When the Meiji era began in 1868, just as the nation was in transition from the Shogunate to a Constitutional Monarch, the Japanese military was undergoing a similar radical transformation. The underlying impetus was national survival. Having witnessed the fate of China in the face of more modern and powerful western militaries, Japan concluded that they too required a modern, Western-style military. They dismantled the Tokugawa samurai-based system and built a centralized national force modeled on European powers. 

At the beginning of the Meiji period the army was a fragmented, transitional force composed largely of former samurai from the victorious domains that had initiated the downfall of the Shogunate. It was not yet a national army as the soldiers’ loyalty was often domain-based. Training was uneven and nascent and not anywhere near the standards required to face western military power. There was a limited amount of modern rifles, some firearms left over from the previous age, but a wealth of samurai weaponry. But even if there were adequate manpower and suitable training, there was no professional officer corps with an understanding of modern warfare, tactics such as combined arms combat (soldiers and artillery support), and the necessary general staff to wage and support an army in the field under combat. All semblance of modern western military capability was lacking.

The Navy was a small, underdeveloped fleet inherited from the late Tokugawa period. There were sailing vessels and a handful of modern steamships, many purchased from abroad. While they possessed good seamanship and ship-to-ship engagements, fleet engagements were foreign to them, and even then lack the capital ships common to the western fleets, namely, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, auxiliary ships, and logistics capability to be a “blue water” navy. In the beginning they are best described as a coastal-defense force.

Twenty years later the army was fully centralized, conscription was in place, training was based on the ideal of Bushidō and Prussian organization and tactics. The army possessed a professional officer corps and general staff (logistics, intelligence, planning, medical services and more). Weaponry was modern in terms of rifles and artillery. Command and control functions were Prussian: centralized, disciplined and bureaucratic. It was a modern national army, capable of coordinated large-scale operations overseas.

The Navy had been reorganized and closely modeled the Royal Navy. Ships were constructed of steel and consisted of a range of large and small capital ships. A professionalized officer corps was in place, well versed in modern navigation, gunnery, and signaling. Even more, their role was integrated into a larger national planning to support Army operations with control of the sea, troop transport and blockade capabilities. In the Asia-Pacific region, apart from western fleets, they were the premier naval force.

At the start of hostilities, the IJN Combined Fleet composition was :

• 12 modern warships (primarily cruisers),
• 8 corvettes,
• 1 ironclad warship,
• 26 torpedo boats, and
• Numerous auxiliaries, armed merchant cruisers, and converted liners used for transport and support

There was a similar buildup and expansion of the Army. All of this came at a cost, but also with benefits. Among the benefits of the military buildup in the late-19th century was the acceleration of Japan’s industrial economy. The state invested heavily in shipyards, arsenals, steelworks, railways, and telegraph lines all of which helped create the foundations for heavy industries which were later transferred to private firms. The build up also stimulated existing sectors such as coal mining, metallurgy, engineering, and shipbuilding. The military buildup acted as a state-led industrial catalyst.

All of this needed to be funded, financed and paid for. To this end the government implemented the land tax reform, creating a stable, cash-based tax system. Revenue became more predictable and as a result enabled long-term military and infrastructure planning. This radical shift in central planning and finance strengthened the modern fiscal state but increased pressure on rural society where the land tax burden landed.

Military expansion was expensive, leading the early Meiji governments to run budget deficits. This problem was compounded by issuing paper currency accelerating inflation throughout the 1870s into the early 1880s. Military spending diverted resources from social welfare, rural investment, and development of the consumer sector of the economy. As a result, the citizens, especially the peasants bore much of the cost through taxes, while economic benefits were unevenly distributed. The social unrest came to a head in the Satsuma Rebellion, a revolt of disaffected samurai against the central government. The rebellion was very expensive for the government, which forced it to make additional monetary reforms including leaving the gold standard. The conflict effectively ended the samurai class. Economic discipline only stabilized in the early 1890s.

Military procurement fostered close ties between the state and emerging industrial conglomerates (zaibatsu such as Mitsubishi). These firms benefited from government contracts, subsidies and technology transfers, and access to capital and overseas markets. This helped create a modern capitalist elite aligned with state goals. Overall, military expansion stimulated economic modernization, but it did so through top-down coercive extraction, embedding a long-term pattern in which economic growth was closely tied to military and imperial priorities.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.

It would not be accurate to describe the evolution of the Japanese military in the latter half of the 19th century. It was a radical revolution. After the Meiji Restoration (1868), Japan’s leaders concluded that national survival required a modern, Western-style military. They dismantled the Tokugawa samurai-based system and built a centralized national force modeled on European powers. This was made possible by Universal male conscription (1873) replacing hereditary samurai service, creating a national military loyal to the emperor rather than to domains or lords.

