Making Waves: Politics, Propaganda, And The Emergence Of The Imperial Japanese Navy, 1868-1922 - Rilegato

Schencking, J. Charles

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0804749779 ISBN 13: 9780804749770

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2005

Riassunto

This book explores the political emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy between 1868 and 1922. It fundamentally challenges the popular notion that the navy was a 'silent,' apolitical service. Politics, particularly budgetary politics, became the primary domestic focus—if not the overriding preoccupation—of Japan's admirals in the prewar period. This study convincingly demonstrates that as the Japanese polity broadened after 1890, navy leaders expanded their political activities to secure appropriations commensurate with the creation of a world-class blue-water fleet.

The navy's sophisticated political efforts included lobbying oligarchs, coercing cabinet ministers, forging alliances with political parties, occupying overseas territories, conducting well-orchestrated naval pageants, and launching spirited propaganda campaigns. These efforts succeeded: by 1921 naval expenditures equaled nearly 32 percent of the country's total budget, making Japan the world's third-largest maritime power. The navy, as this book details, made waves at sea and on shore, and in doing so significantly altered the state, society, politics, and empire in prewar Japan.

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Informazioni sugli autori

J. Charles Schencking teaches Japanese history at the University of Melbourne.

J. Charles Schencking teaches Japanese history at the University of Melbourne.

Dalla quarta di copertina

This book explores the political emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy between 1868 and 1922. It fundamentally challenges the popular notion that the navy was a 'silent,' apolitical service. Politics, particularly budgetary politics, became the primary domestic focus—if not the overriding preoccupation—of Japan's admirals in the prewar period. This study convincingly demonstrates that as the Japanese polity broadened after 1890, navy leaders expanded their political activities to secure appropriations commensurate with the creation of a world-class blue-water fleet.
The navy's sophisticated political efforts included lobbying oligarchs, coercing cabinet ministers, forging alliances with political parties, occupying overseas territories, conducting well-orchestrated naval pageants, and launching spirited propaganda campaigns. These efforts succeeded: by 1921 naval expenditures equaled nearly 32 percent of the country's total budget, making Japan the world's third-largest maritime power. The navy, as this book details, made waves at sea and on shore, and in doing so significantly altered the state, society, politics, and empire in prewar Japan.

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

This book explores the political emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy between 1868 and 1922. It fundamentally challenges the popular notion that the navy was a 'silent,' apolitical service. Politics, particularly budgetary politics, became the primary domestic focus if not the overriding preoccupation of Japan's admirals in the prewar period. This study convincingly demonstrates that as the Japanese polity broadened after 1890, navy leaders expanded their political activities to secure appropriations commensurate with the creation of a world-class blue-water fleet.
The navy's sophisticated political efforts included lobbying oligarchs, coercing cabinet ministers, forging alliances with political parties, occupying overseas territories, conducting well-orchestrated naval pageants, and launching spirited propaganda campaigns. These efforts succeeded: by 1921 naval expenditures equaled nearly 32 percent of the country's total budget, making Japan the world's third-largest maritime power. The navy, as this book details, made waves at sea and on shore, and in doing so significantly altered the state, society, politics, and empire in prewar Japan.

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Making Waves

Politics, Propaganda, and the Emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1868-1922By J. Charles Schencking

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4977-0

Contents

Introduction..............................................................................................................11 Maritime Dreams, Meiji Realities, 1868-1878.............................................................................92 Parochialism and Empire: Satsuma, the South Seas, and Naval Expansion, 1878-1889........................................263 Political Baptism by Fire: The Navy and the Early Diet Sessions, 1890-1894..............................................504 The Rich Rewards and Rivalry of War, 1894-1904..........................................................................785 War, Pageantry, and Propaganda in the Service of Naval Expansion, 1905-1910.............................................1076 Coercion, Pragmatism, and Interservice Rivalry: Elite-Level Politics and Naval Expansion, 1910-1913.....................1377 The Rise and Fall of Navy Political Fortunes, 1913-1914.................................................................1668 Opportunism, Expansion and Limitation: The Imperial Navy and Japan's Great War, 1914-1922...............................201Conclusion................................................................................................................223Notes.....................................................................................................................231Bibliography..............................................................................................................265Index.....................................................................................................................279

