Kenji Doihara

Kenji Doihara
General Kenji Doihara
Nickname	Lawrence of Manchuria
Born	8 August 1883 Okayama prefecture, Japan
Died	23 December 1948 Tokyo, Japan
Allegiance	Empire of Japan
Service/branch	Imperial Japanese Army
Years of service	1904–1945
Rank	General
Commands held	IJA 14th Division, IJA 5th Army, IJA 7th Area Army (Singapore)
Battles/wars	Siberian Intervention Second Sino-Japanese War World War II

In this Japanese name, the family name is "Doihara".

Kenji Doihara (土肥原 賢二, Doihara Kenji^?, 8 August 1883 – 23 December 1948) was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II. He was instrumental in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria for which he earned fame taking the nickname 'Lawrence of Manchuria', a reference to the Lawrence of Arabia.

As a leading intelligence officer he played a key role to the Japanese machinations leading to the occupation of large parts of China, the destabilization of the country and the disintegration of the traditional structure of the Chinese society in order to diminish reaction to the Japanese plans using highly unconventional methods. He became the mastermind of the Manchurian drug trade, and sponsor to a wide variety of underworld activities in China intended to finance Japanese intellegence operations and to undermine Chinese military stability. After the end of the World War II he was prosecuted for war crimes in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. He was found guilty, sentenced to death and was hanged in December 1948.

Biography

Early life and career

Kenji Doihara was born in Okayama city, Okayama Prefecture. He attended military preparatory schools as a youth, and graduated from the 16th class of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1904. He was assigned to various infantry regiments as a junior officer, and returned to school to graduate from the 24th class of the Army Staff College in 1912.

Doihara longed for a high-ranked military career, but his family's low social status stood in the way. He therefore contrived to use his 15-year-old sister as a concubine for a prince, who in exchange, rewarded him with a military rank and a posting to the Japanese embassy in Beijing, China as assistant to the military attaché Gen. Hideki Tōjō.^[1][2][3] Doihara could speak fluent Mandarin Chinese, and was fluent in several other Chinese dialects as well. With his linguistic abilities and knowledge of Chinese history and culture, he was soon earmarked for military intelligence duties. He spent most of his early career in various postings in northern China, except for a brief tour in 1921-1922 as part of the Japanese forces in eastern Russia during the Siberian Intervention.

Meanwhile, Doihara worked his way up the military ladder, and was attached to IJA 2nd Infantry Regiment from 1926 to 1927 and IJA 3rd Infantry Regiment in 1927. In 1927 he was part of an official tour to China and then attached to IJA 1st Division from 1927 to 1928. He was then made military adviser to the Chinese Nationalist Government until 1929. In 1930 he was promoted to colonel and commanded IJA 30th Infantry Regiment.

The “Lawrence of Manchuria”

Doihara's performance was recognized, and he was assigned to Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office in 1930. He headed military espionage operations from the Japanese Army’s Tientsin office. The following year he was transferred to Shenyang as head of the Houten Special Agency, another espionage office under the control of the Japanese Kwantung Army where he served until early 1932.

While at Shenyang, Doihara, together with Colonel Itagaki Seishirō were instrumental in engineering the Mukden Incident, and (as part of the following invasion of Manchuria) suborning the cooperation of Northeastern Army generals Xi Qia in Kirin, Zhang Jinghui in Harbin and Zhang Haipeng at Taonan in the northwest of Liaoning province.

Next, Doihara was dispatched by Itagaki to return former Qing dynasty emperor Pu Yi to Manchuria. The plan was to pretend that Pu Yi had returned to resume his throne by popular demand of the people of Manchuria, and that although Japan had nothing to do with his return, it could do nothing to oppose the will of the people. In order to carry out this plan, it was necessary to land Pu Yi at Yingkou before that port froze; therefore, it was imperative that he arrive there before 16 November 1931. Doihara successfully brought Pu Yi into Manchuria within the deadline.

In early 1932 Doihara was sent to head the Harbin Special Agency of the Kwantung Army, where he began negotiations with General Ma Zhanshan after he had been driven from Tsitsihar by the Japanese. Ma's position was ambiguous; he continued negotiations while he supported Harbin-based General Ting Chao. When Doihara realized his negotiations were not going anywhere, he requested that Manchurian warlord Xi Qia advance with his forces to take Harbin from General Ting Chao. However, General Ting Chao was able to defeat Xi Qia’s forces and Doihara realized he would need Japanese forces to succeed. Doihara engineered the Harbin Incident to justify their intervention. This resulted in the IJA 12th Division under General Jirō Tamon coming from Mukden by rail and then marching through the snow to reinforce the attack. Harbin fell on 5 February 1932. By the end of February, General Ting Chao retreated into northeastern Manchuria and offered to cease hostilities, ending Chinese formal resistance. Within a month the puppet state of Manchukuo was established under Doihara's supervision who had named himself mayor of Mukden. He then arranged for the puppet government to ask Tokyo to supply "military advisors". During the next months 150,000 soldiers, 18,000 gendarmes and 4,000 secret police poured into the newly founded protectorate to secure Japanese rule.^[4]

Because of Ma's fame in fighting the Japanese invasion, Doihara made contact with Ma and offered him a huge sum of money to defect to the new Manchukuoan government and Manchukuo Imperial Army. Ma agreed and flew to Mukden in January 1932, where he attended the meeting that founded the state of Manchukuo and was appointed as War Minister of Manchukuo and Governor of Heilongjiang Province. However, after secretly using the Japanese money to raise and reequip a new volunteer force, he led his troops from Tsitsihar on 1 April 1932 reestablishing the Heilongjiang Provincial Government for the Republic of China and continued to resist the Japanese.

