Did Imperial Japan plan on conquering all of China?

The Japanese wanted to CONTROL China (never really gave well thought out reason for WHY they wanted to, just that they did). One of the things that led to some of the excesses/outright war crimes by the IJA was the frustration creates when the Chinese simply refused to collapse, regardless of what happened on the battlefield.

The Japanese as a state did not really want to control or conquer China, in my estimation. They would have been okay as long as China was not hostile or occupied by hostile powers such as the Soviet Union. This would keep Chinese markets available to Japanese firms.

The Japanese military, especially the Imperial Japanese Army, was a different animal. The IJA was obsessed with a mainland foothold and in particular Manchuria, where battles had been fought in 1895 and 1905. The IJA's continued relevance to Japanese politics hinged on there being some external threat, which China fulfilled quite nicely as both an object of colonial expansion and a burgeoning bogeyman.

These points were hammered into Japanese ultra-nationalist rhetoric in the 1920s and 1930s.

The bogeyman aspect manifested itself varyingly as resurgent Chinese nationalism turning mainland Asia into an anti-Japanese giant, or as the threat of Western or communist powers hijacking the Chinese state to the disadvantage of Japan. The colonial aspect manifested in the supposed need for a "Manchurian lifeline" that would sustain Japanese economic growth in light of a deadlock that came about around the time of the Great Depression.

In sum, it was IJA political ambition riding on economic and geopolitcial fears as well as a good dose of Japanese ultra-nationalism that brought about the outright annexation of Manchuria and by extension the overall war against China as well as the later Pacific War. Everything was rooted in the fact that the Imperial Army and Navy had managed to hijack Tokyo and that not being a coherent decision-making institution, these military factions just tried to one-up each other until they got nuked.

EDIT: The main thing to take away from this is that the Japanese military, not the Japanese state or nation, was primarily responsible for the war. Of course most of the country was to some extent complicit, but that's still a different matter.
 
They learned from the most successful colonizers in the world of course..

Not really , if they did they would have known how to rule of a country for decades and even a century or two without the constant revolts in China.
They would have known there are limits on what you can do and still succeed.

Not necessarily. The bigger factor to that was the start of hostilities with China keeping the most jingonistic officers preoccupied abroad and allowed the government to break up the most radical powerbases with reassignments and bureaucratic maneuvers during the war. Most famously that was why Yamashita was removed from command, indicating the drop in influence by the most extremist/ideological factions.

If the people running Japan in WWII were not the most jingoistic of the Japanese how batshit insane were they? :eek::eek::eek:
 

raharris1973

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That still did not stop Tojo and his successors from needing to fend off assassination attempts throughout the war, though the success and frequency of such attempts were still reduced fro the above reasons.

This was a thing for real? Continued assassination threats an attempts against senior officers throughout the war? Where is a good place to read about this.
 
Nah, if the Japanese planned on conquering China they would send a force to invade Somalia as a diversion, divide the army into three groups to confuse the enemy and include no less than seventy-four ruses into an already complicated plan written in Swedish so the Navy couldn't read it.
 
Control yes, conquer as in physically occupying every square inch as Korea, no. Where the line between territories occupied/owned by Japan (like Manchukuo) and the rest of China where the economy was subordinated to Japanese interests, Japan had military outposts/basis, and Japanese were first class persons and Chinese second class at best who knows. There was no equivalent for Gneneralplan Ost, it was more keep moving forward until China surrenders.

All of Japanese strategy in China, and later in WWII, was simply "we are Japanese, we have the Yamato spirit, thus we will succeed and things like industrial capacity and population are irrelevant."
 
The Japanese wanted to CONTROL China (never really gave well thought out reason for WHY they wanted to, just that they did). One of the things that led to some of the excesses/outright war crimes by the IJA was the frustration creates when the Chinese simply refused to collapse, regardless of what happened on the battlefield.

Wasn't it to pursue the "line of advantage," read prove to the world it had the largest, ahem?
 
The Japanese as a state did not really want to control or conquer China, in my estimation. They would have been okay as long as China was not hostile or occupied by hostile powers such as the Soviet Union. This would keep Chinese markets available to Japanese firms.

I'm thinking the 21 Demands basically disproves this. The writing was done by a "liberal" politician, Shigenobu.
 
It depends on both the specific year and how you define conquest; Japanese war aims in 1930 (admittedly, technically before the war started) were different from Japanese war aims in 1935 were different from Japanese war aims in 1938 to Japanese war aims in 1940. It would take a lot of text to enumerate all of it, but essentially, what started as an attempt to maintain extensive colonial influence over China eventually ballooned into a need to defend a large puppet state and force the ROC to come to terms with Japan, a task which later was found would be largely impossible without in effect conquering all of China.
 
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