Chapter One

Maritime Dreams, Meiji Realities, 1868-1878

A force comprised of two hundred ships and twenty-five thousand men, assembled in three stages over twenty-five years is required for Japan. -Nihon Hyobusho The immediate concern of the Military Department is with domestic affairs while external matters are of future significance. -Yamagata Aritomo

FOR MANY PEOPLE who lived on the Pacific Rim or in East Asia during the waning years of the nineteenth or the first half of the twentieth century, the Imperial Japanese Navy and the emotive Rising Sun flag that flew on each vessel were synonymous with Japan's pre-World War II power, influence, and imperial ambitions. Naval achievements in war and peace brought fortune, international military acclaim, and recognition of Japan as a modern state. When told of the Japanese destruction of the Baltic Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote: "This is the greatest phenomenon the world has ever seen. Even the Battle of Trafalgar could not match this.... I believed that this naval battle decided the fate of the Japanese empire." For many ordinary citizens too, particularly those Japanese who relocated to various parts of the Pacific or Asia from the 1880s onward, the navy also served as a powerful symbol, a tangible link, and an impressive reminder of Japan's modern emergence and success. To many, the navy was a symbolic representation of the rise of modern Japan in the Meiji period (1868-1912).

The Japanese navy did not always garner such acclaim or highlight Japan's power. In many ways the young navy symbolized the grandiose dreams that defined the new Meiji era, but it also reflected the hard realities of the young Meiji state far better than any other governmental organization. As did also the leaders of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement (Jiyu minken undo), who sought greater political pluralism and transparency as encapsulated by the Charter Oath of 1868, naval leaders, stirred by the emperor's 1868 proclamation for the establishment of a strong navy and army, sought to create an impressive, awe-inspiring navy on a scale unmatched in East Asia, a modern, two-hundred-ship maritime armada unlike anything Japan had ever possessed. Each group of dreamers, however, faced the hard political, economic, industrial, and military realities associated with state building in late nineteenth-century Japan. Early Meiji Japan was a poor agrarian country with few resources and little industry, populated by a people who possessed only the faintest beginnings of a truly national identity. Moreover, Japan's early naval leaders lacked the political muscle and connections to champion the interests of their service effectively at the elite level. This, coupled with the absence of any naval tradition to draw upon for support, meant that Japan's navy lacked virtually everything that was required to build a strong national fleet: money, material, and men. This fact left a lasting legacy on the navy's leaders and determined in large part how these individuals visualized and approached government, bureaucracy, politics, and finance in future decades. Events of the 1870s compelled naval leaders to serve as political bureaucrats first, admirals second, and forced them to develop their service by the most cost-effective means possible, through people rather than warships. While troubling to those sea hands whose vision looked beyond shore to the sea, the early focus on politics, administration, and finance that Japan's early naval leaders were forced to make eventually paid significant political and military dividends to Japan's navy in the following decades of the Meiji period. Examining the state of the early Meiji navy not only highlights just how impressive its eventual emergence actually was, but goes a long way in demonstrating why Japan's naval officers eagerly and unabashedly ventured into the realm of politics and finance in the following decades. They did so out of necessity, because politics shaped the budgetary process, and because money determined the size, shape, and institutional health of the Japanese navy.

Organization and Composition of the Early Meiji Maritime Forces

Though the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was couched by members of the anti-bakufu coalition in conservative-sounding slogans such as "Restore Imperial Rule" and "Revere the Emperor," the restoration was truly a revolutionary event. United against the Tokugawa government from 1867 onward, men from Japan's western domains of Choshu, Satsuma, Hizen, and Tosa such as Ito Hirobumi, Yamagata Aritomo, Saigo Takamori, Okubo Toshimichi, Okuma Shigenobu, and Itagaki Taisuke, who orchestrated the restoration together with like-minded court nobles such as Iwakura Tomomi and Kido Koin, fundamentally and irrevocably altered Japan's government and society. Moreover, in the years after 1868 the policies these and other Meiji oligarchs eventually implemented transformed the pace and trajectory of Japan's development as a modern nation-state. Though bound together as a coalition committed to the overthrow of the existing dated and decentralized Tokugawa political order, the restoration leaders did not, however, possess a unified vision or clearly constructed blueprint of how the modern state was to look or function. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the country's young naval forces.

