Övör Mongol Atlas

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Japanese pan-Mongol strategy (two fronts)

theme

Two documented instances of Japan's pan-Asianist courtship of Mongol nationalism before and during the Mengjiang period, and evidence of how conditional Mongol loyalty to that courtship could be.

A note on this entry’s scope before anything else: it was commissioned on the assumption that a version of it already existed in this atlas. It did not. This entry has been built narrowly, from exactly the material supplied for this specific pass, rather than reconstructed from memory or given a fuller framing than the sources in hand support. It should be read as a start, not a finished treatment of Japanese pan-Mongol strategy as a whole.

Merse’s early diagnosis

Before the Mengjiang period, the Dahur Mongol nationalist Merse warned in his own writings that Japanese “pan-Asianism” concealed designs on Mongolia. As evidence, he pointed to the Japanese dealings of two figures: Babujab, an early twentieth-century Mongol military leader whose relations with Japan are not otherwise explored in this atlas, and Grigorii Semenov, the White Russian ataman whose Japanese-backed pan-Mongol movement in Transbaikalia is treated in the Chinggis Khan worship / imagery entry (Nakami). Merse’s warning is notable for its timing. It predates the Kwantung Army’s own courtship of Demchugdongrub by years, making him an early and clear-eyed diagnostician of an appeal that would only intensify after his own disappearance.

The 1935 Peking test

A separate episode, reported by Owen Lattimore and relayed by Nakami, tests how far that Japanese courtship actually reached. In 1935, Lattimore interviewed several Mongols then in Japanese service in Peking and at first received the answers such an interview would be expected to produce: standard expressions of pro-Japanese sentiment (Lattimore, via Nakami). The tone changed once Lattimore revealed that he knew Mongol and was a friend of Merse. The senior Mongol present then answered in a different register, telling him, in effect, “do not look at our uniforms; when the day comes, we will act as Mongols and not as paid soldiers of the Japanese” (Lattimore, via Nakami).

Nakami frames this as a sentiment Mongols in this position could reasonably be expected to hold: not proof that every Japanese-uniformed Mongol secretly harbored it, but evidence that the loyalty Japanese sponsorship purchased was instrumental and conditional rather than fixed. It is worth recording, too, what unlocked the remark. Merse’s own name and reputation, invoked by an outsider, was enough to shift a formal interview into candor. See the Merse entry for the man whose name did that work.

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