Japan leaves the League of Nations

On 27 March 1933 the Japanese government sent to the Secretary-General of the League of Nations in Geneva, Eric Drummond, notice of Japan’s withdrawal from the organisation. That same day Emperor Hirohito issued a rescript explaining to his subjects that Japan, while still desiring peace, could not remain in a League that did not understand its position on Manchuria. Japan had been one of the League’s founders and a permanent member of its Council from the start. It was the first great power to leave the system of collective security built after the First World War. Under the League Covenant the withdrawal took effect after two years, on 27 March 1935.

It is often written that Japan left because of the Lytton Report, which found that Manchuria belonged to China and that Manchukuo was not a genuinely independent state. This is a simplification. The immediate cause was the report adopted by the League Assembly on 24 February 1933, which was based on the Lytton Report but went further. In any case the decision had been taken earlier: on 20 February the government in Tokyo resolved that if the report were adopted Japan would leave the League, and it confirmed the final decision in March.

Manchuria before the League

When on 18 September 1931 the Kwantung Army staged the Mukden incident and began occupying Manchuria, China appealed to the League of Nations on 21 September. The League Council several times called on Japan to withdraw its troops, to no effect. Japan was a permanent member of the Council and could block its decisions, and the great powers wanted neither war nor sanctions in the Far East in the middle of the Great Depression. On 10 December 1931 the Council, with Japan’s own consent, decided to send a commission of inquiry to the area. The United States, which did not belong to the League, proclaimed the Stimson Doctrine of non-recognition of changes brought about by force on 7 January 1932.

The commission was headed by the British politician Victor Bulwer-Lytton, a former governor of Bengal. Its other members were the American General Frank McCoy, the French General Henri Claudel, the Italian Count Luigi Aldrovandi Marescotti and the German Heinrich Schnee, a former governor of German East Africa. The commission reached Japan at the end of February 1932, while the fighting in Shanghai was still going on, and then visited Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing and, for about six weeks, Manchuria, where Manchukuo had been proclaimed on 1 March. The report was signed in Beijing on 4 September and published on 2 October 1932.

Japan did not wait for its conclusions. On 15 September 1932 it signed a protocol with Manchukuo in which it became the first state to recognise it. The foreign minister, Kōsai Uchida, declared in parliament that Japan would defend its position “even if the country were turned to scorched earth”.

The Lytton Report

The report was carefully balanced. It acknowledged that Japan had special rights and interests in Manchuria, that the Chinese boycott and China’s fragmentation made it difficult to protect them, and that a return to the situation before 18 September was no solution. It found, however, that the actions of the Japanese army on the night of 18–19 September could not be regarded as legitimate self-defence, and that Manchukuo had not arisen from a spontaneous independence movement but had been organised by Japanese officers and officials, and lacked the support of the Chinese population. It proposed autonomy for Manchuria within a sovereign China, under the supervision of foreign advisers, most of them Japanese; the withdrawal of all troops; a special gendarmerie; and new treaties between China and Japan. On the explosion on the railway line near Mukden itself, the report did not decide who had caused it.

Japan rejected the report. In November 1932 its case in Geneva was presented by a specially dispatched delegate, the former vice-president of the South Manchuria Railway and member of parliament Yōsuke Matsuoka, known for his excellent English. On 8 December, at an extraordinary session of the League Assembly, he spoke without notes for over an hour, comparing Japan to Christ: crucified today by a world that in a few years would understand it. The matter went to the Committee of Nineteen, which spent two months searching for a compromise. Japan, however, rejected any solution that did not recognise Manchukuo, and China any solution that did.

24 February 1933

In mid-February the Committee of Nineteen presented a draft report under Article 15 of the League Covenant. It was based on the Lytton Report but was more unequivocal: it stated that sovereignty over Manchuria belonged to China, called for the withdrawal of Japanese troops to the zone of the South Manchuria Railway, and recommended that League members recognise Manchukuo neither de jure nor de facto. Japan meanwhile was widening the war. On 23 February it presented China with an ultimatum over the province of Rehe (Jehol), and Japanese and Manchukuo troops moved to occupy it, which opened the fighting for the Great Wall.

