Japanese in Vladivostok

On 11 August 1918 the first units of the Japanese 12th Division went ashore at Vladivostok. This is the date the British weekly The Illustrated London News gave for the arrival of the Japanese vanguard, adding that another battalion disembarked the following morning. Japanese encyclopaedias and some American reports give 12 August as the start of the landing. On 5 August the Japanese General Staff had announced that the first echelon would reach Vladivostok around 10 August. The division, normally stationed at Kokura on the island of Kyushu and commanded by Lieutenant-General Ōi Shigemoto, received its mobilisation order on 2 August, the day the government in Tokyo announced its decision on the expedition, and embarked at the port of Moji.

Under Japanese command

Under the agreement with Washington, the supreme command of the Allied forces fell to the Japanese. On 9 August General Ōtani Kikuzō, one of the most distinguished Japanese commanders, was appointed commander of the Japanese Expeditionary Army in Vladivostok. As the senior officer on the spot, he was also to direct the whole expedition, which already included a British battalion from Hong Kong and a French colonial battalion from Indochina that had landed on 9 August. Ōtani arrived in Vladivostok and took command on 18 August. General Ōi meanwhile moved his headquarters to Nikolsk, today’s Ussuriysk, and his troops moved north, behind the front line on the river Ussuri, where the British, Czechoslovaks and Cossacks were barely holding back the Reds.

Numbers that grew

Japan had promised the Americans that its contingent would not exceed 12,000 men, but began enlarging it almost at once. On 13 August the Foreign Minister, Gotō Shinpei, informed the American ambassador that, by agreement with China, a brigade of about 1,700 men would move from southern Manchuria through Harbin to Manzhouli on the Russian border, where Red units and armed prisoners of war were pressing Ataman Grigory Semyonov. Tokyo maintained that troop movements on the Chinese side of the border had nothing to do with the intervention in Siberia. According to some studies, about 18,000 Japanese soldiers passed through Vladivostok by the end of August, and another 6,000 were sent through Manchuria. By November 1918 the number of Japanese in the Russian Far East and northern Manchuria exceeded 70,000.

A cool reception

The Americans arrived a few days after the Japanese. The 27th Infantry Regiment, which had sailed from Manila on 7 August, landed at Vladivostok on 15 and 16 August. The American consul, John Caldwell, reported that the inhabitants greeted the Allies in very different ways. When the Americans marched through the city on 19 August, the crowd cheered them, as it had the French earlier, while the British and Japanese had been received in silence. The British suffered from having arrived first, before the inhabitants understood what was happening. The silence towards the Japanese, however, was in the consul’s view an expression of deep dislike, which was not lessened by such small matters as Japanese sentries chasing passers-by off the pavement in front of their headquarters.

The Japanese 12th Division quickly went into action. At the end of August its units, together with the British, French, Czechoslovaks and Cossacks, routed the Reds on the Ussuri, and at the beginning of September they took Khabarovsk. Japanese troops remained in the Maritime Province until October 1922, longer than all the other intervention armies.