Daisaku Kōmoto

Daisaku Kōmoto was a middle-ranking officer who in June 1928 decided, on his own initiative, to change the course of East Asian history. As senior staff officer of the Japanese Kwantung Army he organised the assassination that killed the ruler of Manchuria and head of the government in Beijing, Marshal Zhang Zuolin. The assassination did not bring what he expected, but the impunity he enjoyed became an example for the officers who three years later staged the Mukden Incident and seized the whole of Manchuria. The government that tried to punish him fell. Kōmoto was transferred to the reserve, and then for more than a decade held lucrative posts in the economy of occupied China. He died a prisoner of the Chinese communists.

An officer from Hyōgo

He was born on 24 January 1883 in the village of Mikazuki in Sayō District, Hyōgo Prefecture, the second son of a wealthy landowner. He chose a military career: he went through the cadet schools in Osaka and Tokyo, and in November 1903 graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy as an infantry officer. He was in the same class as General Maresuke Nogi’s son Yasunori, who was killed soon afterwards at Port Arthur. In the Russo-Japanese War the young Kōmoto was seriously wounded.

In 1914 he graduated from the Army War College, which opened the way to senior posts. He spent most of his service on Chinese affairs. He was a staff officer of the Japanese troops stationed in central China, worked in the General Staff and as assistant military attaché at the legation in Beijing, and also lectured at the Army War College. He belonged to the circle of so-called China experts in the Japanese army – officers who knew the country at first hand and had become convinced that a China divided into warlords’ spheres of influence offered Japan great opportunities, but that Chinese nationalism might soon take them away.

In the Kwantung Army

In March 1926 Kōmoto, then a lieutenant colonel, was transferred from a regiment in Kokura to the Kwantung Army staff at Port Arthur (Lüshunkou) as senior staff officer, and he was soon promoted to colonel. This army, formed in 1919 from the garrison that Japan had kept in Manchuria since the Treaty of Portsmouth, guarded the Kwantung Leased Territory and the South Manchuria Railway. Its officers saw themselves as the guardians of Japan’s gains on the continent, paid for in blood in the wars with China and Russia.

In his memoirs Kōmoto described the Manchuria of 1926–1928 as a country where hostility towards the Japanese was growing, where the authorities obstructed their leasing of land and their business, and where Zhang Zuolin was building railway lines to compete with the Japanese railway and seeking American capital. He accused Zhang’s Japanese advisers and the diplomats in Mukden of servility. He was convinced that the question of Manchuria and Mongolia could be settled only by force. A few weeks before the assassination he wrote to a friend that nothing would happen “if one or two Zhang Zuolins die like dogs”, and that “this time he will definitely do it”.

In the spring of 1928 Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were approaching Beijing, and in May they clashed with the Japanese in the Jinan incident. The Kwantung Army command, headed by General Chōtarō Muraoka, prepared to move beyond the railway zone to disarm the Chinese troops withdrawing into Manchuria and take control of the whole region. The Prime Minister, Giichi Tanaka, halted the operation at the last moment. According to later accounts Muraoka was then considering an assassination of Zhang, and Kōmoto, who had at first talked him out of other plans, took the whole affair upon himself.

The Huanggutun assassination

Kōmoto prepared the attack at a spot that Zhang’s guards could not control: where the Beijing–Mukden line passed under a bridge carrying the Japanese South Manchuria Railway, a few kilometres from Mukden. He entrusted its execution to Captain Kaneo Tōmiya of the railway guard unit, and the charges were laid by sappers sent from Korea. The bodies of Chinese drug addicts killed by the Japanese were left at the scene, with planted evidence that they had been Kuomintang agents. On 4 June 1928 at 5.23 a.m. the charge exploded under the passing train. Zhang Zuolin died a few hours later.

The political plan failed. Kōmoto had counted on chaos breaking out, Manchurian troops attacking the Japanese and the Kwantung Army gaining a pretext to occupy Mukden. Zhang’s generals kept calm, the Japanese troops were recalled, and power passed to the murdered man’s son, Zhang Xueliang, who in December 1928 submitted to Chiang Kai-shek’s government. The false trail convinced no one: one of the Chinese addicts escaped with his life, and the wires led to a Japanese guard post.