On 24 February 1933 the Assembly adopted the report by 42 votes to one, Japan’s. Siam (Thailand) abstained, and Chile did not vote. Matsuoka read a prepared statement declaring that Japan could not accept the report and that its cooperation with the League over the Sino-Japanese dispute had come to an end, and then walked out of the hall with the whole delegation. The often repeated story that he called out “sayonara” in Japanese as he left is, according to Japanese scholars, a later legend.

In Japan Matsuoka was welcomed like a victorious general. Newspapers that had earlier demanded withdrawal from the League wrote: “Farewell, League!” Matsuoka himself said in interviews that he had been defeated, because he had failed to persuade the world. The government of Prime Minister Makoto Saitō concluded that remaining in an organisation that had condemned Japan was impossible. Formal notice was given on 27 March.

China’s moral victory

For China the vote of 24 February was a diplomatic success, in which a major part was played by Wellington Koo, the Chinese assessor to the Lytton Commission and later one of the delegates in Geneva. Almost the whole world accepted that Manchuria belonged to China and that Manchukuo was a creation of the Japanese army. Apart from Japan, only a handful of countries recognised the new state in the following years – the first, in 1934, was El Salvador – chiefly Tokyo’s future allies: Italy, General Franco’s Spain, Germany and Hungary, and during the war the states dependent on the Axis.

It was, however, a victory with no effect on the ground. Just as the Assembly was voting, Japanese columns were marching on Rehe, and on 4 March they took its capital, Chengde, without a fight. Chinese public opinion, which since 1931 had placed its hopes in the League, learned that Geneva could condemn an aggressor but could not stop him. Chiang Kai-shek drew the conclusion that China had to gain time, avoid a major war, build up its army with the help of German advisers, and deal with the Communists first.

What the withdrawal changed

Formally nothing changed for Manchuria. The League imposed no sanctions and did not declare Japan an aggressor within the meaning of Article 16, and the great powers had no intention of defending China by force. Japan paid its contributions until 1935 and afterwards kept up contacts with some League agencies, especially the International Labour Organization, to which it belonged until 1940. It also kept the Micronesian islands in the Pacific, former German colonies, entrusted to it by the League. Instead of giving up the mandate it began to fortify them, and during the war they became bases of the Japanese fleet.

The political consequences mattered more. Japan placed itself outside the Versailles–Washington system that had until then restrained its expansion. Cut off from the League, it went its own way. In May 1933 it imposed the Tanggu Truce on China, which separated Manchuria from the rest of the country with a demilitarised zone. In 1934 it renounced the Washington Naval Treaty, in 1936 it walked out of the London Naval Conference, and in July 1937 it launched a full-scale war against China.

The first breach

Japan’s example did not remain an isolated one. In October 1933 the Germany of Adolf Hitler, who had been chancellor since January, withdrew from the League of Nations and the disarmament conference. In 1937 Italy, earlier punished with ineffective sanctions for its attack on Ethiopia, left the League. The three states that had left the League concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936 and November 1937, and in September 1940 the Tripartite Pact, negotiated on the Japanese side by the same Matsuoka, by then foreign minister.

The Manchurian affair showed that the League of Nations could not restrain a great power that broke its Covenant and the Kellogg–Briand Pact. Neither Britain and France, preoccupied with the economic crisis and with Europe, nor the United States, which did not belong to the League, did so. The lesson was not lost on Berlin and Rome. Historians often treat 1931 in Manchuria and 1933 in Geneva as the beginning of the road that led, by way of Abyssinia, the Rhineland and Munich, to the Second World War. For Japan, leaving the League was a step towards isolation, and in time towards alliance with Germany and Italy and war with Britain and the United States.