From the 1930s to the 1940s, Japan launched a 14-year war of aggression against China. In the early stages of the war, Japan also clamored to occupy China for three months, but with the continuous development of the war, the pace of the Japanese army on the Chinese battlefield became slower and slower. At the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Japanese army in North China even dared not go out of the building, and had to use the weapons in their hands to exchange grain with the local people or the Eighth Route Army. So where did Japan get the courage to invade China?
Japanese Ambition
In fact, Japan's ambition before World War II was not only to invade China, but to conquer the world. In the 19th century, the famous Japanese scholar Nobuchi Sato proposed that Japan should expand its power throughout Asia and extend its homeland defense to far away from home. By the 1920s, Japan proposed a three-step strategy of occupying northeast China first, then using northeast China as a springboard to occupy all of China, and then using China's resources and manpower as a support to dominate the entire world.
This theory was widely sought after by the Japanese people at that time and became the main reason for the rapid development of Japanese militarism. It can be said that Japan at that time was crazy, and ignorance and arrogance made Japan at that time feel that it could defeat any country in the world, so Japan invaded China.
How Japan's ambitions were formed
However, what contributed to Japan's ignorance and arrogance had a lot to do with the three generations of Chinese qing governments, Beiyang governments, and nationalist governments. At the end of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the Qing government was constantly retreating in the face of the powers including Japan, and the Sino-Japanese Naval Battle of The First Sino-Japanese War allowed Japan to directly complete the initial primitive accumulation and complete the initial industrialization development.
After that, the Beiyang government and the Nationalist government continued to back down in the face of Japan, giving Japan the illusion that any country was easy to deal with. At that time, the famous Japanese military figure Nogi Hidori even had the idea that tactics were higher than strategy, and Nogi Hidori, as the teacher of Emperor Hirohito of Japan, naturally instilled this view in Hirohito. Perhaps in the eyes of the Japanese at that time, as long as a certain tactical victory was achieved, the enemy would retreat strategically.
Japanese infiltration into China
Based on this thinking, Japan has been actively planning to invade China after the Sino-Japanese War in order to realize their ambition of world domination. China's transition from the Qing government to the Nationalist government is not a modern regime in the true sense of the word, and the control at the bottom is quite weak. Therefore, China at that time was infiltrated into a sieve by Japan, and Japanese spy agents emerged endlessly on Chinese soil.
At that time, the Japanese army even had a clearer and clearer map of China than the Chinese army, and looking at the map of China drawn by the Japanese army at the beginning, the rivers and lakes, traffic, geographical information and other situations were clear at a glance. Truth be told, if a country is known to this extent by the enemy in a war, then the country has already lost half of it in this war.
Therefore, when Japan dared to invade China, in addition to its own ambitions and arrogance, it was also related to the poverty and weakness of China's modern period. No one knows whether Japan has confidence in dominating the world, but in any case, Japan was very confident in occupying all of China at that time, otherwise there would not have been a slogan of destroying China in three months.