Kenji Doihara

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Doihara Kenji
Occupied Japan
Cause of death
Execution by hanging
Allegiance
Siberian Intervention
Second Sino-Japanese War
World War II
AwardsOrder of the Rising Sun

Kenji Doihara (土肥原 賢二, Doihara Kenji, 8 August 1883 – 23 December 1948) was a Japanese

general in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, he was instrumental in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria
.

As a leading intelligence officer, he played a key role to the Japanese machinations that led to the occupation of large parts of China, the destabilization of the country, and the disintegration of the traditional structure of

Manchurian drug trade
and the sponsor behind many underworld activities in Japanese-occupied China.

After the end of World War II, he was prosecuted for

sentenced to death
, and hanged in December 1948.

Early life and career

Doihara in army cadet uniform, 1903
Assassination of Zhang Zuolin, 4 June 1928

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-ranking 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

IJA 1st Division
from 1927 to 1928.

He learned to speak fluent

Chinese dialects, and with this, he managed to take a position in military intelligence. From that post in 1928, it was he who masterminded the assassination of Zhang Zuolin, the Chinese warlord who controlled Manchuria, devising a scheme to detonate Zuolin's train as it traveled from Beijing to Shenyang. After that he was made military adviser to the Kuomintang Government until 1929. In 1930, he was promoted to colonel
and commanded IJA 30th Infantry Regiment.

Member of the "Eleven Reliable" clique

Doihara's performance was recognized, and by 1930 he was assigned to the

amoralism and pro-capitalism.[4] It is not quite clear whether Doihara joined the movement for ideological or opportunistic reasons, but in any case, from then on his military career accelerated. In 1931, he became head of the military espionage operations of the Japanese Army of Manchuria in Tianjin. The following year, he was transferred to Shenyang as head of the Houten Special Agency, the military intelligence service of the Japanese Kwantung Army
.

"Lawrence of Manchuria”

A section of the Liǔtiáo railway where Suemori Komoto under Doihara's orders planted the bomb that triggered the Japanese invasion in Manchuria. The caption reads "railway fragment".
Harvest of poppy in Manchukuo used for opium production

While at Tianjin, Doihara, together with Seishirō Itagaki engineered the infamous

Mukden Incident by ordering Lieutenant Suemori Komoto to place and fire a bomb near the tracks at the time when a Japanese train passed through. In the event, the bomb was so unexpectedly weak and the damage of the tracks so negligible that the train passed undamaged, but the Imperial Japanese Government still blamed the Chinese military for an unprovoked attack, invaded and occupied Manchuria. During the invasion, Doihara facilitated the tactical cooperation between the Northeastern Army Generals Xi Qia in Jilin, Zhang Jinghui in Harbin and Zhang Haipeng at Taonan in the northwest of Liaoning
province.

Next, Doihara took the task to return former

Kawashima Yoshiko
, a woman well-acquainted with the Emperor, who regarded her as a member of the Chinese Imperial Family, he succeeded in bringing him 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

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 Ding 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 advice". During the next months 150,000 soldiers, 18,000 gendarmes and 4,000 secret police came into the newly founded protectorate. He used them as an occupying army, imposing slave labour and spreading terror to force the 30 million Chinese inhabitants into abject submission.[5]

Ma's fame as an uncompromising fighter against the Japanese invaders survived after his defeat and so Doihara made contact with him offering a huge sum of money and the command of the puppet state's

volunteer force, on 1 April 1932, he led his troops to Qiqihar, re-establishing the Heilongjiang Provincial Government as part of the Republic of China
and resumed the fight against the Japanese.

From 1932 to 1933, the newly promoted

IJA 12th Division
until 1936.

For the key role he played in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, he earned the nickname "Lawrence of Manchuria," a reference to

T.E. Lawrence had fought to liberate, not to oppress people.[6]

Second Sino-Japanese War and Second World War

Doihara in a press photo in Tokyo during 1936, by then a Lt. General

From 1936 to 1937, Doihara was the commander of the 1st Depot Division in Japan until the

Northern and Eastern Henan, where his division opposed the Chinese counterattack in the Battle of Lanfeng
.

After 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.

In 1940, Doihara became a member of 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

Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore
until 1945.

Returning to Japan in 1945, Doihara was promoted to

1st General Army
.

Criminal activities

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 to weaken public resistance by using every possible kind of action, including deliberately fueling criminality; fostering drug addiction; sponsoring terrorism, assassinations, blackmail, bribery, opium trafficking, and racketeering; and spreading every kind of corruption in the almost-ungovernable country.[8] The extent of his activities and covert operations is 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.

