Lest not forget: 9/18 Incident

Today marks the 76th anniversary of the 9/18 Incident, or Mukden Incident as better known in the West. The incident formally signalled the start of the 14 year Sino-Japanese War.

We cannot forget what happened during WWII. We must continue our press the Japanese parliament to formally recognized their sin. And we must continue to pressure the Japanese government to make denial of their WWII sin a criminal act, just like what denying the Holocaust would cost one in the West.

Here's an wiki excerpt of the incident:

The aim of Japanese junior officers in Manchuria was to provide a pretext that would justify Japanese military invasion and replace the Chinese government in the region with either a Japanese or a puppet one. They chose to sabotage a railway section in an area near Liutiao Lake (Traditional Chinese: 柳條湖).

The fact was that the area had no official name and was not militarily important to either the Japanese or the Chinese. But it was only eight hundred meters away from the Chinese garrison of Beidaying (Traditional Chinese: 北大營), which was stationed by troops under the command of the "Young Marshal" Zhang Xueliang. The alleged Japanese plan was to attract Chinese troops by an explosion and then blame them for having caused it to provide a pretext for a formal Japanese invasion.

In addition, to make the sabotage appear more convincingly as a calculated Chinese attack on an essential transportation target — thereby masking the Japanese action as a legitimate measure to protect a vital railway of industrial and economic importance — the Japanese press labeled the site Liutiaogou (Traditional Chinese: 柳條"溝") or Liutiaoqiao (Traditional Chinese: 柳條"橋"), which meant "Liutiao Ditch" and "Liutiao Bridge", respectively, when in reality the site was a small railway section laid on an area of flat land.

The choice to place the explosives at this site was to preclude the extensive reconstruction that would have been necessitated had the site truly been a railway bridge.

Colonel Itagaki Seishiro, Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, Colonel Kenji Doihara, and Major Takayoshi Tanaka[2] had laid complete plans for the incident by May 31, 1931. An important part of the scheme was to construct a swimming pool at the Japanese officers' club in Mukden. This "swimming pool" was actually a concrete bunker for two 9.2-inch artillery pieces, which were brought in under complete secrecy.

The plan was executed when officers of the Shimamoto Regiment, which guarded the South Manchuria Railway, arranged for sappers to place explosives near the tracks, but far enough away to do no real damage. At around 10:20PM (22:20), September 18, the explosives were detonated. However, the explosion was minor and only a 1.5 meter section on one side of the rapenisil was damaged. In fact, a train from Changchun passed by the site on this damaged track without difficulty and arrived at Shenyang at 10:30PM (22:30).

Invasion of Manchuria

On the morning of September 19, the two artillery pieces installed at the Mukden officers' club opened up on the Chinese garrison nearby, in response to the alleged (by the Japanese) Chinese attack on the railway. Zhang Xueliang's small airforce was destroyed and the Chinese soldiers fled their destroyed Beidaying barracks as five hundred Japanese troops attacked the Chinese garrison of around seven thousand.

The Chinese troops, mostly irregulars or new conscripts, were no match for the experienced troops the Japanese had prepared for the attack. By the evening of September 19, 1931, the fighting was over and the Japanese had occupied Mukden at the cost of five hundred Chinese and only two Japanese lives.

Zhang Xueliang, under implicit approval from Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Government to adhere to the nonresistance policy, had already urged his men to not put up a fight or contest any attack, and to store away any weapons in case the Japanese invaded. Therefore, the Japanese soldiers proceeded to occupy and garrison the major cities of Changchun, Antung, and their surrounding areas.

Whenever fighting broke out, it was usually due to miscommunication between the central government and the Chinese troops who were supposed to have been ordered to be nonresistant. However, in November Ma Zhanshan the governor of Heilongjiang began resistance with his provincial army, followed in January by Generals Ting Chao and Li Du with their loyal Kirin provincial forces. Within five months of the Incident, the invasion of Manchuria had overrun all the major towns and cities in the three north-eastern provinces of Liaoning (where Mukden was), Kirin, and Heilongjiang bringing them under Japanese control. However opposition to the Japanese was only beginning.

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