Japanese intervention in Siberia
일본의 시베리아 출병
The military intervention of 1918–1922 in which the Imperial Japanese Army sent troops into the Russian Maritime Provinces and Siberia, ostensibly to rescue the Czechoslovak Legion and guard Allied war supplies. The United States asked for 7,000 men and the Japanese government agreed to 12,000, but more than 70,000 eventually went in and occupied every port and major town east of Chita. The army stayed on after the other Allies left in 1920, withdrew from Vladivostok on 25 October 1922, and held northern Sakhalin until 1925.
In depth
In February 1918 the Japanese Army General Staff and the Army Ministry set up a "Siberia Planning Committee" to explore whether the Tsarist collapse offered a chance to free Japan from any future Russian threat by detaching Siberia as an independent buffer state. That January the navy had raced the battleships Iwami and Asahi to Vladivostok ahead of a British cruiser. When President Wilson asked in July for 7,000 Japanese troops as part of a 25,000-strong coalition to rescue the Czechoslovak Legion, the Terauchi Masatake cabinet, after heated debate in the Diet, agreed to send 12,000 but under Japanese command alone. Large-scale landings began on 8 August; by the end of the month 18,000 men had arrived at Vladivostok and another 6,000 had moved through Manchuria to Manzhouli, and on 18 August General Otani Kikuzo took command of all the Allied forces. By early November there were more than 70,000. The Japanese refused to go west of Lake Baikal; they held the ports of the Maritime Provinces and the main towns east of Chita and backed Grigory Semyonov’s Special Manchurian Detachment. By 1920 zaibatsu such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui had opened offices in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Nikolayevsk-on-Amur and Chita, bringing more than 50,000 civilian settlers.
When the other Allies left Vladivostok in 1920, the Japanese stayed, chiefly for fear of communism spreading so close to Korea and Manchuria. The Gongota Agreement of 1920, however, obliged them to evacuate Transbaikalia, which brought down Semyonov’s regime that October. Japan occupied northern Sakhalin in retaliation for the Nikolayevsk incident and gave military support to the Provisional Priamur Government in Vladivostok. Under diplomatic pressure from the United States and Britain and growing domestic opposition to the human and economic cost, the Kato Tomosaburo cabinet announced the withdrawal on 24 June 1922, and the last soldiers left Vladivostok on 25 October. The troops on northern Sakhalin left only in May 1925, after the Soviet–Japanese Basic Convention of January 1925. Japanese deaths are given in English sources either as some 5,000 from combat and illness or as 1,399 killed and 1,717 dead of disease, and the cost exceeded 900 million yen. The Diet accused the army of misrepresenting the size of the force, misappropriating secret funds and backing figures such as Ungern, whose atrocities had reached the press; the intervention tore Japan’s wartime unity apart, setting the army against the government and reviving factional strife within the army.