On July 7, 1937 a handful of Chinese and Japanese soldiers exchanged rifle-fire in the vicinity of the Marco Polo Bridge about thirty miles from Peking. This, minor fracas precipitated a sequence of events that soon propelled Japan into full-scale hostilities on the mainland—a war that was significantly to influence the course of Japanese-American negotiation in the fateful months leading up to the Pacific War. Many historians have portrayed the China incident as the consequence of a conspiracy by the Japanese military and as a repetition of a pattern of aggression identical with that of the Mukden Incident of 1931. With this approach, the Sino-Japanese war presents little apparent difficulty to our ascertaining why the fighting at the Marco-Polo Bridge occasioned a major war. The culprit is the Japanese military.

In recent years, the influence of the military on modern Japanese history has been the subject of several excellent analyses.1 Since these studies have sought to explain the major events of the prewar period, they concentrated more on the significance of army factionalism vis a vis political developments, than on the nature of this factionalism. The purpose of this article is to explore the tangled web of factionalism within the Imperial Army in the 1932–36 period. Since this topic presents many complex problems, it may help to review briefly the sources of information on army factions that appeared immediately after the end of the Pacific War.