Japan's Imperial Army

by Edward J Drea

  Emperor Meiji also presided over the military academy’s first commencement, in July 1878, publicly affirming the bond between the army’s officer corps and the imperial institution. To further strengthen identification with the throne, imperial family members routinely served in the military, although the court had not produced active warriors since the wars of the fourteenth century. They were exempted from conscription, preinduction physicals, and written qualification tests and were directly commissioned by an imperial order. In 1885, the year after the creation of aristocratic ranks and titles, young men from twenty-three newly ennobled families were transferred from the Peers School to the military academy, where they formed about 12 percent of the 108-man class.69 The emperor also promoted social changes. In 1873, January 4 became Tenchōsetsu (the emperor’s birthday), a national holiday. In March of that year he cut his hair in the western style, and in June he appeared in a western-style army uniform during a military exercise.

  Tactics for the New Army

  Until 1870, “modern” infantry tactics were found in an 1829 translation of a Dutch tactics manual. Concurrent with the new conscription system, the army adopted French tactical military doctrine, its 1873 infantry manual being a translation of the 1869 French edition. Training was conducted in squad-size groupings commanded by a corporal. Recruits received six months of basic instruction that included physical conditioning, platoon and company formations, dispersed movement, marksmanship, bayonet drill, basic sanitation, and military customs and ceremonies. Field training consisted of mandatory drills, execution of the manual of arms, rote memorization of set-piece tactical problems, and small-unit command and control. Instructors relied on strictly choreographed drill regimens, endless repetition, and iron discipline to get results. The army penal code issued in April 1873 prescribed severe punishment for disobeying superiors or conspiring against the government. In 1874 seventy soldiers were tried under the penal code; 530 were tried the following year.70

  In October 1874 the army created the corporal’s group, a squad-size unit of conscripts organized for drill and training purposes and overseen by a noncommissioned officer or junior officer. The system would eventually evolve into the squad section that regulated training, discipline, and conscripts’ lives in the barracks. Squad leaders initially handled only training, but revised regulations in 1880 assigned NCOs greater administrative responsibilities for the unit’s daily activities. Administration and management, however, were weak. Training regimens varied according to garrisons because of an absence of standardized training programs, frequent changes to drill manuals, irregular tables of organization, and the personalities and interests of commanders and NCOs. The army’s first standardized table of organization appeared in 1877 and established the strength of an infantry company at 160 enlisted and eight NCOs, each responsible for a twenty-man section.

  Monday through Friday the conscripts awakened at 5 a. m. for morning drill followed by afternoon training sessions. After Saturday morning drill, they spent the day preparing their barracks for a 4 p. m. inspection. A Saturday-night bath followed inspection, and Sunday was a free day. Although the army conscripted from all classes of society, its officers and NCOs were drawn mainly from former samurai, and the traditional hierarchical relationship of samurai and peasant endured. Former warriors who became NCOs routinely beat or physically punished the farmer conscripts to instill discipline and ensure compliance with orders. Under such conditions, desertion flourished; of fifty conscripts sent by one domain, half deserted, one of them on four different occasions.71 It is true that the Imperial Guard received better training and equipment, but it too often relied on uncritical and uncomprehending imitation of western-style tactical drill because the army lacked a professional officer corps sophisticated enough to devise more appropriate methods.

  Five years after the restoration, the new government had created a national army from scratch, fought a civil war, and imposed domestic order. It had established conscription, military schools and training facilities, and begun to standardize equipment and training. The army was small, depending on conscription as much for political reasons (to eliminate warrior influence) as social (as a leveling device) and economic (it was affordable). Significant differences about the nature of the armed institution remained unresolved; its deployment capability was haphazard at best, its personnel unproven, and its leadership divided. Standardized training and equipment were still lacking, and the effectiveness of military schools was still undetermined. The army had no popular base of support, conscription was greatly resented, and samurai bands were leading armed rebellions. On the positive side, the Meiji leaders had erected the framework for a national army that relied on the imperial symbolism of the emperor as the military leader, although they protected the army against direct imperial intervention in military affairs by establishing a system in which the emperor could rarely decide anything by himself.72 From these shaky foundations, the new army ventured into an uncertain and dangerous future.

