Imperial Japanese Army

• 1. Introduction

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  The Imperial Japanese Army once counted six million men in its ranks. Yet in March 1974, one of them, an intelligence officer named Hiroo Onoda, was still fighting alone in a Philippine jungle.

  The war he thought he was fighting had ended years earlier. Onoda simply refused to accept it, and kept holding out long after Japan's government had moved on without him.

  That gap between an institution's end and the loyalty it still commanded says something important. It shaped both the men who served in it and the nation that built it.

  It began as a patchwork of feudal domain armies with no unified command. It grew into a military rivaling the strongest in Asia. It fought wars against China and Russia, and joined the fighting of the First World War. It eventually clashed with the United States and its allies across the Pacific.

  How did a country with no national army in the 1860s build a force capable of empire? And how did that force end up commanding more loyalty than the civilians who were supposed to run it?

• 2. Improvised Beginnings

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  On the 27th of January 1868, Tokugawa Yoshinobu marched toward Kyoto with a force of fifteen thousand men, some of them trained by French advisers. Waiting for him were only five thousand troops drawn from the Satsuma, Chōshū, and Tosa domains. The two sides clashed at Toba and Fushimi, just south of Kyoto, in the opening battle of the Boshin War. On the second day of fighting, an Imperial banner was handed to the defending troops, and Prince Ninnaji was named their nominal commander in chief. That single act turned the coalition into an official imperial army. Yoshinobu's forces retreated to Osaka, and Yoshinobu himself later sailed to Edo with his closest advisers.

  Four new military divisions appeared within months, named the Tōkaidō, Tōsandō, San'indō, and Hokurikudō after the highways they followed. Prince Arisugawa-no-miya nominally led the Eastern Expeditionary High Command overseeing them, assisted by two court nobles as senior staff. The army leaned hard on its link to the imperial court, using it to brand opponents as traitors and to win popular backing. Along three major highways, the government set up relay stations stocked with supplies seized from the shogunate or donated by loyal domains. Local villagers were routinely pressed into service as porters, hauling supplies between the depots and the front.

  In March 1869, the government formed an imperial bodyguard of 400 to 500 men from Satsuma and Chōshū veterans of Toba-Fushimi. It also drew in yeoman and masterless samurai from other domains. Command remained a mess for years, since many units still answered to their home domains before the imperial cause. Within months, both this bodyguard and a newly created military branch were disbanded, judged too weak and too poorly armed to matter. A new military affairs directorate replaced them. It drafted troops from each domain in proportion to its rice production, at a rate of ten men for every 10,000 koku. That quota system never worked as intended, and it was scrapped within a year.

  Fighting men from Satsuma and Chōshū still monopolized the senior ranks. That imbalance bred resentment that would soon collide with a bigger argument over who should lead Japan's new army.

• 3. Forging One Army

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  Ōmura Masujirō wanted a standing national army built along European lines, open to conscripted commoners rather than samurai alone. His rival, Ōkubo Toshimichi, preferred a small volunteer force built from former samurai instead. Ōmura's vision cost him his life: he was assassinated in 1869, before he could see it built. Yamagata Aritomo carried the plan forward after Ōmura's death, and historians describe him as the father of the Imperial Japanese Army. Yamagata had commanded mixed samurai-and-commoner units from Chōshū during the Boshin War and trusted peasant soldiers more than he trusted his own samurai class.

  In March 1871, the War Ministry created an Imperial Guard of six thousand men: nine infantry battalions, two artillery batteries, and two cavalry squadrons. The Emperor personally donated 100,000 ryō to fund the new unit. Satsuma supplied four infantry battalions and four artillery batteries, and Chōshū sent three infantry battalions. Tosa contributed two battalions of infantry, two cavalry squadrons, and two artillery batteries. For the first time, soldiers answered to the government rather than to their home domains, under one rank structure, one pay scale, and one uniform. The Guard's real job was suppressing samurai revolts, peasant uprisings, and demonstrations against the new government.

  On the 29th of August 1871, the government ordered every daimyo to disband his private army and surrender its weapons, the same day it abolished the domains. Two days later, the country was split into four military districts, each with its own garrison to handle local unrest. The Imperial Guard held the Tokyo garrison, while former domain troops filled the ranks at Osaka, Kumamoto, and Sendai. Together the four garrisons held about 8,000 troops, mostly infantry with a few hundred artillerymen and engineers. Smaller detachments also watched outposts at Kagoshima, Fushimi, Nagoya, and Hiroshima.

  Before conscription began, Japan's army numbered just 12,000 men in 1870. The conscription ordinance of the 10th of January 1873 made military service compulsory for every male subject in Japan. It required seven years of service in total: three on active duty, two in the first reserve, and two more in a second reserve. Every man aged 17 to 40 was also liable for the national guard in a genuine national emergency. A conscript could buy his way out for 270 yen, an enormous sum that only the wealthy could afford. In 1873, the army numbered about 17,900 men out of a national population of 35 million; by 1875 it had roughly doubled to 33,000.

