The Plot
Kwantung Army Colonel Seishirō Itagaki and Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara devised a plan to invade Manchuria. Ishiwara presented the plan at the Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, and it was approved to be launched, but only following a major incident started by the Chinese. However, when the Japanese Minister of War Jirō Minami dispatched Major General Yoshitsugu Tatekawa to Manchuria for the specific purpose of curbing the insubordination and militarist behavior of the Kwantung Army, Itagaki and Ishiwara knew that they no longer had the luxury of waiting for the Chinese to respond to provocations, but had to stage their own.
Itagaki and Ishiwara chose to sabotage the rail section in an area near Liǔtiáo Lake (柳條湖 → liǔtiáohú). The area had no official name and was not militarily important to either the Japanese or the Chinese, but it was only eight hundred metres away from the Chinese garrison of Beidaying (北大營 → běidàyíng), where troops under the command of the "Young Marshal" Zhang Xueliang were stationed. 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 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 "Liǔtiáo Ditch" (柳條溝 → liǔtiáogōu) or "Liǔtiáo Bridge" (柳條橋 → liǔtiáoqiáo), 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 rebuilding that would have been necessitated had the site actually been a railway bridge.
Read more about this topic: Mukden Incident
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