The Japanese Foreign Ministry and China affairs: Loss of control, 1895-1938

The creation of supra-institutional agencies cutting across existing bureaucratic jurisdictions is a hallmark of Japan's devolution into war in the 1930s. This dissertation studies this phenomenon with focus on the Japanese Foreign Ministry's gradual loss of jurisdiction in diplomacy and administration in China in the period leading to full-scale war between China and Japan. The loss was derived from both internal flaws in the Ministry in its personnel system and bureaucratic organization, and external challenges to its authority from other agencies of the Japanese government.;The Japanese Foreign Ministry, through its consulates, was the principal agency of Japanese exploitation via treaty port imperialism in China. The description of the jurisdictions of Japanese diplomats in China both illustrates this exploitation and gives background to the policy orientations of these "China service" men. Their strong support of Chinese sovereignty and the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek contrasted with the positions of two other consensus groups in the Ministry, the orthodox Anglo-American-oriented diplomats of the 1920s and the reform or "Imperial Way" faction of the 1930s.;The Ministry consistently resisted pressures from other Japanese agencies to transform its offices in China into outright colonial administrative units. Instead, new agencies of empire came to be created to supersede its jurisdictions altogether, particularly the Colonial Ministry, the Manchurian Affairs Board, the Asian Development Board and eventually, the Greater East Asian Ministry. This process of dismantlement is illuminated at crisis points when both internal divisions and external challenges acted to deprive the Ministry of authority, particularly the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the opening of the Sino-Japanese war from 1937-38.