  Public anger over conscription built through 1874. It exploded into the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, fought under slogans opposing conscription and schools and demanding war with Korea. It took the new army a full year to put down the revolt. The victory proved the government's army could hold its own against Japan's old warrior class.

• 4. Borrowed Blueprints

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  French officers arrived first, running one military mission to Japan from 1872 to 1880 and a second from 1884 to 1889. France's defeat in 1871, in its own war with Prussia, pushed Japan to copy the victorious Germans instead. Major Jakob Meckel arrived to train the Japanese General Staff starting in 1886. He was replaced in 1888 by von Wildenbrück and Captain von Blankenbourg, and the German mission ran until April 1890. In 1878, the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office was set up directly under the Emperor, modeled on its German counterpart. It held broad authority over military planning and strategy.

  Major Pompeo Grillo of the Kingdom of Italy worked at the Osaka foundry from 1884 to 1888, one of several foreign specialists filling narrower technical roles. Major Quaratezi succeeded him there from 1889 to 1890. Captain Schermbeck of the Netherlands improved Japan's coastal defenses from 1883 to 1886. After 1890, Japan hired no more foreign military advisers until 1918. That year, a French mission led by Commandant Jacques-Paul Faure arrived to help build Japan's air services.

  By the 1890s, the Imperial Japanese Army had become the best-trained, best-equipped force in Asia, with morale to match. It was still short on cavalry and artillery compared with its European counterparts. The artillery it did buy, from America and several European nations, came in too many different calibers. That variety strained its ammunition supply just as Japan prepared for war with China.

• 5. Wars of Expansion

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  In December 1871, the Paiwan people of southern Taiwan killed 54 crewmembers from a wrecked Ryukyu Kingdom vessel. Twelve survivors were rescued by the local Chinese-speaking community. Japan used this Mudan Incident, as it became known, to claim sovereignty over the Ryukyu Kingdom and to press a claim on Taiwan, then Qing territory. In 1874, Japan launched a punitive expedition against Taiwan, the first overseas deployment of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy together. The expedition cost Japan 543 men, only 12 of them killed in battle and the rest lost to disease. An Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors followed in 1882, demanding unquestioning loyalty to the Emperor. It equated a superior officer's orders with commands from the Emperor himself.

  The Donghak Peasant Revolution broke out in southern Korea in early 1894 and threatened to engulf Seoul. China sent about 2,900 troops to Asan by late June to help put down the revolt. Japan answered by landing a reinforced brigade of roughly 8,000 men under General Oshima Yoshimasa. On the 23rd of July, Japanese forces seized the Royal Palace in Seoul and forced King Gojong to renounce his ties to China. The two governments declared war on the 1st of August. By mid-September, Japan's army had taken Pyongyang, while its navy won a decisive battle at the Yalu River. Japan's Second Army occupied Dairen on the 8th of November and captured the fortress and harbor at Port Arthur on the 25th of November. Total Japanese losses in the war reached 1,132 dead and 3,758 wounded.

  Boxer attacks on foreigners in China intensified through 1899 and 1900, trapping foreign diplomats under siege in Beijing. Japan sent the largest contingent of any nation to the relief force: 20,840 troops and 18 warships. Major General Fukushima Yasumasa led an early provisional force of 1,300 men. He was chosen partly for his fluent English, which let him coordinate with the British commander. By the 14th of August, an allied force of about 33,000 lifted the siege. Japan's 13,000 troops made up roughly 40 percent of that total. At Tianjin, Japan's 3,800 troops suffered more than half of the allied casualties, 400 out of 730. At Beijing, Japanese forces made up under half the assault force but took nearly two-thirds of the losses, 280 out of 453.

  Rival ambitions in Manchuria and Korea pushed Russia and Japan into war from 1904 to 1905. Japan inflicted heavy losses on Russian forces, especially during the siege of Port Arthur. It never landed a knockout blow, and its heavy reliance on infantry cost it dearly in casualties. Japanese combat deaths are put at around 47,000, rising to about 80,000 once disease is included. In 1902, England signed a defensive alliance with Japan, committing to fight anyone who joined Russia against Japan. American president Theodore Roosevelt warned France and Germany against pressuring Tokyo. Facing that pressure, Tsar Nicholas II agreed to withdraw his forces from Manchuria. Russian troops lingered on anyway, officially to guard newly built railways.

  In 1914, Japan entered World War One on the Entente side. It led a well-executed attack on the German-held port of Qingdao and seized several small German island colonies. Roughly 300 Japanese soldiers died in the fighting, most of them at the Battle of Tsingtao. During the later Siberian Intervention, Japan's army general staff first planned to send more than 70,000 troops as far west as Lake Baikal. It hoped to carve an independent buffer state out of the collapsing Russian Empire. In July 1918, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson asked Japan to contribute 7,000 troops to a coalition force of 24,000. Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake instead committed 12,000 troops, under Japanese rather than international command. By November 1918, more than 70,000 Japanese troops occupied ports and towns across the Russian Maritime Provinces and eastern Siberia. They backed the White forces of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak against the Bolsheviks. Even after the Americans withdrew in 1920 following Kolchak's execution, Japan stayed on. Prime Minister Katō Tomosaburō finally pulled Japanese troops out in October 1922.

