Japan's Imperial Army

by Edward J Drea

  Officer education stressed mobile warfare and encirclement operations and preached that a small force (like Japan’s in the recent war) could defeat a superior opponent.21 Strategists crafted plans for a classic double envelopment and fast-moving battles of annihilation that ignored the army’s inability to envelop major enemy forces in any battle during the recent fighting. In part the operational concept derived from their awareness that Japan could not win a prolonged war against superior opponents; in part the short, decisive war philosophy was imbedded in newly drawn imperial defense policy.

  Between 1906 and 1909, tacticians developed an aggressive offensive doctrine to complement imperial defense policy. The army had waged war against Russia according to its 1898 infantry manual, derived in large part from the 1885 German field service regulations. Both asserted that firepower secured victory in infantry combat. A lessons-learned commission established in 1906 to analyze and distill the wartime experience thought differently. Members overlooked evidence that only a handful of bayonet attacks succeeded and none had carried a fortified emplacement to conclude that the bayonet was the decisive weapon against enemy troops in hardened positions. That July the inspector-general of military education endorsed the merits of a bayonet charge and further recommended that infantrymen had to advance regardless of artillery support in order to retain the initiative and momentum of the assault.22

  This preference for cold steel reflected the repeated frustration over the lack of infantry-artillery coordination during the war. Shell shortages, serious problems in quality control that resulted in numerous dud shells or unexploded ordnance, inappropriate guns or ordnance, and the artillery’s immobility diminished confidence in the destructive power of heavy artillery to support infantry assaults. Artillery specialists pointed out that the shell shortage—a logistical problem, not an operational one—forfeited opportunities to inflict heavier casualties on the Russians or close off lines of retreat by fire. But there was a widespread loss of confidence in artillerymen, and even senior artillery officers concluded that deficient artillery doctrine had hampered combined arms interaction.23

  Immediately after the war, Kodama had called for more firepower delivered by an artillery brigade organic to the division and a heavy field artillery brigade attached to each corps. Manufacturing, transporting, and sustaining more and heavier artillery were beyond the capability of Japan’s industrial infrastructure. Heavy industries—steel making, chemical, and metallurgy—lagged far behind European and American standards and output, and until the early 1930s the majority of Japanese factory workers were employed in the textile industry. These cold production factors, internal army disputes over doctrine, and the lack of confidence in artillery ultimately caused the war ministry to reduce the number of guns per division.24

  The army’s major rationale for a fundamental shift from intensive firepower to hand-to-hand combat, however, was the supposedly unique Japanese qualities that endowed infantrymen with intangible advantages. A determined infantry attack displaying these attributes would compensate for inferior numbers and equipment. Preliminary findings in May 1907 anointed the infantry the primary combat arm, mandated that infantrymen attack even without artillery support, and elevated hand-to-hand combat to the decisive ingredient for victory. The next month an army board, echoing the inspector-general, validated the utility of the bayonet charge and instructed troops to press home attacks without waiting for artillery support.25

  In January 1909 Maj. Gen. Nagaoka Gaishi, chief of the military affairs bureau, propounded a set of fundamental principles that with minor revisions became the bedrock of future Japanese tactical doctrine. He claimed that Japan’s unique history and culture (kokutai), combined with national characteristics and geographical setting, determined the nature of the army. Army regulations and training would incorporate these intangibles (spiritual power, or seishin) to enhance technical proficiency gained from military training. Infantry was the decisive arm in combat, the spirit of the attack the basis of warfare, and hand-to-hand combat the decisive factor in battle. Nagaoka’s precepts became doctrine in the revised October 1909 infantry manual.26

  Officers and Conscripts

  Since the advent of conscription, army leaders, mainly of samurai stock, questioned the fighting qualities of the enlisted ranks. Confronted by real warriors during the Satsuma Rebellion, the conscript army had performed poorly, at least in the eyes of commanders, because the troops lacked fighting spirit. Reorganized drill and training attempted to instill that intangible virtue, but the high command always suspected that the conscripted infantryman was capable of improved battlefield performance.

  Examples of units that broke and ran under fire or failed to take assigned objectives because of an apparent lack of offensive spirit during the recent war disconcerted the high command and reinforced its traditional lack of confidence in the conscripts. Many senior officers felt that the rank-and-file soldiers failed to display sufficient spiritual power or morale in battle, and anecdotal observations of wartime conduct of infantry units confirmed their impressions. Improved spiritual education and training were essential to overcome the lackluster performance in combat, and after 1909 the emphasis on élan and morale became an obsession. According to the conventional army wisdom, iron discipline exemplified by unquestioning obedience to orders was the sole means to enhance spiritual power and inculcate confidence in victory.27