From 1932 to 1933 the newly promoted Major General Doihara commanded IJA 9th Infantry Brigade of IJA 5th Division. After the seizure of Jehol in Operation Nekka, Doihara was sent back to Manchukuo to head Houten Special Agency once again until 1934. He was then attached to IJA 12th Division until 1936. However, according to the opinion of his military chief in Manchuria General Kanji Ishiwara, his heavy addiction to the opium contributed to his unreliability as an army officer.^[5]

Second Sino-Japanese War

From 1936 to 1937 Doihara was the commander of the 1st Depot Division in Japan until the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, when he was given command of the IJA 14th Division under the Japanese First Army in North China. There he served in the Beiping–Hankou Railway Operation and spearheaded the campaign of Northern and Eastern Henan, where his division opposed the Chinese counterattack in the Battle of Lanfeng.

Following the Battle of Lanfeng, Doihara was attached to the Army General Staff as head of the Doihara Special Agency until 1939, when he was given command of the Japanese Fifth Army, in Manchukuo under the overall control of the Kwantung Army.

Doihara Kenji in 1948

In 1940 Doihara became a member of the Supreme War Council, Head of the Army Aeronautical Department of the Ministry of War, and Inspector-General of Army Aviation until 1943. From 1940 to 1941 he was appointed Commandant of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. On 4 November 1941, as a general in the Japanese Army Air Force and a member of the Supreme War Council he voted his approval of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In 1943, Doihara was made Commander in Chief of the Eastern District Army . In 1944, he was appointed the Governor of Johor State, Malaya and commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore until 1945.

Returning to Japan in 1945, Doihara was promoted to Inspector-General of Military Training (one of the most prestigious positions in the Army) and commander in chief of the Japanese Twelfth Area Army. At the time of the surrender of Japan in 1945 Doihara was commander in chief of the 1st General Army.

Controversy

Doihara's activity in China vastly exceeded the normal behaviour of an intelligence officer. As chief of the Japanese secret services in China he worked out, put in motion and oversaw a wide series of activities systematically exploiting the occupied areas and disrupting Chinese social structure in the rest of the country in order to weaken public resistance. To this end, he used every possible kind of action, including deliberately fueling criminality, fostering drug addiction, sponsoring terrorism and spreading corruption in the almost ungovernable country. The extent of his activities and covert operations are still inadequately understood. According to Ronald Sydney Seth, his activity played a key role in shattering China's ability to confront Japan's expansion by generating chaotic conditions which prevented any mass reaction in the invaded country.

Robbery, rape, assault and murder by soldiers and gendarmes controlling Manchuria's Chinese and Russian population, and arbitrary confiscation of property and unabashed extortion became commonplace. Underground brothels, opium dens, gambling houses and narcotics shops run by Japanese gendarmes competed with the state monopoly syndicate of opium. Many conscientious Japanese officers protested these conditions, but Tokyo ignored them and consequently they were silenced. The ritual suicide of Field Marshal Nobuyoshi Mutō, who allegedly had left a note to the Emperor Hirohito pleading for mercy for the people of Manchuria, was in vain.^[6]

Doihara soon expanded his activity into the still unoccupied parts of China. By using about 80,000 paid Chinese villains known as Chiang Mao Tao, he funded hundreds of criminal groups, using them for every kind of social disturbance, turnover, assassinations and sabotage inside unoccupied China. Through these organizations he soon managed to control a large part of the opium traffic in China, using the money earned to fund his covert operations.^[7][8]

He hired an army of agents and sent them throughout China as representatives of various humanitarian organizations. They established thousands of health centers, mainly in the villages of the districts, for curing tuberculosis, which was then epidemic in China. By adulterating medicines with opium, he managed to addict millions of unsuspecting patients, expanding societal degeneration into areas which had been hitherto untouched by the increasing breakdown of Chinese society. This scheme also created a pool of addicted victims desperate to offer any kind of service in order to secure a daily dose of opium.^[9]

He initially gave food and shelter to about 100,000 Russian White émigré women who had taken refuge in the Far East after the defeat of the White Russian anti-Bolshevik movement and the withdrawal of the Entente and Japanese armies from Siberia. Having lost their livelihoods, and with most of them widowed, Doihara forced the women into prostitution, using them to create a network of brothels throughout China where the use of heroin and opium was promoted. Once addicted, the women were used to further spread the use of opium among the population by earning one free opium pipe for every six they were selling to their customers.^[10][11]