• 6. An Army Above the State

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  By 1927, barely a decade after Siberia, the Imperial Japanese Army had swelled to 300,000 men. Under the Meiji Constitution, the War Minister answered only to Emperor Hirohito, never to Japan's elected civilian government. No cabinet could survive without the army's backing. The army also controlled who could hold that post. A 1936 law required the War Minister to be an active-duty general or lieutenant-general. Military spending climbed sharply as a share of the national budget through the 1920s and 1930s. Factions within the army increasingly steered Japanese foreign policy.

  After 1928, the force once known simply as the Army, or rikugun, renamed itself the Imperial Army, or kōgun. The shift matched a turn toward romantic nationalism and the army's growing political ambitions. Troop numbers moved unevenly across these years: 21 divisions in 1923, cut to 17 under a 1924 reform, then rebuilt to 34 divisions by 1938. Two waves of military-industrial expansion, one from 1906 to 1910 and another from 1931 to 1934, let the army re-equip itself each time.

  In 1931, the Imperial Japanese Army numbered 198,880 officers and men across 17 divisions. That same year, the army staged a bombing of a Japanese-owned railway in Manchuria and blamed it on Chinese saboteurs. This became known as the Manchurian incident. Acting largely on its own, without direction from Tokyo's civilian leadership, the army used the incident to invade Manchuria. The Second Sino-Japanese War followed in 1937. As the fighting spread, the army's influence over the Emperor actually began to slip, while the navy's grew instead.

  From 1932 onward, Japan's Hokushin-ron doctrine set its sights on Soviet territory. Its puppet state in Manchuria kept colliding with Soviet interests as a result. The last clashes of the 1930s, the Battle of Lake Khasan and the Battles of Khalkhin Gol, both ended in decisive Soviet victories. A Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact signed on the 13th of April 1941 quieted the border for a time. Stalin later promised at Yalta to break that pact, and on the 5th of August 1945, the Soviet Union voided it and declared war.

• 7. War Machine and Its Wages

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  By 1941, the Imperial Japanese Army fielded 51 divisions and roughly 1,700,000 people, including specialized artillery, cavalry, anti-aircraft, and armored units. Twenty-seven of those divisions sat in China at the war's outset. Thirteen more guarded the Mongolian border against a feared Soviet attack. From 1942, fresh divisions fanned out to Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and Malaya. By 1945, Japan's home defense army alone numbered 55 divisions, 53 of infantry and two of armor, backed by 32 brigades and 2.35 million men.

  From 1943, Japanese troops ran short of food, medicine, munitions, and armaments. American submarines sinking Japan's supply ships were largely to blame. Spare parts grew so scarce that large numbers of fighter aircraft simply could not fly. Some historians estimate that illness and starvation, not combat, caused up to two-thirds of all Japanese military deaths in the war.

  In December 1941, when one Japanese yen equaled about $0.23, an Imperial Japanese Army general earned 550 yen a month, or roughly $126.50. A private first class, at the bottom of the pay scale, earned just 9 yen, about $2.07. An American private of the same era took home around $50 a month, equivalent to roughly 204 yen. That meant the lowest-paid American soldier earned about 25 times what a same-ranked Japanese soldier did. Living costs in Japan were lower than in the West. Even so, by any measure, Imperial Japanese Army soldiers were poorly paid for what was widely seen as a first-rate fighting force.

  By 1942, most Japanese soldiers were paid in military yen, a currency that could not be exchanged for regular Japanese yen. Occupied populations came to call it Japanese invasion money. When the war ended, Japan's ministry of finance cancelled every military banknote, making that pay worthless overnight. Through the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II, the army also committed atrocities against civilians and prisoners of war. These included the Nanjing Massacre, forced prostitution, death marches, biological warfare, and the execution of captives. These crimes, by themselves, caused tens of millions of deaths.

• 8. After the Surrender

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  Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution renounced the use of force to settle international disputes. It was a direct response to where militarism had led the country. In 1947, Japan formed a Public Security Force. In 1954, early in the Cold War, that force became the basis for the newly created Ground Self-Defense Force. Far smaller than the old Imperial Japanese Army, and defensive in name and purpose, the Ground Self-Defense Force is Japan's modern army today.

  On the Indonesian island of Morotai, a soldier named Teruo Nakamura kept fighting alone until he finally surrendered in December 1974, one of the last to give up the war. Scattered reports describe other Japanese holdouts turning up on Pacific islands even later than that. Decades after the government that raised them had gone, a handful of men were still guarding a war nobody else was fighting.