Few among Japan's ruling elite gave much serious thought to the navy. Despite the fact that the Western threat approached Japan from the sea, ground forces held considerably greater significance to both the Tokugawa government and the coalition of han (political domains) that had organized and led the Meiji Restoration. To Japan's new leaders, army campaigns shaped politics and the destiny of the restoration movement. During the civil war, in fact, only one significant naval battle erupted, an engagement off Awaji Island in late January 1868. In almost all other situations, naval forces did little except transport ground forces between western Japan and the Kanto area, the area of present-day Tokyo. Maritime concerns were thus an afterthought at best. Accordingly it is unsurprising that the new government did little to separate naval forces from army forces in the organization of the new military after 1868. Naval units existed simply to support ground operations. In February 1868, the government placed the captured forces of the Tokugawa shogunate under the command of the Navy and Army Affairs Section (Kairikugun jimuka) of the fledgling Meiji government. Weeks later, government leaders abolished this organization and created the Military Defense Affairs Bureau (Gunbo jimukyoku), only to replace the second institution with the Military Affairs Department (Gunmuken) less than a month later. Within six months, the government had once again sought better organizational control over the new military forces and created a full-fledged institution, the Military Ministry (Hyobusho). What made this continual reorganization significant for the navy's perspective was that government and military leaders saw no need to make any distinction between army and maritime forces; maritime forces were nothing more than auxiliaries to the new army. As an auxiliary force was how many in Japan's new government saw the navy.

Organizational subservience to army command was only one of the many problems that afflicted Japan's naval forces in the years after 1868. Military decentralization further hindered the establishment of a strong navy, one able to defend Japan's territory from any foreign naval threat. In terms of navy administration, the navy mirrored the national political environment to a remarkable degree. No national, centrally controlled navy truly existed during the first two years of the Meiji state. The new government directly administered only those Tokugawa vessels captured during the War of Restoration of 1867-68. All other naval forces, including some of the most powerful warships, remained under the control of the various political domains that had assembled or purchased military vessels over the preceding fifteen-year bakumatsu period (1853-1868). Thus while these domains retained their political and geographic identity apart from the imperial government, so too did they retain their military and naval independence. This was a troubling situation, and no one understood this better than the former Tokugawa naval leader Katsu Kaishu, whom the coalition leaders brought into the new government because of his naval expertise and his ability to control the bakufu navy personnel who still retained positions in the new government's maritime force. Soon after taking his position of leadership, Katsu recommended the rapid centralization of all naval forces, imperial as well as domain, under one government agency. Such a move to consolidate control, however, required more military and political force than the new Meiji leaders could exert. The young Meiji government therefore retained a decentralized organizational structure throughout 1869 and into 1870.

If not already apparent to those Meiji leaders apart from Katsu, the weaknesses of a decentralized military and political structure became manifest in 1869. Beginning in late spring and continuing throughout much of the early summer of that year, the former Tokugawa naval leader Enomoto Takeaki led a sizable navy-based revolt against the imperial government. Fleeing Tokyo Bay with many of the former bakufu's best warships, the new ruling coalition faced an embarrassing political and troublesome military situation. The new state simply did not possess enough naval might to quell the rebellion on its own. Faced with this predicament, the Meiji government requested considerable naval assistance from the most powerful domains-Satsuma, Tosa, and Choshu-to crush the rebellion. As expected, the disparate group of naval warships put together by the government and coalition forces exhibited a considerable lack of coordination and even less military prowess in battle. Though Enomoto eventually surrendered, the government's slow and humiliating response to the rebellion demonstrated to all but the most obtuse the need for a strong, centralized navy.

Enomoto's rebellion notwithstanding, coalition leaders Okubo and Kido Koin had, over the course of 1869, convinced many of their fellow "restorationaries" of the need for and desirability of greater political, military, and economic centralization. The new government, they argued, needed to forge a strong, centrally controlled nation-state if it was to remain intact, let alone prosper. To this end, just prior to Enomoto's rebellion in fact, the domains of Choshu, Satsuma, Hizen, and Tosa agreed in principle to voluntarily relinquish or "return" their lands and population registers to the emperor. Within six weeks, 118 out of the 276 domain leaders (daimyo) followed suit, and by August 1869 all but 17 had surrendered their land to the central government. For the few domain leaders who failed to return their lands voluntarily, the government forced their hands. With enough military and political power behind them after the first act of military centralization, government forces confiscated all remaining land after August 1869. With this act, modern centralized state building had begun. While important, this was not the last act of centralization. Over the next two years the government continued to centralize political and economic power, culminating with the complete abolition of the domains as political entities in the summer of 1871.