After the occupation of Manchuria, the Japanese secret service, under his supervision, soon turned Manchukuo into a vast criminal enterprise in which rape, child molestation, sexual humiliation, sadism, assault, and murder became institutionalized means of terrorizing and controlling Manchuria's Chinese and Russian populations. Robbery by soldiers and gendarmes of the

Kempetai, arbitrary confiscation of property, and unabashed extortion became common. 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 the conditions, but Tokyo ignored them and so they were silenced. The ritual suicide of Gensui Baron Mutō Nobuyoshi, who allegedly had left a note to the emperor, Hirohito, pleading for mercy for the people of Manchuria, was in vain.[9]

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 the organizations, he soon managed to control a large part of the opium traffic in China, using the money earned to fund his covert operations.[10][11]

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. The scheme also created a pool of addicted victims desperate to offer any kind of service to secure a daily dose of opium.[12][13]

He initially gave food and shelter to tens of thousands Russian

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 they worked under inhuman conditions. The use of heroin and opium was promoted to them as a way to tolerate their miserable fate. 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.[14][15]

Winning the necessary support from the authorities in Tokyo he persuaded the Japanese tobacco industry Mitsui of Mitsui Zaibatsu to produce special cigarettes bearing the popular to the Far East trademark "Golden Bat". Their circulation was prohibited in Japan, as they were intended only for export. Doihara's services controlled their distribution in China and Manchuria where the full production was exported. In the mouthpiece of each cigarette a small dose of opium or heroin was concealed, and by this subterfuge millions of unsuspecting consumers were added to the ever-growing crowds of drug addicts in the crippled country, simultaneously creating huge profits. According to testimony presented at the Tokyo War Crimes trials 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 during the trial that the annual revenue was estimated by the Japanese military at 300 million dollars a year.[16]

Given the chaotic situation in China, the corruption Doihara methodically spread did not take long to reach the very top. In 1938, Chiang had eight generals, all in command of Chinese divisions, executed when it was found that they were informers for Doihara's services. This heralded a wave of executions of high-ranking Chinese 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 did not have lasting results.[citation needed]

Prosecution and conviction

His arrest, accused for war crimes
During his trial before the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. First in the front row from left to right
Last writing of the Class-A War Criminals (Kenji Doihara, Iwane Matsui, Hideki Tojo and Akira Muto)
Last writing of the Class-A War Criminals (Kenji Doihara, Iwane Matsui, Hideki Tojo and Akira Muto)
Kenji Doihara in 1948

After the

war criminal together with other members of the Manchurian administration responsible for the Japanese policies there. He was found guilty on counts 1, 27, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, and 54 and was sentenced to death, while his close colleague Naoki Hoshino, financial expert and director of the Japanese State Opium Monopoly Bureau in Manchuria, was sentenced to life imprisonment. According to the indictment, as tools of successive Japanese governments they: "... pursued a systematic policy of weakening the native inhabitants' will to resist ... by directly and indirectly encouraging the increased production and importation of opium and other narcotics and by promoting the sale and consumption of such drugs among such people."[17] He was hanged on 23 December 1948 at Sugamo Prison.[18]

See also

References

  1. ISBN 9780816060016
    , 2006
  2. ISBN 9780385016094
    , Doubleday, 1974
  3. ISBN 9781846032172
    , 2008
  4. ^ Sims, Japanese Political History Since the Meiji Renovation 1868–2000
  5. ISBN 9780714656908
    , 2005
  6. ISBN 0-714-65690-9
    .
  7. ISBN 9780674018280
    .
  8. ^ The peace conspiracy: Wang Ching-wei and the China war, 1937-1941, vol. 67, Harvard East Asian Series, The East Asian Research Center at Harvard University, Harvard University Press, 1972
  9. ISBN 9780714656908
    , 2005
  10. ISBN 978-0-385-01609-4
    , Doubleday, 1974
  11. ISBN 9780816060016
    , 2006
  12. ^ Secret servants: a history of Japanese espionage, p.128, Ronald Sydney Seth, ASIN: B0007DM4XG, Straus and Cudahy, 1957
  13. ISBN 9781580860154
  14. ISBN 9780385016094
    , Doubleday, 1974
  15. ISBN 978-0714656908
    , 2005
  16. ISBN 9780834800809
  17. ISBN 0275957594
  18. ^ Maga, Judgment at Tokyo

Books

External links
Military offices
Preceded by
Kotaro Nakamura
Commander, IJA Eastern District Army

May 1943 – Mar 1944 		Succeeded by
Preceded by
none
Commander, IJA 7th Area Army

Mar 1944 – Apr 1945 		Succeeded by
Preceded by Inspector General of Military Training
Apr 1945 – Aug 1945 		Succeeded by
Preceded by
Gen Sugiyama
 Commander, IJA 1st General Army
Sept 1945 – Sept 1945 		Succeeded by
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kenji Doihara.


Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kenji_Doihara&oldid=1217435220"