According to testimony presented at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East held in Tokyo in 1948, the revenue from the narcotization policy in China, including Manchukuo, was estimated as twenty to thirty million yen per year, while another authority^[who?] stated that the annual revenue was estimated by the Japanese military at 300 million dollars a year.^[12]

Doihara's methods reached into the core of the Kuomingtang army. In 1938 Chiang kai Shek was forced to execute eight generals commanding Chinese divisions when it was found that they were also inthe pay of Doihara. This heralded a wave of executions of high-ranking Chinese military and civilian officials found guilty for every kind of dealing with Doihara during the next six years of the war. To many westerners in touch with the Chinese leadership, the purges were without lasting results. ^[13]

Prosecution and conviction

After the war, Doihara was arrested by the American occupation authorities and prosecuted before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo for war crimes. Doihara was found guilty of Counts 1, 27, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, and 54 and was sentenced to death. He was hanged on 23 December 1948 at Sugamo Prison.^[14]

References

1. ^ Encyclopedia of War Crimes And Genocide, p.127, Facts on File, Leslie Alan Horvitz & Christopher Catherwood, ISBN 978-0816060016, 2006
2. ^ Encyclopedia of espionage, p.313, Ronald Sydney Seth, ISBN 978-0385016094, Doubleday, 1974
3. ^ The Enemy Within: A History of Espionage, p.221, Terry Crowdy, Osprey Publishing, ISBN 978-1846032172, 2008
4. ^ White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian,p.299, Jamie Bisher, Routledge, ISBN 978-0714656908, 2005
5. ^ An instinct for war: scenes from the battlefields of history, p.311, Roger J. Spiller, Harvard University Press, 2007
6. ^ White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian,p.299, Jamie Bisher, Routledge, ISBN 978-0714656908, 2005
7. ^ Encyclopedia of espionage, p.316, Ronald Sydney Seth, ISBN 978-0385016094, Doubleday, 1974
8. ^ Encyclopedia of War Crimes And Genocide, p.128, Facts on File, Leslie Alan Horvitz & Christopher Catherwood, ISBN 978-0816060016, 2006
9. ^ Encyclopedia of espionage, p.315, Ronald Sydney Seth, ISBN 978-0385016094, Doubleday, 1974
10. ^ Encyclopedia of espionage, p.315, Ronald Sydney Seth, ISBN 978-0385016094, Doubleday, 1974
11. ^ White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian,p.298, Jamie Bisher, Routledge, ISBN 978-0714656908, 2005
12. ^ Mitsui: Three Centuries of Japanese Business, pages 312-313, John G. Roberts, Weatherhill, ISBN 978-0834800809 1991
13. ^ Encyclopedia of espionage, p.318, Ronald Sydney Seth, ISBN 978-0385016094, Doubleday, 1974
14. ^ Maga, Judgment at Tokyo

Books

• Beasley, W.G. (1991). Japanese Imperialism 1894-1945. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198221681. 
• Barrett, David (2001). Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932-1945: The Limits of Accommodation. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804737681. 
• Bix, Herbert B (2001). Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-093130-2. 
• Fuller, Richard (1992). Shokan: Hirohito's Samurai. London: Arms and Armor. ISBN 1-85409-151-4. 
• Hayashi, Saburo; Cox, Alvin D (1959). Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War. Quantico, VA: The Marine Corps Association.. 
• Maga, Timothy P. (2001). Judgment at Tokyo: The Japanese War Crimes Trials. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2177-9. 
• Minear, Richard H. (1971). Victor's Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press. 
• Toland, John (1970). The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945. Random House. ISBN 0812968581. 
• Wasserstein, Bernard (1999). Secret War in Shanghai: An Untold Story of Espionage, Intrigue, and Treason in World War II. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395985374. 

External links

• Ammenthorp, Steen. "Kenji Doihara". The Generals of World War II. http://www.generals.dk/nation/Japan.html. 
• "Scholar, Simpleton & Inflation". Time Magazine. 1932-04-25. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,743625,00.html. Retrieved 2008-08-14. 

Military offices
Preceded by Kotaro Nakamura	Commander, IJA Eastern District Army May 1943 – Mar 1944	Succeeded by Keisuke Fujie
Preceded by none	Commander, IJA 7th Area Army Mar 1944 – Apr 1945	Succeeded by Seishirō Itagaki
Preceded by Shunroku Hata	Inspector General of Military Training Apr 1945 – Aug 1945	Succeeded by Sadamu Shimomura
Preceded by Gen Sugiyama	Commander, IJA 1st General Army Sept 1945 – Sept 1945	Succeeded by Yoshijirō Umezu

Persondata
Name	Doihara, Kenji
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1883
Place of birth	Okayama prefecture, Japan
Date of death	1948
Place of death	Tokyo, Japan