Japan's Imperial Army
Page 1
Japan’s Imperial Army
MODERN WAR STUDIES
Theodore A. Wilson
General Editor
Raymond Callahan
J. Garry Clifford
Jacob W. Kipp
Allan R. Millett
Carol Reardon
Dennis Showalter
David R. Stone
Series Editors
Japan’s Imperial Army
Its Rise and Fall,
1853–1945
Edward J. Drea
University Press of Kansas
© 2009 by the University Press of Kansas
All rights reserved
Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045), which was organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Drea, Edward J., 1944–
Japan’s Imperial Army : its rise and fall, 1853–1945 / Edward J. Drea.
p. cm. — (Modern war studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0-7006–1663-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978–0-7006–2234-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978–0-7006–2235-1 (ebook)
1. Japan. Rikugun—History. 2. Japan—History, Military—1868–1945.
I. Title.
DS838.7.D74 2009
355.00952´09034—dc22 2009007442
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication is recycled and contains 30 percent post-consumer waste. It is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48–1992.
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
Preface
This brief history of Japan’s first modern army covers events from the 1850s through 1945. It is an introductory synthesis told mainly from secondary sources, most in the Japanese language. I made use of the many excellent English-language monographs on Japan’s army but relied more heavily on Japanese-language materials because military history scholarship in Japan has become impressively sophisticated and diverse over the past twenty years. No longer do Japanese historians dismiss the old imperial army with sweeping generalizations. Instead, extensive research in primary documents, the appearance of new evidence, and fresh interpretations of the army’s larger role in the context of Japanese society have revised the standard narrative of an army inherently bent on aggression. One goal, then, is to introduce the English-language readers to this new Japanese military history.
I describe major military campaigns briefly and focus on institutional issues arising from those conflicts that shaped the army’s strategy, doctrine, and values. These subjects are well known to specialists of modern Japanese history, but a chronologically arranged, balanced English-language account of the army has not previously been available. Overviews of the army tend to be weighted to its twentieth-century performance, especially during World War II, creating a lopsided impression of an army with unique qualities. This narrative, generally divided by decades, gives roughly equal attention to army affairs during the 1880s and World War II. Such an approach offers a balanced perspective on the army’s evolution and helps to explain the action and conduct of an institution whose major legacy is suicidal disgrace.
From an ad hoc confederation, the army became the single most powerful institution in the nation. Its leaders wrestled with describing the army’s role in the newly unified nation, defining its mission, and designing its values. The intellectual foundations of the institution shifted as the army constantly reinvented itself to fulfill the changing military and cultural imperatives of a transformed Japanese society. In other words, though the outward appearances of the army of 1895 and that of 1925 were similar, the institution was substantially different.
It was not just a matter of adapting western technology or mimicking the West’s pattern of modernization. Japan developed a first-class army with an efficient military schooling system, a well-organized active duty and reserve force, a professional officer corps that thought in terms of the regional threat, and tough, well-trained soldiers armed with appropriate weapons. Changing social and political ideas, personal rivalries, new concepts of warfare, evolving military doctrine, regional geography, and potential enemies and allies shaped the army’s place in society. Throughout its existence the army sought its core values in real or imagined precedents and relied increasingly on an emperor-centered ideology to validate it as a special institution in the Japanese polity.
The Japanese soldier’s propensity for self-immolation, the military’s emphasis on intangible or spiritual factors in battle, and a fanatical determination to fight to the death became the army’s hallmarks. Overemphasis of these characteristics skewed an understanding of strategy, high-level policy, and the army’s evolution, especially for the period before 1941. I suggest that historical circumstances shaped Japan’s first modern army and that international pressures determined the army’s options, if not its fate. To deal with common danger, the army idealized traditional values, many of them imaginary but nonetheless offering a vision that a wider Japanese audience understood and shared. The formative days of the army occasionally resembled a B-grade samurai movie replete with wild sword fights in back alleys, assassinations, and murderous blood feuds over the institution’s future. These sensational and sanguinary events, much like the later military coup d’états, atrocities, and suicidal banzai charges, inform our perspective of an army run amok, led by fanatics whose blind devotion to the emperor encouraged barbaric behavior. The administrative and operational expansion and development of the army, including its strategy and doctrine, did not make headlines, but this institutional process was decisive in forming the contours of the mid-1930s army, the force that fought in Asia and the Pacific.
The Japanese way of war or style of warfare evolved over seventy years. Subsequent interpretations of the immediate past layered with hoary samurai myths burnished the army’s self-image. Layer upon layer of precedent and tradition formed the bedrock of the edifice by 1941. There were, of course, dramatic events that affected the army’s course, but it was the accumulated past that shaped the army, narrowed its options, influenced its decisions, and made it the institution that conquered most of Asia.
I am grateful to many people in Japan and the United States for their generous assistance. Professor Akagi Kanji of Keiō University responded to my questions with celerity and accuracy. Professor Tobe Ryōichi, National Defense Academy, led me through recent Japanese military historiography; and Professor Hata Ikuhiko, the doyen of Japanese military historians, was always helpful in explaining the
fine points of Japan’s prewar army. I am also indebted to the faculty and staff of the National Institute for Defense Studies, Military History Department for their sustained assistance over the years.
Dr. Robert H. Berlin, School of Advanced Military Studies, emeritus; Professor Roger Jeans, Washington and Lee University, emeritus; and Dr. Stanley L. Falk read the manuscript in its various stages. Their constructive criticism, historical expertise, and insightful comments improved the final draft and spared me from numerous errors. Professor Mark R. Peattie, the Walter H. Shorenstein Institute Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, refereed my draft and made helpful suggestions. David Rennie’s cartographic and computer talents created the maps.
My thanks to Ariane De Pree-Kajfez of Stanford University Press for permission to use material that will appear in the forthcoming publication The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War. I must also acknowledge the staff at the Pentagon Library in Washington, D.C., for their unfailing assistance and friendliness. Kathleen Heincer, Linda McGuire, Yolanda Miller, John Mills, Debbie Reed, and Barbara Risser all contributed to the research behind this book.
Finally I must thank Michael Briggs, general editor of the University of Kansas Press, for his constant encouragement and Job-like patience. When we first discussed this project several years ago, I foolishly remarked that I could complete it in three years’ time. It soon became plain to me that the volume of new research, the appearance of fresh sources, and the evolving historiography in Japan and the United States would make this a more daunting effort than I imagined. My thanks also extend to the editorial staff for their first-rate editorial assistance.
Japan’s Imperial Army
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 t
oo 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