Though restoration leaders forged the political entity that became known as Japan in 1869-70, the newly emerging state still lacked a strong, centrally controlled maritime arm. This situation changed in 1870. Mirroring the national pattern of political centralization, and spurred on, no doubt, by Enomoto's rebellion, the government initiated a military centralization campaign in 1870 as well. As with the political centralization, the domains that held the most power in the new regime, Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen, donated their naval forces to the new government as a symbol of nation building. Though some domains did so only reluctantly, all eventually followed these strongest naval domains, and by 1871 the new government could finally boast a centrally administered naval force, the institutional beginning of the Japanese navy.

The first organization to centrally administer the country's new maritime force was the Military Ministry (Hyobusho), which the Meiji government had earlier established on 8 July 1869 to further coordinate forces seized from the Tokugawa bakufu. This institution was a large umbrella organization that administered both army and navy defense matters, with army concerns receiving preference over those voiced by navy officials. This is not entirely surprising, given the fact that Yamagata Aritomo, the Choshu bureaucrat considered the father of the Japanese army, served as the chief of the Hyobusho. Yamagata's position of authority, however, did not mean that naval affairs were entirely neglected. At the urging of Satsuma military leader Kawamura Sumiyoshi and former bakufu naval leader Katsu, restoration leader Okubo Toshimichi lobbied for the formation of two administrative organizations within the newly forged Military Ministry, one concerned solely with army affairs and the other with naval maters. Army personnel who possessed little, if any, knowledge of maritime science, Kawamura argued, simply should not be allowed to administer Japan's maritime forces. On 9 February 1870, the Dajokan, the pre-1885 equivalent to the cabinet, established just such a semi-independent maritime administrative structure under the auspices of the military minister Yamagata Aritomo. Underneath Yamagata, Kawamura Sumiyoshi assumed the position of navy section chief, and Saigo Tsugumichi served as army section chief. Thus the navy gained at least some degree of organizational identity, albeit still under an army-dominated institution. Its first leader, Kawamura, would emerge as one of the most important individuals of the early Meiji navy.

While separating naval administrative affairs from the army within the Military Ministry in early 1870 was an important first step toward creating a national navy, the military consolidation of han naval forces that ended in 1871 proved more critical to the navy's long-term heath. In February 1871, the government assumed control over ten han warships and two transport vessels, including all the officers and enlisted personnel that manned them. This act more than doubled the size of the Military Ministry's naval force. This act had important political as well as military ramifications. Immediately after this enlargement, Kawamura petitioned the government for complete administrative independence. Kawamura's reasoning was sound. First, Kawamura claimed that the large expansion of bureaucratic work associated with the administration of a much larger naval force necessitated an independent service organization. In case such an argument did not convince the Meiji leaders, Kawamura also suggested two other reasons for the creation of an independent navy ministry: international standards and future institutional health. In a document he presented to Okubo, Kawamura articulated that all the important navies of Europe and North America possessed independence from army affairs, including England's navy, which had been selected as the model for Japan's by imperial decree in 1870. Kawamura concluded that Japan should be no exception. More important, perhaps, echoing an idea raised earlier by Katsu, Kawamura forcefully argued that naval matters would never be prioritized within a bureaucracy whose ultimate head was an army official. This was a logical assumption. Within months, after careful calculation, Okubo agreed with Kawamura, and in June 1871 that Satsuma statesman urged State Councilor Iwakura Tomomi to support calls for the dissolution of the Hyobusho and the creation of two separate service organizations, an army ministry and a navy ministry. Though army leaders in the Hyobusho initially resisted such a separation, the government divided the Military Ministry into two distinct organizations, the Kaigunsho (Navy Ministry) and the Rikugunsho (Army Ministry), whose respective ministers were directly responsible to the Dajo Daijin, Sanjo Sanetomi, the pre-cabinet equivalent of the prime minister. Not surprisingly, in part because of Kawamura's experience in the Hyobusho but more because of his Satsuma connections, Satsuma State Councilors Okubo and Ijichi Masaharu recommended him to serve as acting head of the Navy Ministry in 1872. Thus the navy that would gain international acclaim through the destruction of the Russian Far Eastern and Baltic Squadrons in 1904 and 1905, respectively, could trace its bureaucratic lineage back to 1872.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Making Wavesby J. Charles Schencking Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804749779
• ISBN 13: 9780804749770
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 283
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile