Modern War Studies

Its Rise and Fall

Edward J. Drea

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780700622351
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award Popular impressions of the imperial Japanese army still promote images of suicidal banzai charges and fanatical leaders blindly devoted to their emperor. Edward Drea looks well past those stereotypes to unfold the more complex story of how that army came to power and extended its influence at home and abroad to become one of the world's dominant fighting forces.This first comprehensive English-language history of the Japanese army traces its origins, evolution, and impact as an engine of the country's regional and global ambitions and as a catalyst for the militarization of the Japanese homeland from mid-nineteenth-century incursions through the end of World War II. Demonstrating his mastery of Japanese-language sources, Drea explains how the Japanese style of warfare, burnished by samurai legends, shaped the army, narrowed its options, influenced its decisions, and made it the institution that conquered most of Asia. He also tells how the army's intellectual foundations shifted as it reinvented itself to fulfill the changing imperatives of Japanese society-and how the army in turn decisively shaped the nation's political, social, cultural, and strategic course.Drea recounts how Japan devoted an inordinate amount of its treasury toward modernizing, professionalizing, and training its army—which grew larger, more powerful, and politically more influential with each passing decade. Along the way, it produced an efficient military schooling system, a well-organized active duty and reserve force, a professional officer corps that thought in terms of regional threat, and well-trained soldiers armed with appropriate weapons.Encompassing doctrine, strategy, weaponry, and civil-military relations, Drea's expert study also captures the dominant personalities who shaped the imperial army, from Yamagata Aritomo, an incisive geopolitical strategist, to Anami Korechika, who exhorted the troops to fight to the death during the final days of World War II. Summing up, Drea also suggests that an army that places itself above its nation's interests is doomed to failure.

1

Prelude to Imperial Restoration

The arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships in 1853 shattered Japan’s self-imposed isolation. The bakufu (shogunate)—the military government under the Tokugawa shogun or generalissimo that ruled Japan—was unable to deal effectively with the foreign intrusion, and despite violent internal opposition, within five years it concluded a commercial treaty that opened eight ports to trade, unilaterally set tariffs, and established extraterritoriality. By exposing its weakness, the bakufu emboldened its enemies. In an effort to rally support, the shogun’s chief councilor broke tradition and sought approval for the treaty from Emperor Kōmei in Kyoto.¹ Kōmei’s refusal to sanction the treaty split the bakufu and the court and began ten years of intrigue, violence, terror, and negotiation that culminated in the shogunate’s collapse. During that tumultuous decade, radical loyalist warriors, usually of the middle- or lower-ranking samurai class, were in the forefront of efforts to overthrow the Tokugawa regime. Many were xenophobic, but the military might of the Europeans and Americans sobered upstart samurai and shogunate authorities alike.

Aware of the devastation wreaked by the Anglo-French attack on Peking in 1860 and concerned about Russian probes toward Tsushima Island, the bakufu established arsenals to manufacture bronze cannon, ordered a steam-driven warship from Holland, imported tens of thousands of small arms, and sought western, mainly French, military and technical experts to organize its forces into a modern army and navy.² By 1862 it had revitalized its military forces and assigned priority to a navy in order to control the ports and coast, the locations most imperiled by the foreign military threat. A handful of small frigates and corvettes allowed the bakufu to control the inland coastal shipping lanes and move troops quickly by sea to potential trouble spots. The shogun’s reorganized army fared less well because it had to depend on samurai selected by local han (domain) authorities or resort to unpopular mandatory quotas to fill its ranks. In either case, a han would not necessarily send its best men to the shogun’s army, and the shogun lacked the power to arbitrarily carry through military reforms. Furthermore, many warriors scorned the new lock-step western-style drill and disdained firearms and bayonets in favor of their traditional swords and spears. Their resistance to change was the first indication that the warrior class was abandoning its monopoly on military power.³

Kyoto emerged as the center of national politics, where loyalists from south-western Japan’s Chōshū domain and court aristocrats who wanted to restore the emperor and expel the barbarians maneuvered against moderate bakufu officials, samurai from Satsuma han in southern Kyūshū, and some aristocrats who favored a union of court and shogunate. Pressured by radical reformers, in January 1863 Kōmei set June as the deadline for the bakufu to expel the western barbarians from Japan. This was easier decreed than done, particularly since the foreigners punished the offending domain, not the shogun.

Moderates among the shogunate’s leaders understood that they were no match for western military technology and armaments and preferred a more passive resistance. At the southern tip of Honshu, however, in late June Chōshū extremists enforced the imperial command and attacked foreign commercial ships passing through the narrow Strait of Shimonoseki, cannonading a French warship and later damaging a Dutch merchantman. Retribution followed on July 26 when the gunboat USS Wyoming sank one Chōshū vessel, mauled a second, and knocked out several guns, all the while lying outside the range of the domain’s ancient cannon.⁴ A few days later, French warships bombarded the Chōshū forts and then sent a landing party ashore that spiked the guns, seized rifles and swords, and burned scores of nearby houses. This typical mid-nineteenth century punitive expedition foretold what was in store for those who resisted the power of the West.