  3

  Dealing with the Samurai

  During the early 1870s the government laid a foundation for a modern national army that cast the samurai class adrift. Although samurai from southwestern Japan led the restoration and became the new leaders of Japan, they distrusted their own warrior class. Authorities reduced samurai stipends in 1871, partially commuted them as lump sum payments and bonds in 1873, and in 1876 converted the stipends into government bonds. The approximately 400,000 samurai who lost their income naturally resented the parsimonious settlement. The new government was also intent on breaking the samurai monopoly on warfare. In 1871 it permitted warriors to discard their swords, the samurai status symbol, and five years later outlawed the wearing of swords. The contradiction the Meiji leaders faced was the need to eliminate feudal consciousness of the warrior class but simultaneously inculcate samurai values into the officers and men of the new army whose esprit was inferior to the warriors’.1

  Samurai Uprisings

  In late October 1873 the Council of State, after heated debate, decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to forcibly open trade relations. Pro-war advocates promptly resigned their government posts. Saigō Takamori, a senior councilor and concurrently commander of the Imperial Guard, quit on October 24. The next day Itagaki Taisuke and four senior councilors departed, leaving the government in disarray and shattering the fragile samurai coalition that had overthrown the Tokugawa shogunate. Saigō and Itagaki personified the opposite courses of antigovernment opposition; the former led disgruntled warriors who raised the specter of armed revolt, and the latter led a wider coalition of warriors and commoners who demanded a share of political authority through elected representation.2 The political upheaval forced numerous officers and men who hailed from Satsuma and were assigned to the Guard to choose between individual and national allegiances.

  An October 25 imperial rescript addressed to Imperial Guard officers acknowledged Saigō’s many contributions to the restoration and then reminded them that he was but a single general in the national army that commanded their allegiance. Ignoring the memorial and two personal pleas from the emperor, several Satsuma commanders of Guard units resigned in sympathy with Saigō, and about 100 more Satsuma officers joined the walkout. Hundreds of the rank and file serving in the Guard also deserted and fled to Kagoshima. With wholesale desertions threatening the readiness of the Imperial Guard and leaving the government defenseless, army leaders hastily arranged emergency transfers of picked troops from the regional garrisons to replace the defectors. This decision was very unpopular with those selected because assignment to the Guard incurred a five-year term of service instead of the normal three-year obligation of conscripts assigned to local garrisons. Morale plummeted in the new army, already seriously understrength, at a time of growing internal turmoil and domestic disorder.3

  In mid-January 1874 disaffected samurai attacked and wounded a senior government minister in Tokyo. A nationwide police dragnet quickly a
pprehended nine of the attackers, who turned out to be samurai from the former Tosa domain, including a former Guard lieutenant and his sergeants.4 On February 4 a coalition of frustrated Korean-expedition advocates and antiforeign elements revolted in Saga Prefecture, located in northwestern Kyūshū. Saga had an unusually high samurai population and was seething with discontent because of poor harvests and resulting inflationary food prices. Etō Shimpei led the 2,500 Saga rebels.

  Etō was from an impoverished samurai family and in the 1850s had concluded that overseas commerce would relieve the suffering of the countryside. His combat leadership during the Boshin Civil War led to an appointment as a senior councilor in the new government. Convinced that the dominant regional cliques in the government and military constituted a reemerging bakufu, he reasoned that Japanese expansion to the Asian continent would complete a popular second restoration.5 He too had quit the government in disgust over the Korea issue.

