1922 by Nick Rennison

Author:Nick Rennison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oldcastle Books
Published: 2021-06-21T12:39:35+00:00

Japanese Withdraw from Siberia

By the beginning of 1922, Japanese soldiers had been fighting in Siberia for four years. They had been part of an international force supporting White Russian troops in their campaigns against the Bolshevik Red Army. This coalition of soldiers from several nations, including Britain, America and Japan, had fallen apart by 1920 and the majority of the troops from other countries had departed. The Japanese stayed on. At one time, they had more than 70,000 soldiers in Siberia. The government had also encouraged major companies, including well-known names like Mitsubishi, to open offices in Vladivostok and other cities, and tens of thousands of Japanese civilians had moved to Siberia. Unlike other nations, Japan had shown a clear desire to remain there and some in the country harboured plans for permanent territorial acquisition but the costs of staying on proved ruinous. The army lost more than 5,000 men through fighting the Russians or through illness and hundreds of millions of yen were spent on the expedition. Increasingly, both political and military leaders in Japan raised their voices calling for withdrawal. On 24 June 1922, the government finally announced that all its troops would leave Siberia by the end of October. Morale amongst those soldiers still stationed there had long been low and there had been incidents in which orders had been disobeyed. Critics of the intervention feared the effects it was having on the army generally.

A new prime minister had taken office only 12 days earlier. Kato Tomosaburo had been Minister of the Navy and Japan’s leading delegate to the Washington Naval Conference which had met earlier in the year to discuss international disarmament. He could see little benefit in his country’s continued intervention in a foreign country and, despite opposition from some elements in the army, he brought it to an end. With hindsight, the Japanese intervention in Siberia can be seen as a forerunner of its far more serious and destabilising invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s.

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