Kōmoto Daisaku

Early Life and Military Career

Kōmoto Daisaku was born in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. Reference works differ on his dates: the Nichigai Twentieth-Century Japanese Biographical Dictionary gives 24 January 1882 to 25 August 1955, the Heibonsha World Encyclopedia gives 1883 to 1953, Kodansha’s Japanese Biographical Dictionary gives 24 January 1883 to 25 August 1953, and the Britannica International Encyclopaedia also records his death on 25 August 1955. He graduated from the Army Academy (15th class) and the Army War College and served in the Russo-Japanese War; in 1918 he took part in the Siberian Intervention as a staff officer of the Vladivostok expeditionary force, and also served as assistant military attaché at the legation in Beijing and head of the China section of the General Staff, and he joined the Futabakai, a group of mid-ranking officers formed around 1922. In 1926 he was promoted to colonel and posted to Port Arthur as senior staff officer of the Kwantung Army.

Planning the Huanggutun Incident

According to the Heibonsha World Encyclopedia, as the Nationalist Northern Expedition approached Beijing in May 1928 and the Fengtian army faced defeat, the Kwantung Army sought to use force to make Zhang Zuolin step down, set up a new regime and detach the three north-eastern provinces from China, and prepared to move towards Jinzhou; but Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi, who still intended to use Zhang, advised him to withdraw to Manchuria without fighting and did not approve the use of force by the Kwantung Army. Fearing that the chance to take control of Manchuria would slip away, Kōmoto plotted to kill Zhang in order to create an occasion for military action.

On his instructions, Captain Tōmiya Kaneo of the Independent Garrison directed engineers who laid explosives near the bridge where the South Manchuria Railway crossed the Beijing–Mukden line just before Shenyang station, and at 5.23 a.m. on 4 June they blew up Zhang’s special train. Tōmiya killed two Chinese labourers who had been hired in advance and planted on them a “secret letter” from the Nationalist army, to make it look as though the Nationalists were responsible. Zhang was badly injured and died soon afterwards; the Heilongjiang military governor Wu Junsheng, travelling with him, was killed outright. Kōmoto had hoped to provoke armed clashes in the confusion, but the Kwantung Army chief of staff Saitō Hisashi and others, who had not known of his plan, did not move the army, and the Fengtian side did not take the bait, so the plan came to nothing.

An article published by People’s Daily Online and reprinted by China News Service quotes Kōmoto’s post-war account, in which he says he attended the Eastern Conference in Tokyo as an aide, argued that diplomatic protests would no longer work with the Fengtian warlords, and declared that the leader had to be eliminated: there was no other way to solve the Manchurian problem than to get rid of Zhang Zuolin. The article says his later oral account of the affair was written up by historians as “I Killed Zhang Zuolin,” regarded as his confession.

According to the publisher Bungeishunjū, the truth became widely known only after the war through the testimony of former Major General Tanaka Ryūkichi at the Tokyo Trial, after which Kōmoto was commonly portrayed as a man who acted on his own and lit the fuse of the Sino-Japanese War. His granddaughter Kuwata Fumiko, in a 2018 book on “the real image of the man who killed Zhang Zuolin,” draws on family papers, including letters from army leaders, to argue that the bombing was neither an independent act nor aimed at seizing Manchuria, and that he did not blackmail the army by threatening to expose its plots; this view differs from the standard account in the reference works cited above.

Aftermath and Punishment

The truth was kept from the Japanese public. In January 1929 the opposition Minseitō pressed the government in the 56th Diet over what was called “a certain grave incident in Manchuria.” Tanaka at first intended, at the urging of the elder statesman Saionji Kinmochi and others, to make the facts public, but in the face of strong army opposition he confined himself to administrative penalties for those involved; rebuked by the emperor, his cabinet resigned in July 1929. According to the Britannica International Encyclopaedia, Kōmoto was suspended from duty as the ringleader in July 1929 and was transferred to the reserve in 1930. The Heibonsha encyclopedia argues that the failure to hold anyone properly accountable was one of the factors that encouraged Kwantung Army staff officers to plot the Manchurian Incident.

The Manchurian Incident and Business Career

After leaving active service, according to the Twentieth-Century Japanese Biographical Dictionary, he associated with Ōkawa Shūmei, became an adviser to the right-wing Jinmukai and was involved in the March and October Incidents of 1931; the Heibonsha World Encyclopedia and the Mypedia encyclopedia also record that he worked behind the scenes in the Manchurian Incident. After the founding of Manchukuo in 1932 he became a director of the South Manchuria Railway, in 1936 chairman of the Manchuria Coal Mining Company, and in 1943 president of the Shanxi Industrial Company in Taiyuan.

Remaining in Shanxi and Death in Taiyuan

After Japan’s defeat he did not return home but worked with Yan Xishan, becoming chairman of the Japanese Residents’ Club; the Heibonsha encyclopedia records that he took part in the Chinese Civil War. Wang Shilin, a Shanxi prosecutor who took part in the trials of Japanese war criminals, recalled that he was then an adviser to Yan Xishan’s Northwest Industrial Company. After the People’s Liberation Army captured Taiyuan in 1949 he was detained as a suspected war criminal and later held at the Taiyuan War Criminals Management Centre, where he died of illness.