  Two days after Etō’s uprising, the council of state set in motion a punitive expedition against Taiwan in a much-belated response to the November 1871 massacre of fifty-four shipwrecked Ryūkyū Island sailors by Taiwanese aborigines. The council’s underlying motive was to deflect samurai energy and frustration, and army authorities deliberately organized the expedition around troops from the Kagoshima garrison in southern Kyūshū in order to neutralize Saigō’s main center of support and simultaneously remove potentially rebellious sympathizers from Etō’s treasonous appeals. The army then added soldiers from northern Kyūshū’s Kumamoto garrison to balance the expedition and to make sure that the Kagoshima contingents followed government orders.6

  By mid-February Etō’s samurai insurgents had seized local government offices in Saga, and the insurrection seemed to be gaining momentum. Informers, however, had alerted Home Minister Ōkubo Toshimichi to the rebels’ plans, and the council of state empowered Ōkubo, a civilian minister, with full military and judicial authority to crush the uprising. Ōkubo promptly ordered loyal troops from the Hiroshima and Osaka garrisons to suppress the insurrection. Unable to tap the Kagoshima garrison for troops because they were committed to the Taiwan expedition, the government had to hire more than 4,000 former samurai from nearby domains as reinforcements.

  Etō’s warriors captured Saga castle on February 18 but were soon surrounded. Ōkubo and Maj. Gen. Nozu Shizuo devised a campaign strategy, but the civilian Ōkubo led the army into Saga and ten days later recaptured the castle. Saga insurgents made repetitive surprise attacks designed to lure government troops into close-quarter ambushes, but the conscripts had sufficient training in minor tactics to withstand frontal assaults and then counterattack to turn rebel flanks, bypass ambushes, and force Etō’s battered warriors to withdraw. The rebels relied on traditional tactics of sword and spear in close hand-to-hand combat, and few had any appreciation of the national army’s small-arms firepower or understood the deadliness of government artillery. Losses amounted to about 700 men, almost evenly divided between the army and the rebels, but the much larger national army could absorb the casualties while the insurrectionists could not. Etō’s decision to flee during the fighting for Saga castle rather than fight to the death with his men turned public opinion decisively against his cause. He appealed for aid to Saigō Takamori, who dismissed Etō for “being the type of man who disregarded 3,000 troops to escape.”7

  Despite the victory, the army hierarchy resented a civilian like Ōkubo commanding military forces and faulted the ad hoc command and control arrangements. The emperor had formally led the campaign from Tokyo and on February 23 had designated his military aide Second Lt. Prince Yoshiaki (Ninnaji) the titular field commander. Minister of the Army Yamagata became the imperial military adviser at the Tokyo headquarters, but he was so annoyed by civilian command that he reorganized the army ministry’s sixth bureau into a small prototype general staff to exercise control over military operations. This marked the beginning of the army’s assertion of its uniqueness and the independence of supreme command from civil authorities.8 Yamagata then resigned his ministerial portfolio and appointed himself director of the revamped sixth bureau staff and concurrently commander of the Imperial Guard. He led the Guard to Saga, but by the time he arrived the major fighting was over and a manhunt for Etō was under way.

  The discredited Etō was finally captured on April 13 and after an impromptu trial, presided over by Ōkubo, was beheaded. His gibbeted head went on public display as a warning of the consequences of rebellion, and the authorities capitalized on the latest technology by posting photographs of Etō’s severed head in government offices throughout Japan. Yamagata’s Guard provided a display of overwhelming government force designed to cower other potentially rebellious peasants, advocates of the people’s rights movement, and especially Saigō and his Satsuma bands. With Etō’s short-lived rebellion crushed, Yoshiaki returned to Tokyo, where the emperor promoted him six grades, to the rank of major general. Yamagata resumed his duties as minister of the army in June.9

  During the manhunt for Etō, Ōkubo appointed Saigō’s younger brother Tsugumichi to organize and command the Taiwan expedition. Several commercial ships carrying 3,000 troops departed Tokyo Bay on April 6 for Nagasaki to take on more troops and supplies. The newly appointed U.S. minister to Japan, however, compelled Ōkubo to order a delay in the departure from Nagasaki. Saigō Tsugumichi ignored Ōkubo’s directive, claimed his writ from the emperor took precedence, and sailed for Taiwan that night. Saigō’s insubordination implied that the army’s special relationship with the throne superseded civilian control.

