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THE MILITARY IN MODERN JAPAN

urrounded the throne after 1868 sought to regain control over Japan's national destiny which was threatened by the military and technological superiority of the West. Their aim was to transform Japanese society and its institutions, including the military, by importing wholesale Western ideas, institutions and knowhow and adapting them to the Japanese way of life. The governing slogan was "to open the country to drive out the barbarians" (Schirokauer 180). The old military dictatorial class (the bakufu) and the feudal clans and warlords (daimyos) were overthrown and the military aristocrats supporting it, the samurai, lost most of their privileges. Many samurai became key civil functionaries and military officers.

The new regime focused during the remainder of the 19th century on domestic reforms and industrialization, not foreign expansion. According to Pyle, the new elite believed that "the governed should be brought into the governing process, not as a natural innate right but rather as a means of achieving national unity" (120). A perennial and dominant theme of Japanese history was the preservation of kokutai or national polity consisting of the divinity and authority of the imperial dynasty, the stability of the hierarchical and group-oriented social structure which had evolved over the centuries against external and internal threats and the preservation of Japanese "distinctive moral values" (Tsunoda et al. 155). The military was seen as the principal guardian of the national essence and honor.

While the state-sponsored economic industrialization of Japan gathered momentum, the military was reshaped. A mass, largely peasant-based army based on conscription, which was introduced in 1873, was created and easily overwhelmed the Chinese in the Sino-Japanese War of 1893 which led to the cession to Japan of Formosa and the Pescadores Islands and Japanese suzerainty over Korea. A dominant figure in the restructuring of the Japan...

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THE MILITARY IN MODERN JAPAN. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:04, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681140.html