![]() These impressive military victories raised Japan’s military establishment to its peak of political authority and spawned a strikingly ambitious plan for the future. During and immediately after the Sino-Japanese War, defense spending had risen to 63.2 percent of the national budget. On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War (1903), the army had grown to thirteen divisions and the Imperial Navy to seventy-six ships totaling 250,000 tons. Indeed, in the name of securing Korean “independence,” Japan would wage war against China in 1894-95 and Russia in 1904-05. It laid the foundation for both a robust offensive military establishment and continental empire. īy the mid-1880s, in other words, Japan’s modern military establishment had identified continental stability as a strategic priority and championed the expansion of both ground and naval forces toward that end. Control over the peninsula by a third country would threaten the security of the home islands and had to be prevented. Korea, Meckel stressed, was a “dagger at the heart” of Japan. By 1885, a Prussian major, Klemens Wilhelm Jacob Meckel (1842-1905), supplied this expanded force with a new strategic objective. By the early 1880s, however, Imperial Army founder Yamagata Aritomo (1838-1922) had begun transforming the small-scale, static accumulation of troops that typified French military organization (the garrison) to the large-scale, mobile, self-sufficient operational units combining infantry, cavalry, artillery, engineers, and supply troops (the division) perfected by France’s conqueror in 1871, Prussia. Before 1886, Japan possessed only eight modern warships. Army Power and Status ↑Īlthough Japan is an island nation, its military pioneers were all former samurai who from the start prioritized a robust ground force. Two imperial ordinances in 1900 required the cabinet posts of army and navy minister to be staffed by officers on active duty. The relationship was formalized in 1890 when the Meiji Constitution designated the emperor commander-in-chief. The Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors of 1882 sanctified the modern military’s special status by accentuating a direct relationship with the emperor. ![]() Tokyo created an autonomous General Staff in 1878 and founded an Army War College in 1883. Coming of age after the Franco-Prussian War, Japan’s modern military followed the wave of post-war military professionalization in Europe. More importantly, by exposing young Japanese men of all classes from around Japan to a uniform set of drills, food, clothing, and song, national conscription played a critical role in fashioning a sense of nation. Although originally the source of contentious debate, national conscription produced an armed force that, by 1877, had vanquished the last feudal resistance (samurai rebellion) to the modern state. A year after introducing compulsory education, Imperial Japan’s founders laid the basis for a modern military establishment. It brought, most importantly, a dramatic transformation of civil-military and army-navy relations in Tokyo.Īs with the great powers of Europe, military strength constituted a critical pillar of nation-building in 19 th century Japan. As with the war’s other main belligerents, the Great War marked the culmination of 19 th-century empire and nation-building in Japan. Detached from the looming history of the Second World War, however, Japan’s experience in World War I assumes a different hue. Confronted with the realities of total war in Europe, it is also argued, Japan’s military planners immediately began drafting outlines for general mobilization to prepare for another global conflagration. Historians portray the comprehensive list of demands presented to China in January 1915 (the so-called “ Twenty-one Demands”) as a new level of Japanese belligerence that would culminate in the Manchurian Incident (1931) and, ultimately, full scale war on the continent (the 1937 Sino-Japanese War). The First World War is often described as the start of a new era of continental expansion and military authority in Japan. ![]() Introduction: Military in Meiji Japan (1868-1912) ↑
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