About a month later, in mid-August, British warships appeared in southern Kyūshū’s Kagoshima Bay to enforce demands that Satsuma pay an indemnity that the bakufu had agreed to and surrender one of its samurai who had murdered a British subject the previous year. The fleet’s arrival coincided with a typhoon, but the flagship commander ignored the high winds and heavy rainsqualls to give battle. He unintentionally steered his ships into the Satsuma gunnery range, making them easy targets for the well-trained Japanese gunners. Ten coastal batteries (eighty-three cannon total) raked the British vessels as they maneuvered in the howling winds between the towering backdrop of Mt. Sakurajima and the castle town of Kagoshima, inflicting sixty-six casualties. Kagoshima, however, suffered the greater damage. The heavier British guns outranged the coastal batteries and demolished them. Strong winds compounded the effects of British incendiary rockets falling into the town and burned through large swaths of wooden neighborhoods.⁵ The fighting ended in a draw, the British sailing away and the samurai dousing the flames.

Despite their antiforeign outbursts, individual domains like Chōshū and Satsuma had experimented since the 1840s with western-style artillery to strengthen their military power vis-à-vis the bakufu and keep the West at arm’s length.⁶ It was not unusual then for Satsuma to react to its setback by arranging through British diplomats in Japan to hire English military advisers to reorganize and reequip its military forces. Satsuma samurai quickly adopted the new, dispersed infantry tactics taught by their foreign advisers and dropped the traditional massed assault formations. Satsuma’s leaders also modified their political policies. In September 1863 they allied themselves with warriors from northeast Japan’s Aizu domain and restored more moderate nobles in Kyoto to control the imperial court.

Chōshū responded to its defeat by organizing mixed warrior-commoner rifle units commanded by 24-year-old Takasugi Shinsaku, an antiforeign extremist recalled from internal exile (for setting fire to the British consulate) to fix the domain’s army. In the late 1850s Takasugi had been a follower of loyalist leader and ideologue Yoshida Shōin and through him had connections with other young radical samurai like Maebara Issei (age 25), Itō Hirobumi (18), and Yamagata Aritomo (21).Takasugi’s slight frame and reputation as a womanizer and heavy drinker belied a young man of unparalleled bravery with a passionate devotion to radical reform.

Takasugi was far more than a hired sword. He was intelligent, well versed in western military science, and on record that hereditary warriors were too cowardly to fight for an imperial restoration. He dramatized his contempt for his class by cutting off his top-knot, a samurai status symbol. To replace the reluctant samurai, by mid-1863 Takasugi had organized samurai, peasants, merchants—indeed, anyone willing to join him—into the kiheitai (extraordinary units), a name derived from Sun Tzu’s injunction that the standing army fixes and distracts the enemy; the extraordinary (ki) forces strike when and where they are not expected.⁷ Kiheitai militia units initially were supposed to back up Chōshū’s standing samurai army. They were poorly equipped with various obsolete muskets and matchlocks and usually consigned to patrolling the domain’s coastlines.

After the Satsuma-Aizu coup, Chōshū extremists, whose radicalism now alarmed the court, fled from the imperial city. But without an effective strategy to deal with the foreigners, the shogunate continued its conciliatory policy. Encouraged by the shogunate’s weakness in dealing with the Westerners, in mid-August 1864 Chōshū radicals marched on Kyoto to restore the emperor. A combined Satsuma-Aizu force blocked their approach and fighting erupted at the Forbidden Gate, one of several entrances to the imperial palace grounds.

In the day-long battle, Aizu samurai’s skill in traditional hand-to-hand combat and Satsuma’s modern artillery soundly defeated the Chōshū insurgents, including the attached kiheitai units. Gunfire, explosions, and arson destroyed thousands of Kyoto dwellings as fires raged for three days. Thousands of refugees from the blackened neighborhoods huddled along the riverbanks, carrying whatever possessions they had on their backs. Sixteen Chōshū ringleaders and their lieutenants committed suicide just outside the capital. Radical court nobles fled the capital, and the court demanded that the shogun punish Chōshū.

Chōshū suffered another setback on September 4 when an allied fleet of eighteen warships carrying more than 5,000 troops and almost 300 cannon moved into the Shimonoseki Strait. In dense fog the next morning the ships unwittingly sailed within range of a kiheitai battery, where a young samurai named Yamagata Aritomo opened fire, damaging the flagship. Retaliation came swiftly. Around noon, about 2,000 western troops landed and scattered the Chōshū defenders. During the next two days the foreigners seized all the coastal defenses, spiked cannons, and tossed any remaining ammunition into the sea. After posing for a commemorative photograph atop an occupied coastal battery, the landing force carried off swords, armor, and samurai helmets as trophies.⁸

Meanwhile the shogun obtained an imperial command to punish the rebellious domain and in late 1864 launched the first Chōshū expedition. Rather than extensive fighting, the overpowering show of force by the 150,000-man coalition sufficed to oust Chōshū’s discredited and isolated radical loyalists.The shogun replaced them with conservative bureaucrats and, after punishing senior Chōshū officials for encouraging the loyalists and enforcing other punitive measures, disbanded the military coalition in mid-January 1865.

After being driven from the capital, Chōshū’s younger reformers concluded that inferior weaponry, not the kiheitai concept, was to blame for Chōshū’s setback at Kyoto’s Forbidden Gate. They resisted the newly installed Chōshū authorities’ at...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Prelude to Imperial Restoration
• 2 Civil War and the New Army
• 3 Dealing with the Samurai
• 4 The Army of Meiji
• 5 To Asia: The Sino-Japanese War
• 6 Back to the Continent: The Russo-Japanese War
• 7 Institutionalizing National Military Strategy
• 8 Short War or Total War?
• 9 Conspiracies, Coups, and Reshaping the Army
• 10 The Pivotal Years, 1937–1941
• 11 The Asia-Pacific War
• 12 Epilogue
• Appendix 1. War Ministers and Army Chiefs of Staff
• Appendix 2. Japanese Field Army Headquarters in China, 1937–1939
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover