of war and for the dash of deadly onset; and just as the shogun sought to display before the eyes of the citizens of his capital a charming picture of a gentle peace, though its setting was a framework of vast military preparation, so the Japanese of every era has loved to turn from the fencing-school to the arbor, from the field of battle to the society of rockery and the cascade, delighting in the perils and struggles of the one as much as he admires the grace and repose of the other. (Brinkley2, 11)
Did the military class succeed in completely saturating the national psyche with its particular interpretation of the national spirit (Yamato-damashii), in imposing its values upon the rest of the country, in freezing history at that stage of national development which historians identify as feudal? The answer to these questions can be provided only by a study of the post-Meiji history of Japan, beginning in 1868. This study should reveal whether the military tradition and the influence of the warrior class had been terminated or only curtailed with the restoration of power to the emperor. In this context, there seems to be general agreement among Japanese and Western historians that no nation could be expected to emerge unscathed from centuries of the relentless conditioning undergone by Japan during her feudal era. No one has expressed this point better than Reischauer.
The two centuries of strictly enforced peace under the watchful eye and firm hand of the Edo government have left an indelible mark upon the people. The bellicose, adventurous Japanese of the sixteenth century became by the nineteenth century a docile people looking meekly to their rulers for all leadership and following without question all orders from above. (Reischauer1, 93-94)
The people had become thoroughly conditioned to look “instinctively” to the military leaders of the land for guidance and to assume that, because of their position, these leaders “were always honest and sincere.” The same author concluded as follows: “Seven centuries of domination by the feudal military class has left patterns of thought and behavior which have not been easy to discard in recent times and which will not be easily erased even today” (Reischauer1, 55).
The protagonist of that which Hearn considered “the whole of authentic Japanese history,” the warrior of feudal Japan, had achieved a position of such importance, therefore, that his influence was not (probably could not be) eliminated, even after the military dictatorship of the powerful feudal barons was officially abolished in 1868 and society had been given a wider and firmer base through a massive educational effort intended to provide the foundations for the expertise necessary in an industrialized and highly competitive era. However, in the uncanny way in which a firmly entrenched traditional power structure often manages to survive the dawn of a new day by assuming various disguises or, more frequently, by broadening its base of support among all classes of people so that more citizens begin to identify with it, so did the military class manage to survive in Japan. The power of the Tokugawa clan and their allies was severely curtailed by the efforts of other powerful clans of warriors, including the Choshu and Satsuma clans, which were to provide the “new” Japan with the nucleus of an Imperial Army and Navy destined for greater glories and greater disasters in the decades to follow. The Restoration was, in effect, a ritualistic “changing of the guard,” with waves of new warriors from the provinces advancing upon the capital where they jostled and finally dislodged the older, privileged class of warriors from their entrenched positions. Significantly, we are told by Yazaki (300) that the Kyakkan Rireki Mokuroku, or directory of government officials for the Council of State (Dajokan) held in 1867-68, listed the following percentages by lineage in its composition: 78.9% belonging to the warrior class, 18.1% to the higher class of daimyo, 1.8% to the ancient imperial court recently restored (along with the emperor) to power, and 0.7% to the commoners.
It was this “new” leadership, then, which was to guide the nation in the liberated times of the modern age. In order to accomplish their task with the utmost efficiency, they embarked upon a fantastically intense effort to expand the traditional loyalty concept from the narrow confines of the clan to the wider horizon of the entire nation, enlarging the focus of unquestioning obedience to one’s immediate superior and feudal lord to include blind and absolute fealty to the emperor. Kurzman noted that “if a man would willingly die for his lord, a person of mortal heritage, they reasoned, then his loyalty to the Sovereign, descendant of the Sun Goddess, could be nurtured to similar extremes” (Kurzman, 41). Accordingly, after the Meiji Restoration:
In classrooms and army barracks, the young Japanese was taught to glory in Japan’s military traditions. He came to believe that death on the battlefield for the emperor was the most glorious fate of man and to believe in the unique virtues of a vaguely defined “national structure” and an even more vague “Japanese spirit.” Together the government and army succeeded in a few decades in creating in the average Japanese the fanatical nationalism already characteristic of the upper classes, and an even more fanatical devotion to the emperor, which had been cultivated by historians and Shinto propagandists and fostered by oligarchs around the throne. (Reischauer1, 129-30)
This was possible, according to Mendel, because of the vagueness of the Meiji Constitution concerning “the location of political power”—a vagueness which the military, who had direct access to the throne, promptly exploited. They assumed “special privileges” and largely ignored the newly created civilian cabinet which was modeled upon Western systems of government. This independence of action in matters of governing was promptly dubbed “dual diplomacy,” and its effects were to haunt the members of the civilian cabinet, who were ultimately unable to steer into more peaceful channels of national development the singular dedication of the military to ideals of racially exclusive predominance. Members of the military class continued to hold fast to the pursuit of a goal whose attainment they believed their destiny and, by implication, the destiny of their country since time immemorial. Eventually, members of every class in Japan began to feel fully justified in calling that destiny their own. By the early part of the twentieth century, this process of military identification on a nationwide scale had grown to such an extent that the authorities had “even succeeded in convincing these descendants of peasants, who for almost three centuries had been denied the right to possess swords, that they were not a downtrodden class but members of a warrior race. Japanese political and military indoctrination was indeed thorough and spectacularly successful” (Reischauer1, 130).
It had also been successful during the Tokugawa period, when the military tradition inculcated from above had elicited the desired responses from below. Repeated attempts by innumerable commoners (heimin) throughout the entire feudal era to rise to the privileged level of the warrior were noted in many records. Although such ambitions were officially discouraged, the possibility of adoption into a military clan did exist—many wealthy merchants being willing to part with subtantial sums in exchange for the right to have the insignia of a warrior clan embroidered on their sleeves.
When the desired status itself was not accessible, anything resembling it, however remotely, would serve to fulfill most aspirations. All associations of commoners, whether farmers, merchants, or artisans (even the clergy), were organized according to the vertical pattern of the military class, a pattern which linked the ancient clan structure to the contemporary period, thus imparting to it an aura of antiquity which, in Japan (as in many other countries), made it divine.
Even before the Meiji Restoration, the military tradition had permeated the whole of Japanese life to the extent of having lost its primary identification with a single class. That it had become the sole tradition of every Japanese subject was proven by the fact that when the military class tried once again to seize power from the emperor, the armies of “sword-wielding samurai” were crushed on the battlefields by an imperial army whose ranks were filled with conscripts from every class, including many farmers. The crushing of one of these rebellions, after 1868, wrote Browne,
signified much more than the collapse of feudal opposition to the government and the new order. In the conflict the regular soldiers like Hidenori Tojo and the conscripts who had fought along with them had shown that the valor and martial skill which had made the samurai elite such formidable fighters could be found in