In order to accomplish this radical change, Japan looked to the nations it considered threats to Japan’s independence. This was accomplished by adopting foreign military models under the tutelage of foreign advisors. The army was modeled on Prussian doctrine that emphasized discipline, general staff organization, and state-controlled command. The navy was modeled on the British Royal Navy, adopting British ship designs, training methods, and naval strategy. At the same time, Japan imported modern rifles, artillery, and warships, then rapidly developed domestic arms industries, arsenals, and shipyards to ensure self-sufficiency.

Essential to the development of a modern military was formation and education. To this end, western-style military academies, staff colleges, and technical schools were established, professionalizing the officer corps and emphasizing science, engineering, and modern tactics. Western techniques were combined with emperor-centered loyalty, making the military both modern in form and uniquely Japanese in spirit. In addition, the spirit and lessons of the samurai were not lost. Japan did not simply preserve samurai tradition; it selectively reconstructed it.

Bushidō and the Meiji Military

Under Tokugawa Shogunate rule, “samurai spirit” referred to class-based ideals: loyalty to one’s lord, honor, discipline, and readiness to die. After 1868, the Meiji state detached these values from the samurai class and recast them as virtues for all citizens, especially soldiers. This recasting of the “samurai spirit” became known as Bushidō, and was a national moral code, not a code restricted to the military. But it did serve as a bridge between Japan’s past and its modern conscript army. No longer was there feudal loyalty to a daimyō; loyalty was now absolute and directed to the emperor. The Meiji Constitution made the emperor the “command-in-chief” of the army and navy. Bushidō preserved the form of samurai loyalty while transforming its object.

Formation and indoctrination of Bushidō was incorporated into every level of military training. While Japan adopted western drill, weapons, and organization, it paired them with ethical and spiritual instruction drawn from samurai ideals. Soldiers were taught: endurance, self-control, obedience, and acceptance of death as honorable if done in imperial service. These ideals were reinforced from the oath of service and in every course of education and training. Bushidō was simplified from is historical samurai basis and then standarized for modern instruction.

Bushidō was also incorporated in symbolic practices and rituals. Ceremonial language was ripe with honor and shame, casting failure as disloyalty to comrades and especially to the Emperor. Rituals reinforcing collective identity, willingness to endure hardship, and death as preferable to dishonor. The officer corp carried swords as symbols of moral authority and leadership. Clearly in modern warfare, the use of the sword was limited, but at the end of World War II photographs of kamikaze pilots before their final mission showed the officers with their swords which were carried in the cockpit on the one-way flight. All of this was an effort to link the modern military psychologically to the samurai past. 

Key writers and thinkers such as Nitobe Inazō positioned bushidō as Japan’s equivalent to Western chivalry, and proof Japan possessed a moral civilization worthy of great-power status. This intellectualization helped justify both military discipline at home and imperial mission abroad.

The fusion of western military structure, samurai-derived moral absolutism, and emperor-centered ideology produced a military culture that valued spirit (seishin) over material limits, encouraged endurance and sacrifice, and discouraged surrender and compromise. These traits became especially pronounced in the early 20th century. It is noteworthy that during World War II, less than 3% of imperial Japanese soldiers surrendered – and most of these were extremely sick, starving or critically wounded. In many instances, there were no Japanese survivors.

The effects of bushidō formation was strikingly evident in 20th century combat behavior.

• preference for death over surrender
• emphasis on spirit over material reality – commanders often stressed seishin (spiritual strength) to compensate for shortages in equipment or supplies, encouraging frontal assaults and last-stand defenses even when strategically unsound.
• fanatical defensive tactics where soldiers fought to the last man in Biak, Pelilui, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa reflecting the belief that total sacrifice was the highest form of loyalty.
• Banzai charges and later kamikaze missions were framed as noble offerings to the emperor, transforming death into a sanctioned military tactic.
• harsh treatment of prisoners and civilians since their surrender was and thus the prisoners were viewed with contempt, brutalized and executed in violation of the Law of War to which Japan was a signatory.

It also led to actions and campaigns that were strategically and tactically questionable supported by the guise that the bushidō spirit would compensate for all the evident shortcomings.

At the advent of the 20th century

By the late 19th century, Japan possessed a modern, disciplined, and industrialized military, capable of defeating China (1894–95) and Russia (1904–05), demonstrating that Japan had successfully adapted Western military systems to its own political and ideological framework.

