John T. Kuehn - A Military History of Japan: From the Age of the Samurai to the 21st Century

From the Age of the Samurai to the 21st Century

John T. Kuehn

Copyright 2014 by John T. Kuehn

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kuehn, John T.

A military history of Japan : from the age of the Samurai to the 21st century / John T. Kuehn

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9781440803932 (hardback) ISBN 9781440803949 (ebook)

1. JapanHistory, Military. I. Title.

DS838.K84 2014

355.00952dc23 2013033793

ISBN: 9781440803932
EISBN: 9781440803949

18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5

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For Robert Suki Kuehn; Tyler Wade Kuehn; Captain John L. Kuehn, MC, USNR (retired); and especially Sei-Chan, my second mother, who took me to see the Tokyo Tower strapped to her back.

A photo essay follows .

My first memories are of Japan. My father had convinced the U.S. Navy to pay for his final years of medical school and in 1958 he received orders to Atsugi, Naval Air Station. Atsugi is located on the broad Kanto Plain west of Tokyo Bay. It was surrounded by rice fields and binjo ditches (sewer or irrigation) as far as the eye could see. Today it is wall-to-wall houses and people. One can see the foothills of the mountains that form the footstool for Mount Fuji and on clear days one also sees the snow-capped cone of Fuji in the distance. Atsugi and Japan were very different back then. To a two-and-a-half-year-old what may have seemed alien to others equated to normal. By 1961, the year our family moved back to the United States, I had experienced two distinct culturesthat of the U.S. Naval Air Station and then everything outside of it. Japan was still very much an occupied country back then.

Two images especially remain. The first is of my mama-san, Sei-Chan our maid. All the Navy wives had maids, and my mother was no exception. My mother had four children, and the two youngest were in Sei-Chans caremy younger brother Robert still goes by Sei-Chans pet name of Suki today. The second image is of the young me in front of a Marine F-8 Crusader jet on the runway at Atsugi. My biological mother had arranged for me to see the aircraft because of my childish interest in airplanes. Evidently my mom knew better my inclinations than me or anyone else. In the background of the photograph sits an EC-121 Super Constellation of the Navys Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron ONE (VQ-1).

Twenty-one years later I received my first Navy orders to VQ-1 in Guam as a new ensign and naval flight officer. A short three weeks after reporting to Guam, I was back in the same Atsugi Bachelor Officers Quarters (BOQ) that had been there over two decades before. Even the Quonset hut my family had temporarily lived in still stood in the same place with the same pine trees surrounding it. Talk about dj vu. My next three years in the Pacific involved flying out of Atsugi for a period of time totaling an entire yearalthough the Navy was kind enough to let me return to Guam to see my wife occasionally.

* * *

My goal with this general military history was to survey the span of Japanese martial history from 300 AD (or Common Era, CE) to the present. This was a tall order given the span of nearly two millennia. To do this I intend to concentrate on broad cultural, social, and even religious themes that have shaped how Japanese societies have managed violence and who has been allowed to wield it. My approach is derivative from the work of Sinologist Mark Edward Lewis in Sanctioned Violence in Early China. Lewis follows the formulation of the sociologist Max Weber who proposes that... a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.... Lewis further advances the notion of violence as a definer of groups.

The major themes that emerge from a broad study of Japanese military history revolve around who managed violence and how institutions were created to perform this function. Foremost among these themes stands the emergence of the samurai class within Japanese society and its virtual monopolization of violence for much of Japans history. A second theme addresses the role of the emperor as a supreme warlord or as a pawn used by supreme warlords (Shogun) and the emergence of the Bakufu (military dictatorship) system of government. Another theme is that of the preference in Japanese military history for the defeated hero. Finally, congruent with these themes exists the tension between centralized versus decentralized power found throughout Japans history. This tension existed between Daimyo (great name) lords in medieval Japan, the Meiji oligarchs and militarists from 1868 to 1945, and perhaps the Zaibatsu industrialists and their political allies of today.

This work relies primarily on secondary sources in English by scholars of Japan. Some translated memoirs and primary sources (e.g., Nihon Shoki, Onin War, Musashis Five Rings) were also used, but most of the factual information comes from previously published sources. Some of the modern military history includes primary sources in English from U.S. archival sources. The book strives for a broad synthesis of the military history of Japan. As such it is only a starting point for other scholars and historians to continue to work as well as the debates it may ignite to fill in the gaps. The book also seeks to reach a broad audience interested in understanding Japan culturally from the perspective of how war, politics, and violence shaped Japanese society and events.

* * *

My final time in Atsugi was with my own family (wife and three young children), from 1991 to 1993, again working for the Navy. My family also lived at Atsugi-Base, and our third child was born in the Yokosuka Naval Hospital in 1992, just in sight of Admiral Togos flagship the Mikasa across the harbor (see ). I served on a busy operational staff and still regret not taking more advantage of living in Japan, being more of a tourist, and learning the language beyond basic pidgin Japanese. I did get to work closely with the Fleet Air Force (FAF) component of the Japanese Maritime Defense Force (JMSDF) and met the modern Japanese naval aviators, the offspring of those pilots who had once dominated the skies of Asia and the Pacific, the heirs of the samurai warrior legacy. I flew with them, planned with them, and socialized with them at their karaoke clubs in Yamato City and Iwakuni. They still serve the emperor and their nation. I console myself that in these close allies a bit of the old samurai spirit lives on. This book is for them, too.

Note to Reader: The text has been Anglicized and does not use the Japanese accents that are found in some writing on the topic. In most cases, Japanese words are italicized on first use and the Japanese/Asian format of last name first (patronymic) observedfor example, Yamamoto Isoruku versus Isoruku Yamamoto. This work strives to keep this usage consistent until the nineteenth century, when individuals began to go almost exclusively by their clan or family names, for example, General Yamagata Aritomo is Yamagata, not Aritomo.