The effective implementation of these ideas would inaugurate a third phase in German civil-military relations. The aristocratic army of Frederick the Great was destroyed by Napoleon. The professional army created by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau was destroyed by Hitler. Now the proposal was to create a democratic army, an ideologically motivated force embodying subjective rather than objective civilian control. In part, this approach was a reaction against the professionalism of the past and the product of the false identification of that professionalism with Hitler. Ironically, it was also in part an imitation of the American conquerors of Hitler. But the changes of the Bonn government were not for the better. They were a retrogression to a more primitive form of civil-military relations. Inevitably they will foster the permanent embroilment of the German military in politics and reduce the fighting effectiveness of the new army. Despite what Herr Blank had to say, a democratic state is better defended by a professional force than by a democratic force. The Federal German Republic possesses the confidence of its citizens and strong central institutions such as the Weimar Republic never had. The obstacles to civilian control which existed in the twenties no longer exist. It would be tragic if the new German democracy did not seize the opportunity to reestablish an effective system of civilian control and a professional officer corps. It could do far worse than to resurrect the tradition of Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Clausewitz.
JAPAN: THE CONTINUITY OF POLITICAL MILITARISM
NATIONAL IDEOLOGY: SHINTO AND BUSHIDO.The key factor influencing Japanese civil-military relations was the persistence of feudalism through seven hundred years down to 1868. Under feudalism the ruling class in Japanese society had been composed of the Emperor who was a figurehead, the shogun who was the real ruler of the country, the local lords or daimyo, and the samurai or warriors who were the followers of the shogun and the daimyo. The mass of people, including the peasants and the small mercantile class, were excluded from political affairs. The Restoration of 1867—1868 ended feudalism. The shogunate was abolished, the Emperor brought out of seclusion and given an active role in the direction of national affairs, and power transferred from the local lords to the national government. The samurai were the leaders in this reassertion of imperial control and in the formation of the new institutions of government.
The national ideology of Japan which set the basic framework of Japanese thinking down to 1945 was essentially a compound of two interrelated systems of thought reflecting imperial authority and samurai rule. These were embodied respectively in State Shinto and Bushido. State Shinto expressed the unity of government and religion in Japanese life. It had three basic doctrines.27 The belief in “unbroken divine imperial sovereignty” was reflected in Articles I and III of the Constitution of 1889, which provided that “The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal” and that “The Emperor is sacred and unviolable.” The Emperor was a living god, his will was absolute, and the highest duty of the subject was not merely obedience to that will but identification with it: the loss of self in enthusiasm for the Emperor. Shinto’s second element was belief in the divine origin of the Japanese nation itself. The Japanese were a uniquely gifted people with divinely ordained institutions: “the national gods have given to Japan a divine land, a divine racial psychology, and a divinely established structure in the state.” Finally, there was the belief in the divine mission of Japan. Each nation of the world must assume its rightful place in the hierarchy of things. Japan’s mission was in the words of one admiral to make “the boundless virtues of the Emperor prevail throughout the whole world.” The world was to be brought under one roof through benevolent Japanese leadership although it might be necessary at times to use military force in fulfilling this mission.
The other element in the Japanese national ideology was the ancient ethic of the samurai, the moral code of the military class of Japanese feudalism. After the end of feudalism this code was romanticized and given the name of Bushido: the ways of the military knights. The Bushido code had many resemblances to the standards of conduct of European chivalry. The values of Bushido were the values of the warrior, the lover of violence for its own sake. The sword was “the soul of the samurai” and the “symbol of God.” After 1867 this bellicose code which had been the property of a relatively limited class became the ideology of the entire people; Japan became “incontestably a warlike nation.”28 The national ethic combining State Shinto and Bushido was thus a synthesis of imperial nationalism and feudal militarism. It was authoritarian, ethnocentric, nationalistic, imperially oriented (in the sense of both Emperor-worship and glorification of the Japanese empire), expansionist, and bellicose with high value assigned to the warrior and the warrior virtues.
THE JAPANESE MILITARY MIND. The Japanese military strongly adhered to the national ideology. The reasons for this are simple. The same forces which brought about the Restoration of 1868 and stimulated the rise of this national ideology also created the modern Japanese armed services. The armed services, moreover, occupied a very peculiar place in the ideology. They were closely identified with the Emperor; they were an essential if not preëminent requirement for the fulfillment of the world mission of the Yamato race; and they were the continuing embodiment of the samurai tradition. The national ideology served the military and the military served the ideology. The Japanese Army thus, in contrast with the German military, achieved Schleicher’s ideal of always being in tune with the dominant spirit of the times. There was no tension between military values and political values. Consequently, Japan had “the most political army” in the world.29 Given the nature of the national ideology and its strong associations with the feudal tradition, it also made the Japanese officer corps the major military body in the world most lacking in professional spirit.
