Roughly a third of the way through Japan's Imperial Army, Edward J. Drea steps back from his account of the Russo-Japanese War to offer the reader “An Assessment.” He writes, “Despite its extensive planning, modern weaponry, and expanded force structure, the 1904 army was still an amateurish one, characterized by regional cliques, favoritism, incompetence, and nepotism” (p. 110). Lieutenant General Nogi Maresuke, for example, “was stumped when looking at a topographic map of the Port Arthur defenses” (p. 110). Nogi's chief of staff in the Third Army was “incompetent, opinionated, but cautious” (p. 111); the commander of the Fourth Army had a “difficult personality [that] made it all but impossible for anyone but his own son-in-law to work with him” (p. 111); the commander of the First Army “cultivated a rude and simple lifestyle,” while his chief of staff was “ignorant of the working of a headquarters staff” (p. 112). And so it goes on, a passage that highlights the many strengths of Drea's book: the author's confident tone, his eye for detail, and the fact that even as he narrates the “rise” of one of the world's most feared fighting machines by the mid-twentieth century, so he also lays the foundations for explaining its subsequent dramatic “fall.”

Japan's Imperial Army fills an important gap in the English-language literature on modern Japan by offering us a detailed survey of the Japanese army from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, thus complementing more narrowly focused monographs such as Leonard Humphreys's The Way of the Heavenly Sword: the Japanese Army in the 1920s (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). By the author's own admission, Japan's Imperial Army is a “synthesis told mainly from secondary sources”: Drea mines his many years of research on the imperial army to introduce his readers to what he calls the “new Japanese military history” (p. vii), with particular reference to Japanese-language scholars such as Fujiwara Akira, Hata Ikuhiko, Kurono Taeru, Tobe Ryōichi, and Yoshida Yutaka. One of Drea's aims is to redress a historiographical imbalance in English-language overviews of the Japanese army: such overviews, he argues, “tend to be weighted to its twentieth-century performance, especially during World War II, creating a lopsided impression of an army with unique qualities.” Instead, by writing a nine-decade narrative of the imperial army, Drea aims to offer “a balanced perspective on the army's evolution” (p. vii).

In this, he succeeds with distinction; indeed, Japan's Imperial Army will appeal to a wide range of historians and students by offering a fresh perspective not only on the evolution of the army, but also on the evolution of modern Japan as a whole. Thus, Drea's focus on the origins of the imperial army in the 1850s and 1860s (chapters 1 and 2) reminds us that despite the honeyed phrases of the new government's Charter Oath (April 1868), the transition from Tokugawa to Meiji was often vicious and bloody, depending on which part of the country one happened to live in: residents of Akita domain, for example, had more than one-third of their homes torched by Meiji troops during the Boshin War of 1868–69 (p. 12). By further describing with clarity and concision the early arguments among Meiji leaders concerning the army's function and composition, or the disaffection of kiheitai soldiers and anticonscription rioters, Drea highlights the “uncertain and dangerous future” (p. 34) that the new institution faced for many years after 1868. And yet, he concludes, once it had overcome these challenges to help establish the new Meiji state, “[a]rmy culture increasingly protected the military institution at the expense of the nation” (p. 255). By the time of the Manchurian Incident (1931–33), “[i]nstead of the army serving the interests of the state, the state came to serve the army” (p. 256).

Although the structure of Japan's Imperial Army is chronological, Drea expertly uses his narrative to foreground and later to reflect on key themes behind the army's rise and fall. In his coverage of the Satsuma rebellion, for example, he highlights a number of issues that will soon become familiar to readers: the army's “assertion of its uniqueness and the independence of supreme command from civil authorities” (p. 37), and the “special relationship” between the imperial throne and the army (p. 38), to name but two. As the book develops, Drea draws on previously discussed episodes to contextualize popular domestic reactions to, for example, the Manchurian Incident: thus, the press coverage of the bakudan sanyūshi (“three brave soldiers who became human bombs”) in early 1932 reminded ordinary Japanese of the famous “human bullets” of the Russo-Japanese war (p. 172). More generally, the reader confronts a number of themes that seem to recur with depressing regularity: the army's fatal downplaying of the importance of logistics, for example, is highlighted with reference to the Sino-Japanese war (p. 83), the Russo-Japanese war (p. 117), the China war (p. 201), and multiple campaigns after 1941. The lack of regard that the high command held for conscript troops is another recurring theme, as is the lack of joint planning between the army and the navy, which ultimately led to “a military strategy that the nation could not afford” (p. 257).

In any synthesis of this type, what is gained in terms of overview can sometimes be lost in terms of primary source detail: Drea discusses the “fundamental disagreements” and “fundamental differences” (p. 177) between the Imperial Way faction and the Control faction, but his account inevitably lacks the immediacy of Humphreys's The Way of the Heavenly Sword, which captures, through extensive primary quotations, the bitterness and complexity of such splits. Drea's text works best where there are brief quotations of key sources, such as the 1928 Infantry Manual, which spoke of “the magnificent tradition of Japanese arms” (p. 158). Similar short quotations to capture the mood of the “confident” (p. 198) reservists in the summer of 1937, or to illustrate what Drea calls the “flowery passages” (p. 212) of the 1941 “Code of Battlefield Conduct,” or to give voice to the Imperial General Headquarters war diarist, who is only quoted indirectly (p. 240), would have added more color to Drea's narrative.

The reader of such a survey might also occasionally quibble with narrative priorities: should the Rape of Nanjing (discussed in four paragraphs on pp. 196–97), for example, or the issue of comfort women (p. 206), have warranted greater coverage, given the relative importance that Drea attaches to the 1904 Port Arthur massacre? (pp. 86–87). Nevertheless, Drea does not flinch from assessing the “brutality” of the Japanese army in the epilogue (pp. 259–61)—indeed, in the way that it expertly weaves together the many threads of the narrative, the epilogue constitutes a tour-de-force that marks Japan's Imperial Army out as essential reading for anyone interested in the history and legacy of Japan's first modern army.