  Campaigning in Taiwan proved tougher than anticipated. Taiwanese guerrillas in mountain strongholds held out until early June, and though Japanese combat losses were negligible (twelve killed and seventeen wounded), an outbreak of malaria, the effects of other tropical diseases, poor logistics, and substandard medical support spread epidemics that resulted in more than 560 deaths. When word reached the emperor of the terrible conditions, he sent his personal German physician to oversee medical care, a practical example of imperial benevolence that further reinforced the special bond between throne and army. Japanese forces withdrew from Taiwan after the Chinese paid an indemnity and gave de facto recognition to Japanese claims on the Ryūkyū Islands, which became Okinawa Prefecture in 1879.

  In late March 1876, just after suppressing Etō’s uprising, the government officially outlawed the wearing of swords except for the police and military, who carried western-style swords or sabers, not the traditional curved samurai sword. Samurai discontent flared over this latest decree, especially in southwestern Japan. That October an uprising of about 200 xenophobic warriors erupted in Kumamoto, where rebels mortally wounded the local garrison commander and murdered several government officials. Troops from the Kumamoto garrison quelled the Jimpūren revolt while the nearby Kokura garrison crushed another smaller disturbance. Later that month about 200 disgruntled warriors in Hagi attacked government offices and in early November fought a four-day pitched battle with army troops. Maebara Issei, the former senior councilor who had temporarily controlled the army after Ōmura’s assassination, led the latest antigovernment uprising.

  Maebara’s motives mixed traditional samurai disdain for the conscription ordinance and frustration over the government’s Korea policy. A warrior known for simplicity, honesty, and sentimentality, Maebara’s radicalism dated from his association with Yoshida Shōin in the 1850s. But his mercurial character could undergo sudden, unnerving mood swings and an indifference to higher orders. After Maebara left the government, ostensibly to care for his aging parents, his volatile personality and fanatical commitment made him a lightning rod for samurai extremists. His followers fought with such desperate resolve that the army needed reinforcements from the Osaka garrison to defeat them. Maebara was captured and later executed.

  The warrior revolts in southwestern Japan displayed a samurai exclusivity with few, if any, commoners, fighting alongside of them. As warriors they were bound by
an iron-clad discipline that normally motivated them to fight against great odds and often to the death. Fortunately for the national army, the samurai clung to their regional allegiances and antiquated tactics, and their isolated uprisings did not coalesce into nationwide rebellions.

  Besides disgruntled samurai, tens of thousands of peasants joined violent demonstrations in central Japan to protest inflationary rice prices and higher land taxes. With the Osaka and Nagoya garrisons overextended while suppressing the Kumamoto warrior uprisings, the government again enlisted outsiders, hiring 1,200 former warriors that December to put down the violent peasant outbreaks. The spontaneous and uncoordinated small-scale uprisings enabled government troops and their hired auxiliaries to crush the outbreaks sequentially.10 The geography of rebellion also favored the national army. Peasant uprisings were confined to central Japan whereas warrior insurrections were centered in the southwest, where Saigō, the gravest military threat to the government, drew his greatest strength.

  Since his resignation, Saigō Takamori and his lieutenants had been forging a cadre of NCOs and junior officers trained in modern infantry tactics at his network of private military academies (i.e., not approved by the central government) in Kagoshima City. Rifle units trained at the academies were composed in large part of former Imperial Guard troops commanded by the same officers who had quit the Guard in 1873. The same was true for the artillery school students.11 By early 1876 Saigō had mustered about 13,000 troops with battle-hardened ex-samurai, the majority of them veterans of the restoration and Boshin campaigns in their late 20s or early 30s, stiffening the ranks. Saigō’s officers had similar battlefield pedigrees, including several who had commanded large units during the Boshin War. This private army had stockpiled quantities of small-arms ammunition, weapons, and equipment.