All events · The World Wars

Japan's Seizure of Manchuria and Agricultural Settlement

1931–1945 · East & Southeast Asia

Displacement Territory Seized Mass Killing

Displaced

320,000

Japan planned to send one million households, roughly five million people, to Manchuria over twenty years from 1936; in the event about 270,000 to 320,000 Japanese agricultural settlers went, including 86,530 members of the Patriotic Youth Brigade between 1938 and 1945. The land they received was largely bought under compulsion or expropriated from Chinese and Korean cultivators through the Manchuria Colonization Company, displacing an uncounted but far larger number of Chinese farmers; the Kwantung Army also forced villagers in guerrilla districts into fortified 'collective hamlets'. Settler figures come from Japanese colonization ministry records; the displacement of Chinese cultivators was never systematically counted.

Share of the population affected

1.1%

of the population of Manchuria, the three northeastern provinces, when Japan seized it, 1931

Killed

78,500–250,000

excess mortality incl. disease and starvation

Territory

1,300,000 km²

The three northeastern provinces of China, about 1.3 million square kilometres, were detached from Chinese authority after the Mukden incident of 18 September 1931 and constituted as Manchukuo in March 1932 under the last Qing emperor Puyi, with Jehol added in 1933. Japan controlled the state through the Kwantung Army and Japanese officials until the Soviet invasion of August 1945.

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What happened

Officers of the Kwantung Army staged an explosion on the South Manchurian Railway near Mukden on 18 September 1931 and used it as the pretext for occupying Manchuria, which was constituted the following year as the nominally independent state of Manchukuo. The League of Nations commission under Lord Lytton found in 1932 that the Japanese action could not be justified as self-defence and that Manchukuo did not rest on a genuine independence movement; when the League adopted the report in February 1933 Japan withdrew from the organisation. From 1936 Japan pursued a mass colonisation programme intended to place a million farming households in Manchuria, backed by a company that acquired land cheaply or by compulsion from Chinese cultivators, and by youth brigades of teenage boys. Around 270,000 settlers had gone by 1945. When the Soviet Union invaded in August 1945 the Kwantung Army withdrew southward and left the settler communities behind: of the more than 200,000 still in Manchuria, some 78,500 died in attacks, suicides, disease, starvation and exposure, and thousands of children were left with Chinese families. The repatriation of the survivors is treated separately.

Parties

The Japanese Kwantung Army seized Manchuria, installed the puppet state of Manchukuo and settled Japanese farmers on land taken from Chinese cultivators

Disputed

Japan maintained until 1945 that Manchukuo was an independent state responding to local self-determination, a claim the Lytton Commission and the Tokyo tribunal rejected; the scale of Chinese dispossession by the colonisation programme has never been quantified.

The denominator

Estimates for 1930-31 run at roughly 30-34 million, the great majority Han Chinese who had migrated from Shandong and Hebei over the preceding half century. The Manchukuo census of 1940 counted about 43 million, a rise driven by continued Chinese in-migration as well as Japanese and Korean settlement.

Manchuria's population grew by roughly a third during the occupation through continued Chinese migration, so a 1931 denominator is unstable across the event's span.

Where the baseline comes from

Manchukuoopen-edited
Manchuriaopen-edited

On the death toll

About 78,500 Japanese settlers died in 1945-46 during the Soviet invasion and the flight south, a figure from Japanese repatriation and prefectural records. Chinese deaths under the occupation of Manchuria - in the suppression of resistance, in forced labour on Japanese projects, and in the biological warfare experiments of Unit 731 near Harbin - are far less well counted; estimates for Chinese civilian deaths in the northeast across the whole occupation run into the hundreds of thousands.

Documented forms of violence

Destruction of PropertyForced LabourArbitrary DetentionMass Killing

Compulsory land acquisition for settlers, forced concentration of villagers into guarded hamlets, conscripted labour on military construction and the killing of suspected resisters are documented in Japanese colonial administrative records and in the findings of the Tokyo tribunal.

Formal findings

League of Nations Commission of Enquiry (Lytton Commission) (1933) — Reported in 1932 that Japanese military action in Manchuria could not be regarded as self-defence and that Manchukuo was not the product of a genuine independence movement; the League adopted the report in February 1933 — source
International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1948) — Found that the seizure of Manchuria in 1931 was an act of aggressive war and part of a conspiracy to dominate East Asia — source

Movements mapped

Nagano and other Japanese prefectures -> settlement villages in northern Manchuria270,000

Countries touched, on present-day borders

China, Japan

Related entries

Continued as: Repatriation of Japanese Settlers from Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan and Sakhalin
Japanese agricultural settlers who survived the 1945 Soviet invasion of Manchuria were among those repatriated to Japan after the war. 120,000 people are counted in both entries.