ABSTRACT
On 18 September 1931 the Japanese army in Manchuria felt provoked by the anti-Japanese activities on the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway line. They moved into townships and occupied arterial highways in the south and centre of Manchuria. They encountered little opposition and in the following six weeks drove the Chinese armies out of southern Manchuria. This came to be known to the Japanese as ‘the Manchurian incident’, to the foreign community as ‘the Manchurian crisis’ and to some Chinese as ‘the North-eastern War’.1
