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Making Waves

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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

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...