The impotence of the professional ethic in the Japanese military forces was all the more surprising because in the decades after 1868 the new leaders of the government consciously strove to model their military institutions upon those of the West. French and then German military advisers aided in the creation of the Japanese Army. Military colleges were established. A naval academy was set up in 1872, a naval engineering school in 1876, and a naval staff college in 1888. The system of officer recruitment was very similar to that of Germany. The requirements for promotion were such as might be found in any European officer corps. But it was impossible to import the professional outlook which in the West had developed along with these institutional devices. Japan had the form, the external shell, of military professionalism, but not the substance. The Japanese military mind remained dominated by the popular ideology. Only in the twentieth century did something resembling the professional military ethic gain a foothold in the officer corps and even then it was limited to a relatively weak and distinctly minority group. The dominant ideals of the Japanese military remained fundamentally opposed to this ethic.
The most basic manifestation of this opposition concerned the concept of the ideal officer. The professional military ethic draws a distinction between the military virtues and the warrior virtues. For the Japanese, however, the ideal officer was a warrior — a fighter engaging in violence himself rather than a manager directing the employment of violence by others. This was a feudal, not a professional, ideal. As one observer described the Japanese officer, he was perhaps inferior technically to his western counter part, but this was compensated for by “magnificent ‘nerve’ and fighting ardor.”
The Japanese officer . . . is a magnificent leader of men. His weakness consists of his failing to remain master of a combat, as European officers do. He goes through with a battle rather than directs it. His courage and conception of honor are far more inspired by a warring passion than by a real and realistic understanding of the necessities of the craft of arms . . . The Japanese is more of a warrior than a military man, and therein lies his weakness. The difference may be a subtle one, but it does exist: the essential quality of the warrior is bravery; th
at of the military man, discipline.30
Officer indoctrination in the Japanese military forces stressed the importance of courage under fire far more than scientific accomplishment. Associated with this was the close bond which existed between officers and men in the Japanese Army. All were warriors together. The officers did not constitute a fundamentally different group with skills and abilities not possessed by the enlisted men.
The professional military man tends to focus upon the balance of material strength between opposing nations. Japanese military thought, however, minimized the role of material factors. Spirit alone was decisive: this was a basic concept of Bushido. Superior armaments were not responsible for Japanese victories:
No! What won the battles on the Yalu, in Corea and Manchuria, were the ghosts of our fathers, guiding our hands and beating in our hearts. They are not dead, those ghosts, the spirits of our warlike ancestors.31
Or as one officer put it: “The Imperial Army of Japan attaches more importance to spiritual training than to the art of war. Moral strength is greater than physical force.”32 General Araki, War Minister during the 1930’s, declared that the mission of Japan was to
. . . spread and glorify the Imperial way to the end of the Four Seas. Inadequacy of strength is not our worry. Why should we worry about that which is material?33
War, consequently, was the test of faith. The nation with the stronger faith not the stronger armaments would come out on top. Because of their divinely ordained role, this must necessarily be the Japanese. For the western military thinker, God is almost inevitably on the side of the bigger battalions; for the Japanese, He was on the side of the Yamato race. The military had few objections to war with the United States because, despite our incomparably greater resources, our spirit was weaker than theirs. The Japanese military mind was thus subjective rather than objective, involved rather than detached. Because it was imbued with the national ideology it was difficult if not impossible for it to analyze a military situation in a coldly realistic, scientific manner.* Japanese military training emphasized “spiritual mobilization” — Seishin Kyoiku — as the most important aspect of preparing troops for battle. Essentially, this was indoctrination in the spirit and principles of the Japanese national ideology: the identification of the individual with the nation and his subordination to the will of the Emperor. It was the continuation of a process which had begun much earlier in the schools. One reason for conscription in Japan was the opportunity it presented for the military to train virtually the entire male population in the ideals of Bushido and the Kodo (the Imperial Way).
The minimizing of the intellect and the exaltation of the spirit produced a notable lack of professional military writing in Japan. Although from 1905 to 1945 Japan was a major naval power, no Japanese writer ever formulated a significant theory on the nature and employment of seapower. Virtually their only writing upon this subject before World War II was either sensationalist or highly elementary. Scholarly analyses were absent. The same was true with respect to land operations. Japan “never produced a standard work on the science of war.”34 Similarly, military history, the core of professional study in the West, was not studied anywhere in the Japanese military educational system except at the Staff College. Only after World War I did military periodicals in a significant number and quality begin appearing in Japan, and so far as naval affairs were concerned these too remained on a very elementary level.
