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Japan The Modernization of the Military, 1868-1931
When Western powers began to use their superior
military
strength to press Japan for trade relations in the 1850s,
the
country's decentralized and, by Western standards,
antiquated
military forces were unable to provide an effective
defense against
their advances. After the fall of the Tokugawa government
in 1867
and the restoration of the Meiji emperor, de facto
political and
administrative power shifted to a group of younger samurai
who had
been instrumental in forming the new system and were
committed to
modernizing the military. They introduced drastic changes,
which
cleared the way for the development of modern,
European-style armed
forces.
Conscription became universal and obligatory in 1872
and,
although samurai wedded to the traditional prerogatives of
their
class resisted, by 1880 a conscript army was firmly
established.
The Imperial Army General Staff Office was established
directly
under the emperor in 1878 and was given broad powers for
military
planning and strategy. The new force eventually made the
samurai
spirit its own. Loyalties formerly accorded to feudal
lords were
transferred to the state and to the emperor. Upon release
from
service, soldiers carried these ideals back to their home
communities, extending military-derived standards to all
classes.
An imperial rescript of 1882 called for unquestioning
loyalty
to the emperor by the new armed forces and asserted that
commands
from superior officers were equivalent to commands from
the emperor
himself. Thenceforth, the military existed in an intimate
and
privileged relationship with the imperial institution.
Top-ranking
military leaders were given direct access to the emperor
and the
authority to transmit his pronouncements directly to the
troops.
The sympathetic relationship between conscripts and
officers,
particularly junior officers who were drawn mostly from
the
peasantry, tended to draw the military closer to the
people
(see The Meiji Restoration
, ch. 1). In time, most people came
to look
more for guidance in national matters to military
commanders than
to political leaders.
The first test of the nation's new military
capabilities, a
successful punitive expedition to Taiwan in 1874 in
retaliation for
the 1871 murder of shipwrecked sailors from Ryukyu, was
followed by
a series of military ventures unmarred by defeat until
World War
II. Japan moved against Korea, China, and Russia to secure
by
military means the raw materials and strategic territories
it
believed necessary for the development and protection of
the
homeland. Territorial gains were achieved in Korea, the
southern
half of Sakhalin (renamed Karafuto), and Manchuria. As an
ally of
Britain in World War I, Japan assumed control over
Germany's
possessions in Asia, notably in China's Shandong Province,
and the
German-controlled Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall islands
in the
Pacific Ocean
(see World War I
, ch. 1).
The Naval General Staff, independent from the supreme
command
from 1893, became even more powerful after World War I. At
the
1921-22 Washington Conference, the major powers signed the
Five
Power Naval Disarmament Treaty, which set the
international capital
ship ratio for the United States, Britain, Japan, France,
and Italy
at 5, 5, 3, 1.75, and 1.75, respectively. The Imperial
Navy
insisted that it required a ratio of seven ships for every
eight
United States naval ships but settled for three to five, a
ratio
acceptable to the Japanese public
(see Diplomacy
, ch. 1).
The
London Naval Treaty of 1930 brought about further
reductions, but
by the end of 1935, Japan had entered a period of
unlimited
military expansion and ignored its previous commitments.
By the
late 1930s, the proportion of Japanese to United States
naval
forces was 70.6 percent in total tonnage and 94 percent in
aircraft
carriers, and Japanese ships slightly outnumbered those of
the
United States.
Data as of January 1994
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