At the heart of the military-fascist program in Japan, just as in
Germany and Italy, lay a demand for territorial expansion. The army
extremists made careful plans for a series of bold moves. First,
Manchuria and Mongolia were to be conquered, then China, then the
rest of Asia. In the past decade we have seen this seemingly wild and
visionary program translated into reality to an extraordinary degree.
In fact, the actual course of Japan’s foreign policy has followed it
very closely.
With territorial expansion was linked an economic idea--that of
regional self-sufficiency, or the “bloc economy.” In 1931, Manchuria
was called Japan’s “economic life-line.” In 1932-33 the watchword was
the “Japan-Manchoukuo economic bloc.” After 1937 the demand was for
a “Japan-China-Manchoukuo bloc.” Finally, the slogan today is for a
“Greater East Asia,” to include the rich territories of Indo-China,
Malaya, the East Indies and the Philippines.
What the army leaders were chiefly seeking through this program was
to overcome Japan’s dependence on the international market. They were
proposing a basic alternative to Shidehara’s plan for the peaceful
development of international trade. In 1930-31 they had seen Japan’s
foreign trade suddenly collapse, plunging the country into an economic
crisis. They were determined that this should not happen again. The
answer, they felt, lay in extending Japan’s political control over
a vast region. The markets and raw materials of such an area, they
thought, would make Japan economically independent of the rest of the
world.