When Japan adopted a Social Darwinist lens, East Asia ceased to be a shared moral world and became a competitive ecological system. Bushidō was the ideological element needed to form the military and the citizenry to not simply remain competitive but to become the apex nation in the Asia-Pacific sphere.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.

In the previous post we considered the late 19th-century events in Hawaii that led to the overthrow of the Hawaiian constitutional monarchy and eventually the annexation of Hawaii as a U.S. territory. The post ended with the Japanese reaction to these events. This post explores the lens through which the Hawaii events were seen and the rationale for the coming wars with China (1894-1895) and Russia (1904-1905). It also forms the basis on how the United States will be increasingly seen from Japan’s point of view.

If you ask most people who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” the most probable reply is Charles Darwin. But the correct answer is Herbert Spenser, a 19th century English philosopher. He is best known for his theory that, much to his chagrin, came to be known as Social Darwinism. Spenser’s work was based on the evolutionary theory of Lamarck, who posited that organs are developed or diminished by use or disuse and that the resulting changes may be transmitted to future generations.  Spenser applied this view of evolution to society, proposing that societies, like organisms, evolve from simple to complex, and individuals/groups best adapted to competition thrive (“survival of the fittest”). He might be thought of as sociological “libertarian” as he advocated for minimal government interference (laissez-faire) to allow natural progress through specialization and adaptation, viewing society as an evolving organism. He argued for individual liberty and believed societal advancement comes from the “fittest” succeeding, leading to a more complex, efficient world.

When Spenser’s work reached late-19th-century Japan it reshaped elite thinking leading to a re-evaluation and view of China and East Asia after the Meiji Reforms. The core assumptions absorbed in Japan was that the nations compete like organisms in which there will always be a struggle for the resources that make life flourish and history will be governed by conflict in which weak states are absorbed or eliminated. Moral intention will not stave off extinction. For a nation that had long been invested in Confucian life where virtue and moral order are essential elements, the shift away from moral intentions to survival of the fittest, the natural pathway was imperialism and permanent competition for local, regional and global dominance.

It was a rapid shift away from traditional and classic ways of understanding the world order because they watched it unfold in the living laboratory called China. For Japanese elites and leaders social darwinism was evident in the Opium Wars, the Unequal Treaties, loss of economic control, and disintegration of internal cohesion. China became the empirical proof that moral civilization without power equals extinction.

Even before Spenser’s work reached Japan in 1870, Fukuzawa Yukichi published “Conditions in the West,” a meditation based on his observations in Europe and America. He introduced the concept that international relations operate by power, not morality and as a result weak nations are exploited regardless of virtue. He pointed out that China, while being morally refined, is politically helpless, no nation at all and is subjugated to the economic interest of the non-Asian world powers.

Among Japanese elites the dialogue asserted that Asia was collectively at risk, only strength and modernization could prevent subjugation, and equality would be granted only to those who could enforce it. Thus national survival required military parity, industrial capacity and territorial buffers

In 1882 Katō Hiroyuki published “A New Theory of Human Rights,” work in which Katō explicitly rejected natural rights, arguing that rights arise from power. He applied what was essentially evolutionary logic to politics: “The strong rule; the weak are destroyed—this is the law of nature.” Why this is significant is that his work marks the moment when evolutionary struggle became normative political theory. And then Spenser’ s work was translated by Katō and was propagated throughout academic journals tied to Tokyo Imperial University. Spencer’s philosophy opposed imperial aggression, but the Japanese elite emphasized struggle and survival.

In 1886, Tokutomi Sohō moved social darwinism to general readership with his work “The Future Japan.” In the popular work he combined social darwinism, national destiny, and historical inevitability. He argued that nations are competing organisms with only two outcomes: domination or eradication. He used China as the proof. This text popularized elite theory for mass readership, turning Darwinism into common sense.

In 1890 social darwinism was explicitly militarized as state strategy in the writings of Yamagata Aritomo. He was not translating western works, but synthesized western military theory to highlight key elements of national strategy: buffer zones and strategic depth. His famous idea was describing Korea as “a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.” Yamagata asserted that since conflict was inevitable, preemptive expansion was critical and the first goal was Korea. If Japan did not dominate Korea, another power would. 

The ideas of Yamagata pointed to zones of survival that were more than geography. Given Japan’s lack of many natural resources, Manchuria became seen as a repository of needed resources and a buffer against Imperial Russia. Zones of survival were never neutral. It was in this view that imperialism was not aggression but was defensive in nature. The implications are that the “empire” was inevitable and forced by global conditions. This allowed Japanese leaders to claim: “We do not seek conquest; we seek existence.” It is a logic that removes ethical restraint.

