“Where have all the soldiers gone?” Many geographic fields of academic history have been asking this question for decades. Military history has long been popular with readers but has been largely marginalized within professional academic circles. This has been true too for the study of modern Japan. Despite war being a frequent occurrence and the military arguably the most important institution for the first half of the modern era since 1868, the historiographical attention they have attracted has not been proportional to their historical importance. Since 1945, Japan has avoided any direct participation in war and its Self-Defense Force (SDF), which insists on not being called a military despite being among the most powerful in the world, has had a much reduced political and social impact. Yet scholarship about the postwar military has not been commensurate to even that lesser role. These three recent books on military history mark a historiographical milestone that calls for a brief overview of modern Japanese military history in English before evaluating these new contributions.

Japan's military rise begat its military history. Triumph over Russia led to the first academic volumes about the topic, most notably a series of over a half dozen monographs by Japanese scholars published by Oxford University Press in the early 1920s. World War II triggered a second wave of commentary and a bit of history, the most reliable of which was E. H. Norman's Soldier and Peasant in Japan (1943). In its forward, his fellow academic historian George Samson made a plea for “historical context” in response to the “shortcomings … in studies of contemporary Japan” that “tend to pick out some spectacular features of Japanese life and build up from them a picture, which may be essentially false.”Footnote ¹ Postwar history-writing heeded that call.

Historians of Japan in the decades after the war—when the study of the country as a recognized field within the discipline of history first took recognizable form—often asked the question: What went wrong? Within the prevailing scholarly paradigm of the era—modernization theory—the “military history” of these decades was essentially political or diplomatic history that sought to explain why the country veered from its modernizing march. The usual explanation of this generation did not lie in the dark, feudal Tokugawa period or the incomplete Meiji Restoration as it did for the Marxist-influenced Norman. Rather, they saw the war as an aberration in Japan's “way to becoming ‘more like us,’” as Carol Gluck memorably characterized the “teleology of postwar America-centrism.”Footnote ² In a half dozen or so monographs published in the first few decades after the war, it was almost always a military cabal at home and abroad that was to blame, a narrative that seemed to confirm the verdict of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials.

By the early 1970s, influenced by social history, what one might call the “new military history” of Japan extended this diagnosis back in time and beyond the military to society. This work was, as Leonard Humphreys suggested in his book about the Japanese army in the 1920s, more interested in “the people [and] the process” than simply narratives of what went wrong.Footnote ³ As its title indicates, Richard Smethurst's A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism fit in this vein as well.Footnote ⁴ In the decades since, a number of historians have applied this emphasis on military-society relations to earlier conflicts.

It was only from the 1980s on that the more traditional strand of military history—concerned with issues such as actual warfare, strategy, organization, training, tactics, and technology—became prominent in academic history-writing about Japan. A small group of scholars, through military and/or government service and graduate training, developed the interest and expertise in such issues. Over several decades, they published on such topics as the Soviet-Japanese border conflict of Nomonhan in 1939, the imperial navy and naval air power, and military doctrine.

Since the 1990s, many other historians have emphasized cultural aspects of the military and war. Little of this recent work could be called military history—and its authors would certainly not call themselves military historians—but war, the military, and soldiers have captured the attention of historians concerned with culture, race, empire, gender, sexuality, memory, animals, sports, and the environment.Footnote ⁵ Though this work may not be classified as military history, these new approaches have greatly enriched our understanding of war and the military.

In contrast, one can place the three books under review within the category of military history in the more conventional sense. All three continue earlier trends, yet together they may signal a renewed enthusiasm for and more specialized treatment of the military and its relationship with society. Together they cover all three iterations of the military in the last century and a half—the nation's army (kokugun) of the Meiji military system that was organized along the lines of European armies, the imperial (or emperor's) military (kōgun) that took shape in the decades before the Asia-Pacific War, and the SDF. All three concentrate on the army rather than naval or air forces, which has generally been the case for earlier scholarship. D. Colin Jaundrill's Samurai to Soldier is the closest to classical military history with its specific interest in the army as an organization; Danny Orbach's Curse on This Country reminds one of diagnostic work of the political and military histories of the early postwar decades but has a more deep-rooted explanation of why the military attained such political power; and Tomoyuki Sasaki's Japan's Postwar Military and Civil Society could be understood as “new military history” concerned with both the military and society. Let us consider each in chronological order.

