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Concept
Hokushin-ron
Summary
北進論 was a political doctrine of the Empire of Japan before World War II that stated that Manchuria and Siberia were Japan's sphere of interest and that the potential value to Japan for economic and territorial expansion in those areas was greater than elsewhere. Its supporters were sometimes called the Strike North Group.
It enjoyed wide support within the Imperial Japanese Army during the interwar period but was abandoned in 1939 after military defeat on the Mongolian front at the Battles of Khalkhin Gol (known in Japan as the Nomonhan incident) and the signing of Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in 1941.
It was superseded by the diametrically-opposite rival policy, 南進論, which regarded Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands as Japan's political and economic sphere of influence and aimed to acquire the resources of European colonies and to neutralize the threat of Western military forces in the Pacific.
From the 1890s First Sino-Japanese War, Hokushin-ron came to dominate Japanese foreign policy. It guided both the Japanese invasion of Taiwan (1895) and the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1910, which annexed Korea to Japan. After the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) Field Marshal Prince Yamagata Aritomo, a political and military ideological architect of Hokushin-ron, traced the lines of a defensive strategy against Russia. A February 1907 Imperial National Defence guideline envisioned two strategies: Nanshu Hokushin Ron (南守北進, defence in the South and advance in the North) and Hokushu Nanshin Ron (北守南進, defence in the North and advance in the South). There was intense discourse within Japan on the two diverging theories. After World War I, Japanese troops were deployed as part of the Siberian Intervention during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, with the hope that Japan could be freed from any future Russian threat by detaching Siberia and forming an independent buffer state. The Japanese troops remained until 1922, which encouraged discussion by Japanese strategic planners of the idea of permanent Japanese occupation of Siberia east of Lake Baikal.
Official source
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