Samurai to soldier
Subtitle: remaking military service in nineteenth-century Japan
By: D. Colin Jaundrill
Series: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University; Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2016
Place of publication: Ithaca
Language: eng
Number of pages: 229
ISBN-13: 9781501703096
Subjects: Samurai; Draft; Recuiting, enlistment; Military History; Armed Forces; History
Description: D. Colin Jaundrill rewrites the military history of nineteenth-century Japan. In fifty years spanning the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the rise of the Meiji nation-state, conscripts supplanted warriors as Japan's principal arms-bearers. The most common version of this story suggests that the Meiji institution of compulsory military service was the foundation of Japan s efforts to save itself from the imperial ambitions of the West and set the country on the path to great power status. Jaundrill argues, to the contrary, that the conscript army of the Meiji period was the culmination and not the beginning of a long process of experimentation with military organization and technology. Jaundrill traces the radical changes to Japanese military institutions, as well as the on-field consequences of military reforms in his accounts of the Boshin War (1868 1869) and the Satsuma Rebellions of 1877. He shows how pre-1868 developments laid the foundations for the army that would secure Japan's Asian empire.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The rise of "western" musketry, 1841-1860; title: Rising tensions and renewed reform, 1860-1866; title: The drives to build a federal army, 1866-1872; title: Instituting universal military service, 1873-1876; title: Dress rehearsal : the Satsuma rebellion, 1877; title: Organizational reform and the creation of the serviceman, 1878-1894.