  Another reason the army imposed harsher discipline was to counteract postwar societal and popular trends toward greater individual expression. An upsurge in insubordination and widespread evidence of lax discipline in the ranks in the immediate postwar period deeply troubled army leaders, who were quick to single out the baleful influence of the socialist movement for the decline of standards. Officer and NCO combat veterans were convinced that unrelenting discipline, stoical endurance, and unquestioning obedience to orders enabled them to survive on the unforgiving Manchurian battlefields, and they were determined to inculcate these virtues into their successors. To reassert these values, the army revised the 1888 squad regulations, which governed the peacetime garrison routine. Intensive physical conditioning, weapons proficiency, and demanding tactical training augmented by the spirit of the attack would enable a smaller army to defeat a larger one. Harsh physical discipline and uncompromisingly rugged training designed to make everything simple in battle became the postwar army’s hallmarks.28

  The revised squad regulations, published in 1908, extolled the army as a family whose goal was to nourish spiritual values, military discipline, and unquestioning obedience to superiors. The company commander adopted the role of the strict father, the NCOs that of the loving mother, and the enlisted troops were the children under their care and tutelage.29 The approach romanticized enlisted life in the barracks, describing it as a place where young soldiers shared joys and sorrows together and lived and died together in the army family.

  Company grade officers (captains and lieutenants) and NCOs adopted stricter oversight of daily life in barracks to enforce the regulations. NCOs took direct control and supervision of the daily life of conscripts, training them in tactics and demanding unforgiving discipline and absolute obedience to orders, whose ultimate source of authority was the emperor.30 The direct link to the throne was layered over a tactical doctrine that placed a premium on aggressiveness, harsh training, and racial superiority. As soldiers of the emperor, they were beyond reproach and morally superior to their civilian counterparts.

  Squad regulations institutionalized informally administered corporal punishment, hazing, and abuse in the barracks. The tough new regimen likely accounted for a dramatic increase in suicides in the army, which peaked in 1909 at ninety-eight cases, a rate of thirty-six per 10,000—more than two-and-a-half times the national average. Although no clear motive was apparent in more than half the suicides, army authorities attributed the remainder to confusion about spiritual training (22 percent) and remorse (12 percent).31

  The renewed stress
on discipline coincided with the army’s expansion. The percentage of the eligible 20-year-old cohort conscripted rose steadily from 5 or 6 percent between 1889 and 1894 to around 10 percent in 1897 and about double that after the Russo-Japanese War, where it remained into the 1930s.32 Expansion inevitably diluted the overall quality of the force, but the changing type of conscripts was more troubling to the army.

  During the nineteenth century the army had represented modernity, especially for conscripts from rural Japan. It exposed them for the first time to, among other things, western clothing and diets, indoor stoves, electric lights, and beds. Peasant soldiers who transmitted these cultural phenomena to their villages were respected for their modernity and cosmopolitanism. As the population gravitated to the cities (by 1920 one-quarter of the population lived in urban areas), however, traditional values identified with the countryside were eclipsed as progress and modernity became centered in the cities.33 The new conscript of the 1910s was likely drawn from an urban setting and was better educated as well as more politically conscious than his prewar comrades. Young men arrived at army depots with critical attitudes, widely differing perspectives, more spontaneous personalities, and degrees of independence that required adjustment to the training regimen.34

  The army might regard criticism as subversive to morale and discipline, but it still had to shape the new type of conscript into a fighting soldier. The 1913 revised barracks regulations toughened the already strict discipline within the platoon in the barracks to train conscripts in seishin and obedience. The manual condoned informal and unofficial violence to enforce regulations and discipline within the barracks’ confines as institutionalized violence eventually affirmed a soldier’s aggressiveness as expressed in spontaneous mayhem.35

  Though the army praised rural values, it preferred young men with formal education and conscripted proportionately more primary school graduates than were represented in the annual cohort. To take one example, in 1909 less than 1 percent of conscripts were semi- or totally illiterate versus 17 percent of their cohort. Furthermore, army training enabled even poorly educated conscripts to acquire technical skills and knowledge that ranked them above the standard educational levels of the general public. Evolving infantry tactics, for instance, demanded initiative and the exercise of independent judgment, technical proficiency, and some supervisory ability.36

  A new wave of ideas from the West—initially anarchism and socialism and later democracy and communism—washed over Japan and threatened to engulf the official state orthodoxy. The government reacted by reinforcing the concept that Japan was a family in possession of unique moral attributes by virtue of each subject’s connection to a divine emperor. Kokutai, the national structure of Japan, was the repository of special values conferred on the nation by an unbroken imperial line descended from the gods.

  Before the Russo-Japanese War the army had a narrow base of popular support, and in the postwar years it attempted to enlarge and energize a constituency to advocate its ambitious expansion and rearmament plans. Veterans were a natural advocacy group, and in 1910 Col. Tanaka Giichi, military affairs section chief, created the Imperial Reservist Association to spread army ideology, organize reservists’ support for army policies, and strengthen army ties with rural society. Tanaka’s goal was to spread military values as widely as possible to the civilian community, and by integrating the reservist association into the existing social order, he restructured the army’s societal base of support, created an activist pro-army pressure group, and expanded support at the village level.37 The association became the umbrella organization that incorporated the thousands of local reservist groups into a centralized system.