Samurai to Soldier focuses on the samurai and the soldier, two iconic figures of nineteenth-century Japan, and argues that the “redefinition of military service—from a marker of social status to a national obligation—was deeply rooted in the final decades of the Tokugawa era” (p. 3). Historians writing in Japanese and English, with some exceptions like Norman's book, have generally drawn a sharp distinction between late Tokugawa military reforms and the policies of the Meiji regime. In contrast, Jaundrill argues that “the replacement of the warrior by the conscript soldier was a complex, contested process that unfolded … across the Meiji Restoration rather than as a result of it,” over a half-century from the time of the Opium Wars in the 1840s to the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 (pp. 5, 7). With impeccable organization, convincing evidence, and economic and even elegant prose, he makes an important contribution to the development of the military in Japan's long trans-Restoration nineteenth century.

The book is organized into six chapters. The first three form the heart of Jaundrill's argument. Chapter 1 explores how the Takashima school of musketry promoted the adoption of new technology and organizational reform in response to the Opium Wars and Perry's arrival. The shogunate and some outer domains, the Tokugawa's rivals, found technological change without structural change to be inadequate, but everywhere entrenched political interest resisted. By 1860, internal politics stalled shogunal efforts. Reforms in some outer domains, such as Satsuma but not Choshū, met with greater success. Rising international and domestic tensions from 1860 to 1866, the focus of chapter 2, prompted both shogunal and domain officials to begin prioritizing the mobilization of fighting men over the preservation of warrior status, even at the risk of sparking internal conflict. The results were mixed. The shogunate took the lead in establishing a Western-style army under central control and composed mostly of commoners. Satsuma and Choshū trailed but were not far behind. In the end, the rebel domains triumphed in 1868, but more important to Jaundrill's argument is that from 1866 to 1872, the subject of chapter 3, both the shogunate and then the early Meiji government attempted to create a national army along federal lines. Both failed, but these efforts laid the groundwork for the institution of universal military service in 1873.

In 1871, the new regime abolished the domains, their military forces, and warrior status. Chapter 4 examines the preparation for and implementation of the Conscription Ordinance of 1873, which decoupled military service from status and was the decisive step in creating a national conscript army composed of imperial subjects. Although actually enforcing universal male conscription proved difficult, as many young men found ways to avoid serving, Jaundrill judges the policy “ultimately an enormous success” that within a decade “resolved the lingering tensions over military service, eliminated domestic challenges to its rule, and created the foundation for the Great Power army it so desperately desired” (p. 107).

As the new army worked to implement the ordinance, it was confronted with its first challenge, the Satsuma Rebellion, in 1877. Jaundrill argues in chapter 5 that the government's victory should not only be understood as the triumph of a modern conscript army over a highly motivated force of reactionary, former samurai. It also provided the army with a “body of experiential knowledge that informed [further] reform efforts of the 1880s and it functioned as a dress rehearsal for the army's ability to mobilize and maintain an army in the field” (p. 155).

In the final chapter, Jaundrill describes reforms the army implemented between 1878 and 1894. It made administrative changes to make the army a more professional organization, revised the conscription law to curtail draft evasion, and established a program of ideological education that effectively used “redefined versions of many of the values associated with warriors” to create “a new kind of military identity” (p. 168). Together these reforms created an additional stage in the process beyond that suggested by the title Samurai to Soldier. Though awkward, Jaundrill could have used the title Samurai to Soldier to Servicemen, the last incarnation being a combination of the early two: a professional soldier inculcated with the spirit of the samurai. As he observes, by the 1880s when “actual warriors no longer posed a political or military threat to the Meiji state, the warrior ideal became eligible for appropriation” (p. 168).