The discipline of the Japanese military forces was a holdover from feudalism. Officers and soldiers had to be instantly prepared to sacrifice their lives for the Emperor. For the Japanese military man, there was no higher achievement than to die in battle with the cry of “Tenno Heika Banzai” on his lips. All soldiers who died in battle were deified and their names inscribed in a national shrine. The warrior code, moreover, did not permit retreat. Unlike realistic western professional military thought which recognizes that retreat may well be a military necessity and that consequently it is desirable to prepare for it, Japanese doctrine refused to consider it an admissible alternative. Along with this was the tradition of “death rather than surrender,” the refusal to recognize that from a realistic military viewpoint the latter may be a legitimate course of action. In the words of General Araki:
Retreat and surrender are not permissible in our Army . . . To become a captive of the enemy by surrendering after doing their best is regarded by foreign soldiers as acceptable conduct. But according to our traditional Bushido, retreat and surrender constitute the greatest disgrace and are actions unbecoming to a Japanese soldier.35
In contrast to the professional military view that war is generally undesirable and that it is the last resort of national policy, the Japanese feudal warrior tended to praise violence and glorify war as an end in itself. The Japanese Ministry of War declared that: “War is the Father of Creation and the Mother of Culture. Rivalry for Supremacy does for the state what struggling against adversity does for the individual. It is such impetus, in the one case, as in the other, that prompts the birth and development of Life and Cultural Creation.”36 With this philosophy of war in general it is not surprising that the Japanese military in specific circumstances favored war as a means of achieving national goals. The army leaders in particular were bellicose; the admirals, who played a lesser role in politics, tended to be more conservative and professionally oriented. The Japanese military were eager for the 1894–1895 conflict with China. They urged the acquisition of the Liaotung Peninsula at the end of that war. They favored a strong policy against China during World War I. They wanted to expand Japanese influence through Siberia during the intervention there after the war. They were responsible for the intervention in China in 1928 and for the attack on Manchuria in 1931. Finally, they initiated the China incident in 1937, and the army leaders at least (the navy was more hesitant) advocated the attacks upon American and British possessions in December 1941. This record of consistent support for aggression by the politically oriented Japanese military leaders stands in marked contrast to the persistent warnings against adventurism offered to their government by the professionally inclined German generals. Whereas in Germany the military opposed withdrawal from the League of Nations and remilitarization in violation of the Versailles Treaty, in Japan they supported withdrawal and the denunciation of the London Naval Treaty. The more extreme groups within the Japanese officer corps were quite explicit in formulating a philosophy to justify Japanese dominance of East Asia.
MILITARY AUTHORITY: DUAL GOVERNMENT. The legal structure of civil-military relations in the Japanese state was essentially one of military independence. The government was divided into two spheres: military and civil. The theory was niju seifu: “dual government.” But, while civilians could exercise no authority within the military area, the military, on the other hand, by virtue of their political influence, could easily expand their power into the civil area.
Legal authority for this dual government stemmed from the constitution and from custom. The Constitution of 1889 made the Emperor supreme commander of the military forces, gave him authority to determine their organization and peace standing, and authorized him to declare war, make peace, and conclude treaties. These clauses furnished the constitutional justification for the direct relation between all top military leaders and the Emperor. Unlike the civilian members of the cabinet, the Ministers of War and the Navy did not have to go through the Prime Minister to reach the Emperor. Neither did the Chiefs of Staff nor the commanding generals and admirals. The Emperor exercised military command directly. The military were his personal implements. This close identification of the forces with the Throne provided the objective basis for military adherence to State Shinto with its glorification of the Emperor. It also placed the Japanese military forces in a unique legal position. “Armies abroad,” as one general said, “exist on a legal basis, but the Imperial army is founded on that which is infinitely more precious than law.”37 The military exercise of their functions free from civilian interfer
ence was guaranteed by an imperial Ordinance of 1889 which provided that, “With the exception of questions of gunki (strategy) and gunrei (military command), which, having been reported directly to the Emperor, may have been submitted to the cabinet for deliberation, the ministers of state for war and the navy shall report to the minister president of the state.”38 The premier and the cabinet — the civil government of the state — were precluded from rendering advice to the throne on military and naval operations, strategy, and the internal organization, education, and discipline of the armed forces.
The freedom of the military from civilian interference was further guaranteed by the prohibition against appointing civilians to the posts of Minister of War and Minister of the Navy. In 1900 the previously existing custom that only top officers could hold these posts was written into law. Only a general or lieutenant general of the army on active service could be Minister of War. Only an admiral or vice admiral on active service could be Minister of the Navy. In 1912 this restriction was limited so as to permit the appointment of reserve officers of comparable rank. This liberalization, however, only lasted until 1936 when the return was made to the 1900 procedure. It was frequently customary for the service ministers not to resign when cabinets changed but to stay on through many governments, a fact which emphasized their distinct position compared to the civilian ministers.
This complete division of authority between civil and military resulted, of course, in continuous friction between them. Since there was no easy way of defining their respective spheres of responsibility, the support of both was necessary to carry on the government. The vagaries and vicissitudes of civilian politics, however, put the military in a superior position. As General Araki once said: “A Minister of War is able to force the adoption of any measure desired by the Camp or to block any measure that meets his disapproval.”39 This result was brought about simply by the threat to resign. Since the cabinet had to have a Minister of War and a Minister of the Navy, and since only military officers could fill these posts, each service could bring about the downfall of the cabinet by having its representative resign or could prevent the formation of a new cabinet until its demands were met. Time and again, this form of military pressure occurred in Japanese history.* Dual government was further strengthened by the manner in which finances were handled. The Throne — that is, the military leaders in practice — had the authority to set the peacetime strength of the armed services. Appropriations had to be made by the Diet, but if the Diet refused to appropriate funds, the previous year’s budget was automatically continued. The estimates for the civilian departments were presented to the Diet by the Finance Minister while the Ministers of War and Navy defended their own budgets before the legislature. Usually the ministers discouraged and frustrated any real parliamentary discussions of military policy.
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