The history of Japan's step-by-step invasion of China in modern period, starting decisively in 1931, and ultimately leading to the all-out war in the whole Asia-Pacific and Japan's defeat, is fairly well known by now, owing to the research work by the historians from many countries. But, until I saw a documentary film by Japan's NHK(Nihon Hoso Kyokai, Japan Broadcasting Corporation) the other day, I was unaware of the history of the puppet army Japan tried to build within Manzhouguo as a supporting force to Japan's own powerful army stationed there.
The film was entitled "The Manzhouguo Army--Under the Banner of the Cooperation of Five National Groups". Japan, in occupying the Chinese Northeast, also known as the Three Eastern Provinces, in 1931, and turning it into the territory of an outwardly independent state, Manzhouguo, the next year, made the Cooperation of the Five National Groups the official ideology. They refer to the Japanese, the Chinese who constitute the most of the residents, Manchurians, the descendants of the former dynastic rulers, Koreans who migrated there fleeing from the Japanese rule over the Korean Peninsula, and the Mongolians. They were supposed to be equal.
But the leadership officially resided in the hands of the Japanese. Manzhouguo was a monarchy. Japan smuggled out the deposed Chinese Emperor from Beijing and made him the Emperor there, "the last Emperor". The Ministers were all Chinese/Manchurians, but the real power resided with the Vice-Ministers, No.2 posts, who were all Japanese. Numerous land issues between the local Chinese peasants and Japanese/Korean immigrants were solved in favour of the latter, with Koreans legally treated as the Japanese.
The puppet state was in existence for 13 and a half years, and then collapsed with Japan's defeat. Would it be impertinent to ask if it would have continued longer if it had been given a constitution guaranteeing to the non-Japanese elite groups posts in the upper bureaucracy, and seats in the legislature, and the common people had been assured some of the fundamental rights, all irrespective of what groups they came from?
It is of course an entirely hypothetical, and purely academic, question. None of them, starting from the constitution, were in place when Japan collapsed. But when the Japanese who were ruling there, and specially the SMRC(South Manchurian Railway Company, the mighty economic machine in control of the railways and coal there) studied the history of the British rule over India, did they not learn those lessons?
And, while studying the British rule, did they not study the Indian Army, a unique creation of the Raj, which developed from an auxiliary force to the British Army into a full-fledged one. The British, to a large extent, transferred power in 1947 not to the Indians in general but to the highly trained parliamentarians, higher civil bureaucrats and the higher military officers they had brought up during the preceding three to four decades.
What about the Manzhouguo Army? The above film says that a Military Academy was established in 1939, and the students included all of the above groups. There were 250 Chinese in one year alone. But many of them ultimately joined the Eighth-Route(Chinese Communist) Army in the end. A Korean survivor was saying that the war was after all Japan's war, not Korea's. Some Mongolians revolted, like Aung San's army in Burma, against Japan. The documentary says that the Mongolians especially worked hard to study the technologies from Japan in agriculture and other fields.
The Mongolians were mobilized in the war against the Soviet and the outer-Mongolian forces in 1939, and was beaten. Some was saying in the film that it was wrong to use them in the trench warfare. They are not fit for it. They are fit for the cavalry war. So another hypothetical and purely academic question would be, what would have been the consequences for the Mongolians, who were highly independent-minded, if the Soviets and the Outer-Mongolians had been repulsed at the border?
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