  Active-duty service was not a prerequisite for membership, although members did have to pass the army’s preinduction physical, which enabled young men assigned to the reserves to join. By 1918 the IRA national headquarters supervised more than 13,000 branches, with 2.3 million members, about half of whom had neither served on active duty nor received more than cursory basic training. The association thrived in rural areas, where it served social functions in closely knit small communities. Urban branches attracted fewer members, but they tended to be more committed to the organization’s political agenda and nationalistic goals.38

  Army leaders also grasped that mandatory schooling offered the state the opportunity to inculcate patriotic, nationalistic, and military values into schoolchildren because education was a citizen’s obligation and duty to the state. Formal education for most young men ended around age 14 or 15, leaving a five-year gap until they were eligible for conscription. In 1915, Tanaka, with home and education ministry cooperation, organized the Greater Japan Youth Association to fill this void by indoctrinating the youths in military, ethical, and patriotic values. Accompanying physical training and military drill under reserve officers and NCOs prepared the young men for their future military service. The association also played an important local role as a community service organization.39 This grassroots effort to popularize the army from the bottom up coincided with a strategic reassessment that would reshape the institution from the top down.

  World War I and the 1918 Revision to Imperial Defense

  After the outbreak of World War I in Europe in August 1914, Japan joined the war on the side of the Entente Powers (Britain, France, Russia) but initially took minimal action against the opposing Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy). The European belligerents had anticipated a short, decisive conflict, but by early November it was dreadfully apparent that their expectations had been wrong. Faced with a protracted war of attrition, British diplomats sounded out the Japanese foreign minister on the possibility of sending fifteen divisions to reinforce the western European front. The cabinet had no intention of committing the bulk of the standing army to such an overseas adventure, and army leaders hastened to add that transporting that many divisions to Europe would require two million tons of shipping, which was unavailable because of the current wartime demands. Japan instead bolstered its military position in China by seizing the German fortress at Qingdao on the Shandong Peninsula in late 1914 and in the Pacific by occupying lightly defended German colonial outposts north of the equator.40

  The six-week Qingdao campaign cost the army approximately 1,400 casualties, including about 400 killed. Veteran commanders of the Russo-Japanese War expected rapid movement to contact and hand-to-hand combat. Instead, artillery and engineers dominated siege operations to reduce the skillfully defended fortress. The army’s very limited experience with new technologies—machine guns, airplanes, and antiaircraft defenses—revealed that Japanese aircraft were inferior even to the few obsolete German planes, wireless communications were substandard, and rear area logistics were constantly teetering on the verge of collapse.41

  The approximately 5,000 German soldiers and sailors captured during the campaign were held at more than a dozen prisoner-of-war stockades scattered throughout Japan. They received good treatment during their three years of captivity, as evidenced by a death rate of about 1 percent for the period.

  The totality of the war in Europe diverted western attention, resources, and commerce from their colonial possessions and markets in Asia. Japanese merchants quickly filled the void, displacing British textiles in the Chinese and Indian markets. The fall of Qingdao extended Japan’s presence in China, and in January 1915 the Ōkuma Shigenobu cabinet tried to entrench Japanese influence in China by imposing the Twenty-One Demands, whose acceptance would have reduced China to a semicolony of Japan. Western displeasure, especially from the United States, caused Tokyo to back away, and Ōkuma resigned in October.

  In exchange for the political support it received from the Seiyūkai Party, the new cabinet of Marshal Terauchi Masatake (October 1915–September 1918) established the Provisional Foreign Affairs Research Committee in June 1916, with the presidents of the political parties as members. The committee was the highest national policy deliberative group during and immediately after World Wa
r I. By the time the cabinet abolished the committee in 1922, it had formulated policy for the Siberian Expedition, the Paris Peace Conference, and the Washington Conference on Naval Limitations. Indicative of Japan’s ambiguous wartime role, the services did not establish an imperial general headquarters to direct the war effort.42

  Army officers naturally took a keen professional interest in the European war, and in mid-September 1915, the war ministry established the Provisional Military Research Committee, whose broad charter included analyzing everything from grand strategy to small-unit tactics. One early observation was that Japan had to amend national defense policy because total warfare in the future would involve protracted struggles of national, not just military, endurance. As a consequence, in January 1916 the general staff authorized a military research committee to revise national military strategy and assigned Vice Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Tanaka Giichi to chair the twenty-five-officer group.

  Tanaka believed that the radically altered international situation and the interlocking system of national alliances demanded a wholesale redefinition of national defense policy.43 His approach would preserve Japanese interests in Asia, but without the entangling military alliances that brought war to Europe (he did except the Anglo-Japanese alliance for naval reasons) or commercial treaties. Tanaka’s goal was autarky, a world in which nations had to independently ensure their defense. But to achieve self-sufficiency, resource-poor Japan had to have unlimited access to China’s natural resources. In other words, exploitation of China became vital to Japan’s national interests.44 The committee’s various analyses and reports buttressed his sweeping proposal that identified China as vital to Japan’s national interests and anticipated that Japan would simultaneously expand north and south in East Asia.