I found few flaws in this book. Two elements, though, deserve more attention. Readers, I suspect, will want to know more about what the men, who were transformed from samurai to soldiers to servicemen, thought about these changes in military service and identity. Chapter 4 explores the fabric of army life, but it would have been nice to hear the voices of the men themselves. Such sources are undoubtedly hard to come by but would have enriched the text. In addition, I would have liked more analysis of what the military was called and what that meant. Jaundrill suggests that the rebel's claim to be the “emperor's army” (kangun) as they sought to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate gave them a significant advantage (p. 87). Later he mentions that the military was known as the “government army” (kangun) during the Satsuma Rebellion, but by the 1890s became known as the Imperial Army (teikoku rikugun) (p. 157). How did the meaning of kangun 官軍 change over the course of a decade? And how does what he calls the Imperial Army (teikoku rikugun) by the 1890s square with Humphreys's claims that it became the Imperial Army (kōgun) in the 1920s?

Fortunately, Orbach, whose book covers the 1860s to the 1930s, sheds some light on these later questions. Neither he nor Jaundrill see as a watershed a major reform implemented in the wake of the Satsuma Rebellion: the “prerogative of supreme command” (tōsui-ken), which placed military decisions under the emperor and outside of civilian control. Both authors take a page from the Japanese military historian Tobe Ryōichi and caution that while this change certainly helped facilitate the military's rogue behavior in the 1930s, that was not the intent in 1878. Nevertheless, Orbach identifies it as key to understanding those later military excesses. He thus implies that although the transformation of the Meiji military system into an imperial military did not happen until later, the enabling roots of that metamorphosis can be found deep in the nineteenth century.

Orbach's is a bold book. He asserts that “the Imperial Japanese army was arguably one of the most disobedient armed forces in modern history” (p. 2). As the source of that insubordination, Orbach goes back to as early as the 1860s to identify what he calls “bugs,” which “in certain situations, under specific conditions, … cause[d] severe failures that eventually undermined the entire system.” The first bug was the authority of the emperor, which was absolute in theory but limited in practice, and whose “will” could be claimed by dissenters in the military and beyond to rebel against the government. The second bug, Orbach writes, was the “official state ideology” of expansion. By expanding “faster and more resolutely than the government,” rebels could claim they were true to this ideology and the authorities were not. The third bug was the “basic ambiguity” of this ideology (p. 3). No one could define what the extent of expansion—political, economic, or military—should be, so those disgruntled could always claim they were right. Over ten chapters, Orbach traces how these bugs, “programmed into the political and ideological code,” established a culture of military insubordination (p. 261).

In chapter 1, Orbach argues the warriors (shishi) who overthrew the Tokugawa regime in the name of the emperor were the “thread that tied the knots of Japanese military disobedience together” (p. 8). In chapter after chapter, he connects the insubordination of later rebels to the shishi, often using their very words to tighten the knots. After the first chapter, Orbach divides the remaining chapters into three parts of three chapters each.

Part one considers what Orbach calls “The Age of Chaos, 1868–1878.” Chapter 2 briefly describes the context of the first bug, the decision by early Meiji leaders “to legitimate their rule” by concealing it “behind the prestigious institution of the emperor, without giving this inexperienced monarch real power” (p. 30). Chapter 3 analyzes the “first important case of military insubordination,” the decision by Saigō Tsugumichi to invade Taiwan in 1874 against explicit orders to not do so (p. 38). Saigō justified his actions using “the hidden power of the emperor to circumvent established channels of authority” (p. 45); he did so not willingly but in face of political pressure at home in Satsuma. Orbach admits that Saigō’s insubordination was neither precedent-setting nor inspirational for later rebels. However, it was important because it contributed to the “prerogative of supreme command” reforms four years later that were designed to cut ties between military officers like Saigō and local politicians. Chapter 4 takes up other cases of insubordination in the 1870s, in these cases of willing rebels and assassins. These figures from places such as Tosa, Saga, and Satsuma (home of the famous rebel Saigō Takamori, older brother of Tsugumichi) all sought to justify their behavior through the “haziness of imperial authority” (p. 55). All failed. In this chapter, Orbach introduces the categories of pessimistic and optimistic rebels, those who were sure they would fail and those who thought they could succeed, an idea he effectively returns to repeatedly. The violence of the 1870s, he notes, involved the last military uprisings for over a half century.

