Answer:
After seizing control of Japan’s government, Japanese military leaders launched a much more aggressive campaign of expansion in Asia.
How did the Japanese military seize the control of the government in the 1930s?
The Crash of 1929 had hit the Japanese economy hard, resulting in actual starvation in parts of the rural economy and forcing many families to sell their daughters into prostitution. Their resentful rural brothers began to enter the military in large numbers out of hunger and desperation, coming in with a fanatical devotion to Shinto and a hatred of the civilian politicians who, they felt, were responsible for the economic crisis.
Although in theory they did everything for the Emperor, their watchword was “kokutai,” or national policy, and they would not hesitate to challenge their own senior officers or even the Emperor himself if they felt they opposed kokutai.
The Japanese economy somewhat recovered by late 1932, but the crisis had embittered many ordinary Japanese, who blamed party (civilian) politics and and increasingly welcomed the idea of supposedly impartial military authorities as saviors (somewhat like Germans after the Weimar hyper-inflation).
In March 1931, there was a failed attempt at a military coup.
The watershed was the “Manchurian Incident” of September 1931 when junior officers of the Kwantung Army—the Japanese army occupying parts of Manchuria under previous treaties—acting on their own, faked a railway sabotage incident (by blowing up a part of their own railway and blaming it on the Chinese) in order to justify a full-scale takeover of Manchuria.
It was quickly followed by another military coup attempt in October.
The fact that the officers got away with the Manchurian incident emphasized that the military was not accountable to civilian authority. Under the Meiji constitution, the army and navy had to be headed by active, serving officers and they were accountable only to the Emperor (in theory), not Parliament. Even though the world economy was still shaky and rural austerity still held sway, the army and navy (which distrusted each other) competed for larger and larger slices of the national budget. Any civilian politician who challenged them was assassinated.
Military policy (which was swallowing national policy) was supposedly decided in liaison conferences between the army and navy heads in the Emperor’s presence, but elaborate court ritual meant that communication was ambiguous and unclear and didn’t result in any actual policy. The Emperor himself was not allowed to speak, but only to communicate through allusive poems. A special archaic court language had to be used. Instead, the army and navy leaders just went ahead and acted as they thought best. It wasn’t really a “system.” One historian described it as an anarchy of terror driven by fear of assassination. The fear kept any one individual, even Tojo, from asserting himself too prominently. Decisions had to be taken collectively to avoid individual responsibility, because individual accountability could mean assassination.
In 1932, in the so-called Blood Society Incident, Junnosuke Inoue (former finance minister) and Takuma Dan (head of the Mitsui Group) were assassinated. In May 1932, Navy officers assassinated the prime minister. The assassins had planned to also assassinate a visiting Charlie Chaplin (whom they believed to be American) in hopes that it would spark war with America. The Emperor himself had been the target of sat least three assassination plots throughout his reign, beginning in the 1920s.
In 1936, in the February 26 Incident, nationalistic army officers led their troops to stage a military coup in Tokyo. Korekiyo Takahashi (finance minister), Makoto Saito (interior minister) and Jotaro Watanabe (education minister) were assassinated. The coup group occupied central Tokyo for four days. The army headquarters first approved their action but later disowned them, because the Emperor told the military to put down the rebellion. (This raises the interesting question of how far Hirohito could have gone in stopping the military dictatorship.) The coup failed, but after this incident the party government was marginalized and the military controlled Japanese politics.
After the Sino-Japanese War broke out in full in 1937, civilian politics were completely sidelined and the military took full control of all aspects of the economy.