

“Then you have guys like, Kishi Nobusuke, who during the Second World War was in Manchukuo as one of the directors of, I think, the General Affairs Board of the Machuquo government and his job was to oversee the kind of industrialization of Machuquo. But more importantly from the perspective of many Chinese, this industrialization entailed the enslavement and early deaths of billions of people. This was a essentially slave labor driven industrialization of Manchukuo and Kishi Nobusuke oversaw this and was not indicted and actually his grandson Abe Shinzo eventually became the prime minister of Japan in 2021 after Kishinobusuke was prime minister in Japan in the late fifties. The CIA, I think, helped install him as the prime minister in the late fifties as a kind of bulwark against the Soviet Union.”

“I would say that to some extent Japan has not sufficiently apologized for the atrocities that it committed during the Second World War in East Asia. For example, you have the Rising Sun enzyme of the Imperial Japanese Navy which is still in use, right? A lot of people compare it to the swastika and for good reason, because this kind of the rising sun with the rays, that flag is, was the standard of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy when they were rampaging throughout the Asia Pacific region and committing a wide variety of heinous atrocities that led to the depths of tens of millions of people.”