In that interlude, Orbach addresses what he calls the “Age of Military Independence” from 1878 to 1913. Chapter 5 analyzes the prerogative of supreme command, the most important reform instituted by General Yamagata Aritomo and his protégé, Colonel Katsura Tarō. Orbach calls it a “rational, effective solution to the problems of the preceding decade” that helped to eliminate the “illicit horizontal connections between politicians and army units” (pp. 98–99). But it had fatal unintended consequences after Yamagata disappeared from the scene in the 1920s and the context changed. In chapter 6, Orbach turns to events in Chosŏn Korea in 1885. There, the inexperienced Japanese minister to Korea, Miura Gorō, who like many Meiji political leaders was a one-time high-ranking military officer, led a plot of his legation staff and the employees of a local Japanese newspaper that assassinated the Korean Queen Min. In chapter 7, Orbach jumps to the Taishō political crisis of 1912–13, during which the army used an offshoot of the supreme prerogative ideology called the “active duty rule” to topple the government. In 1900, an imperial ordinance stipulated that the army and navy ministers serving on the cabinet had to be generals and admirals on active duty. In December 1912, the Saionji cabinet was forced to disband by the resignation of the army minister and the army's refusal to nominate a replacement. Prime Minister Saionji was succeeded by Katsura, a favorite of the military, but he had difficulty forming a cabinet and his attempt to cravenly use imperial power to do so prompted a backlash by the Diet and the public. In the end, Katsura's cabinet collapsed, the military's machinations failed, and it lost the rule of active duty. Yet, civilian control of the military remained fleeting.

In part three, “Into the Dark Valley,” Orbach examines 1928 to 1936, the years most associated with military insubordination. In chapter 8, he discusses the assassination of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin in 1928 as another example, like the killing of Queen Min, of military officers using imperial supreme prerogative and expansionist ideology to defy government authority. The government failed to punish the ringleader Colonel Kōmoto Daisaku and his fellow conspirators, setting a dangerous precedent. It was soon followed by a flurry of “incidents” in 1931 that Orbach analyzes in chapter 9: the March Incident, the Manchurian Incident in September, and the October Incident. In each, junior officers, with the support of some “senior officers, generous backing of financial patrons, and strong cooperation with a dense web of violent civilian organizations,” conspired against the government and in every instance escaped any punishment (p. 221). On February 26, 1936, the “army's culture of insubordination … exploded into full-scale rebellion” in an attempted coup led by lower-ranking officers, lieutenants and captains (p. 226). This is the subject of chapter 10. Rebels again invoked the emperor and claimed to be acting patriotically in the service of the state. But this time, they went too far by using rank-and-file troops and were harshly punished by the government, which had come under the control of a military faction that was a rival of the rebels. This incident, Orbach concludes, demonstrated the limits of military insubordination.

In a different sense, there seems to be no limit to “military insubordination” for Orbach. He stretches its meaning, in some cases, too far, and its strands seem near snapping. Was the assassination of Queen Min really committed by the military? Minister to Korea Miura happened to be a former lieutenant general, and the squadron of soldiers assigned to the legation participated, but it seems a bit much to call this military insubordination. This assassination was as much the work of “continental adventurers” (tairiku rōnin), though they participated “at the behest of the Japanese state” as represented by Miura, but not the military per se.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, Miura and most of his associates were tried (and acquitted) in a civilian court, while a smaller military tribunal acquitted the officers and soldiers involved. Likewise, Orbach calls the Taishō political crisis a “coup d’état,” an overthrow of the government by the military. Does the joint effort by politicians and military officers to bring down a government by political means qualify as a coup, or as insubordination by the military? It appears that no other historian has made such a claim. These conceptual objections aside, I appreciated Orbach's original interpretation, his extensive research, and the fervor of his prose. Curse on This Country makes an important contribution to both military history and the history of Japan.