Impunity

Prime Minister Tanaka soon learned the truth and in December 1928 assured Emperor Hirohito that Kōmoto would face a court martial. The army and most of the ministers, however, blocked a trial. According to accounts from the circle of Kinmochi Saionji, Kōmoto threatened that if he were put on trial he would reveal all the army’s plots. In 1929 he was transferred to the staff of the 9th Division in Kanazawa, and in the summer of that year he was suspended from duty. Sources differ on the exact dates of these decisions. When Tanaka presented the outcome to the Emperor in the form of disciplinary penalties, Hirohito showed his displeasure, and on 2 July 1929 the government resigned. In July 1930 Kōmoto was formally restored to service and the next day transferred to the reserve. He spent a year in Kyoto, where, as he wrote, he studied economics and politics and became confirmed in his conviction that Japan had to settle the question of Manchuria.

In the shadow of Manchukuo

Kōmoto did not break off his contacts with the army. He knew well the officers who were preparing the plan to take over Manchuria: Kanji Ishiwara had joined the Kwantung Army staff in the autumn of 1928, while Kōmoto was still his superior, and Seishirō Itagaki took over his post in 1929. According to the statements he made after the war in a Chinese prison, in 1931 he helped the army raise money and make contacts with civilian circles in preparing the Mukden Incident. After the creation of Manchukuo in 1932 he became a director of the South Manchuria Railway Company, and in the mid-1930s president of a company that merged the coal mines of Manchuria. He was on good terms with the Emperor of Manchukuo, Puyi, and with the warlord of Shanxi province, Yan Xishan, which made him a useful intermediary for the Japanese.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, in the early 1940s, he took charge of the Shanxi Sangyō company in Taiyuan, which in occupied Shanxi province managed mines, steelworks and industrial plants taken over from the Chinese and working for Japan’s needs. The industry of occupied northern China relied to a large extent on the exploitation of Chinese workers, including forced labour.

After the war

After Japan’s surrender in 1945 Kōmoto did not return home. The government of the Republic of China took over his company but kept him on as its chief adviser. Kōmoto persuaded many Japanese employees to stay in Taiyuan and, as chairman of the association of the Japanese there, worked with Yan Xishan, whose troops, reinforced by several thousand former Japanese soldiers, were fighting the communists in the civil war. When the communists captured Taiyuan in April 1949, Kōmoto was taken prisoner and, as a war criminal, sent to the war criminals’ detention centre in Taiyuan. There he made statements in which he admitted organising the assassination of Zhang Zuolin and attributed responsibility to the Kwantung Army. He died in prison on 25 August 1955, aged 72. His ashes were returned to Japan in December 1955, and his funeral in Tokyo in January 1956 was attended by many former officers and Manchukuo officials. The eulogy was written by the nationalist ideologue Shūmei Ōkawa.

Significance

Kōmoto never stood trial, either in Japan or before the Tokyo tribunal. The Japanese public learned the truth about the assassination only from General Ryūkichi Tanaka’s testimony before that tribunal in 1946. In December 1954 the monthly Bungei Shunjū published under his name the memoir “I Killed Zhang Zuolin”, written down by his brother-in-law, the writer Reiji Hirano. Theories later appeared in Japan that the assassination had been carried out by Soviet intelligence and that Kōmoto’s statements had been extorted. Historians have not accepted them, because the involvement of Kōmoto and his men is confirmed by numerous documents and accounts from 1928 and 1929, including the findings of the Japanese military police that reached Prime Minister Tanaka.

The Kōmoto affair exposed the mechanism that led Japan to war. A middle-ranking officer killed the head of a foreign state, the army shielded him from punishment, and the government that wanted to punish him fell. The officers who began the conquest of Manchuria in September 1931 learned the lesson. From then on, action “on the spot”, taken without Tokyo’s consent and then presented as a fait accompli, became the rule in the Japan of the 1930s.