Unlike Orbach, Sasaki's Japan's Postwar Military and Civil Society takes readers into topically untrodden territory. Although the SDF has received some recent attention in English from anthropological and sociological perspectives, this is the first historical study that examines the SDF and wider society, and one of the first to consider “postwar Japan as (military) history.” Sasaki asks how the SDF was able to “cultivate a firm base of support in civil society and convince the people of the need for an army” (p. 1) despite a constitution that “could have undermined or destroyed its legitimacy” (p. 5). As a case study, he uses the northern island of Hokkaido from 1950, when the SDF's forerunner the National Police Reserve was founded, until the 1980s, when he believes anti-military sentiment withered. Sasaki's answer to his query is that society's economic reliance on the military led people to believe the SDF was a necessity for economic and eventually for security reasons.

Sasaki supports this argument in five chapters. Chapter 1 explores the SDF's recruitment efforts in the 1950s, as well as the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that the SDF “worked as a welfare institution, providing employment opportunities to those who did not benefit from high-speed economic growth” (p. 19). One of his most interesting points is that the high ratio of recruits from Kyushu (for both the SDF and the imperial army), many of whom were stationed in Hokkaido, can better be explained by the poor economic conditions of these areas rather than for cultural reasons.

Chapter 2 examines the use of SDF labor for the benefit of Hokkaido during the 1950s and 1960s. Sasaki argues that this labor “provided an important source of public assistance for rural communities” and “this fostered close ties between these communities and the SDF,” enabling it to become an “SDF for the people” as its leaders desired (p. 51). Sasaki's focus is on civil engineering projects and disaster relief. Surprisingly, he says little about extensive outreach conducted by the SDF, including nothing about the Sapporo Snow Festival, which provided the SDF with an excellent public relations opportunity from the 1950s onward. I also wished he had not treated Hokkaido in such a monolithic fashion, and paid some attention to difference between the capital Sapporo and rural areas.

Sasaki casts his eyes almost entirely to civil society and specifically to resistance to the SDF in Hokkaido in chapter 3. He focuses on two well-known legal challenges in Hokkaido, the Eniwa and Naganuma cases, to illustrate how citizens used a creative interpretation of the constitutional “right to live in peace” to argue that “national defense and the defense of individual and community were not necessarily compatible” (p. 85). Ultimately these legal challenges failed, but they led to the Defense Agency to take a proactive strategy to undermine objections to the SDF by offering generous economic assistance to base communities, both those hosting US troops and the SDF.

That assistance is the subject of chapter 4. Sasaki suggests that the government successfully used economic incentives to deflect and dissipate political objections to the SDF. The final chapter examines what he calls a campaign warning against “the northern threat” posed to Hokkaido and Japan by the Soviet Union that appeared in the media starting in the late 1970s. For Sasaki, this discourse represents the “culmination of the militarization of Hokkaido that began with rearmament in 1950” (p. 133).

Sasaki deserves tremendous credit for breaking new ground with this study. He sheds light on a number of issues that have received little attention in English, and even in Japanese. Although his application of theory is sometimes awkward, his effective adaptation of the concept of “militarization” to demonstrate how it “served to solidify ideological and socio-economic interdependency between the military and civil-society … fostering the idea that the military was an indispensable part of civilians’ everyday lives” is instructive (p. 9). Yet both in content and tone, the book seemed to have little interest in the SDF and its personnel. There is no discussion, for example, of how militarization—what one might also call “normalization” or “legitimization”—impacted the organization and its members. By the same token, the language sometimes seems to be alarmist and exaggerated. To cite one example, did a “jingoistic atmosphere” really “suffuse … Japanese society” in the 1980s (p. 133)? Finally, I was puzzled by the decision to say next to nothing about the SDF's much praised (and in dealing with a radioactive reactor exceedingly brave) response to the 3/11 triple disaster. It is too early to tell if the SDF's performance represents another watershed moment in the military's relationship with wider society, but surely it deserved some analysis.

It also may be too early to tell whether the publication of these three books marks the beginning of a greater interest in modern Japanese military history, but I am confident that it will not be a “long time passing” until we see more work inspired by and building on these fine monographs.