Another important work was “Leaving Asia (1985) by Fukuzawa Yukichi. It was an essay that argued that Japan must separate from backward Asia (pointedly referring to China and Korea).  Strategically this transformed these two nations to “zones of survival” for their resources and to position to serve as a buffer against major powers.

The evolving integration of social darwinism into national polity and strategy began to transform Pan-Asianism. Early Pan-Asian thought was focused on solidarity among Asian nations in order to form a mutual defense in terms of culture, economy and border integrity. But under the concepts of social darwinism, Asia needed a leader.  Japan’s view was that they were the only viable candidate. Solidarity was replaced by the architecture of hierarchy within Asia.

This thinking was not uniform across the range of Japanese elites. Some Pan-Asian thinkers opposed the imperialism embedded in the fusion of the two forms of strategy. At the same time, business leaders worried about economic stability and national budgets being redirected to military expansion. But military and bureaucratic elites set the national policy

What this means is that, depending on who governed, international relationships would be increasingly less reliant on the role of diplomacy as international relations became zero-sum, evolutionary and amoral. This logic carries will become evident in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the Russian-Japanese War (1904–05), the aftermath of the Mukdan Incident (1931) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945; the opening action the the Asia-Pacific War) and in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

When Japan adopted a Social Darwinist lens, East Asia ceased to be a shared moral world and became a competitive ecological system. China was re-imagined not as a fallen elder brother but as an endangered species whose weakness threatened Japan’s own survival. Russia, Britain, France, Holland, Germany, and the United States were existential threats to Japan’s independence.

From this perspective, imperial expansion was a necessity for the very sake and survival of the nation.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.

The history of how Hawaii came to be part of the United States is not, in my opinion, a shining moment in our nation’s history. The Hawaiian archipelago consists of five major islands and a number of smaller islands – including Midway at the extreme northwest. The five major islands and several smaller ones in proximity were united under the great King Kamehameha in 1795. It was not a bloodless unification, but the Kamehameha dynasty was the reigning monarchy of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The Kingdom was formally recognized by the United States in 1846 and as a result of the recognition of Hawaiian independence, the Hawaiian Kingdom entered into treaties with the major nations of the world and established over ninety legations and consulates in multiple seaports and cities.

Europeans had first come across the islands in the late 1700s and by the 1790s was an active destination for American merchants. The arrival of outsiders brought new technologies, goods, diseases, and political dynamics, ultimately leading to Kamehameha’s unification of the islands. One of the key elements of Hawaiian that outsiders quickly encountered was that the land is a gift and not to be owned by individuals. It is a concept that the Hawaiians managed well enough in the normal matters of houses, villages, farms and the such. It was a concept unthinkable to merchants, missionaries, and members of the western business community.

Over the next 100 years more and more outsiders came to the islands. American merchant ships began stopping in Hawaii for supplies, and some sailors jumped ship to live among Hawaiians. The first wave of Americans were the New England missionaries who arrived in 1820. They were soon followed by business men, investors, and all manner of commerce. Plantation agriculture first appeared in Hawaii with the establishment of the first permanent sugar plantation in 1835, marking the start of large-scale commercial sugarcane production that would define the islands’ economy for over a century. It also led to immigration from China and Japan.

Immigration to Hawaii

Between 1852 and 1899, around 46,000 Chinese immigrated to Hawaii. Although many came as laborers for sugar plantations in Hawaii, they concentrated on getting education for their children. When their contracts expired, many decided to remain in Hawaii and opened businesses in areas such as downtown Honolulu’s Chinatown.

In 1868 the first documented group of Japanese immigrants arrived seeking work in Hawaii’s sugarcane and rice fields, though this initial wave was small. The major waves began in 1885 when the first large-scale, government-sponsored group of almost 1,000 Japanese laborers arrived, following King Kalākaua’s diplomatic efforts to secure workers from Japan for the plantations. Following this, many Japanese women arrived as “picture brides,” marrying men they’d only seen in photographs to join the growing immigrant community. In time, the Japanese community was well established in the islands.

All during this period land ownership was a constant source of friction between the native Hawaiians and the outsiders. In 1875, the U.S. considered Hawaii as critical to their national interest in the Pacific region and began discussions with the Hawaiian government about the use of Pearl River Lagoon as a naval base. We know the area as Pearl Harbor.

Imperialism from within

During the summer of 1887, while the Legislature was out of session, a group of Hawaiians (most also U.S. citizens) with land and business interests, essentially hijacked the nation. Under the threat of armed revolt and assasination, King Kalakaua signed what is known as the Bayonet Constitution. This resulted in disenfranchising two-thirds of the native Hawaiians as well as other ethnic groups who had previously held the right to vote but were no longer able to meet the new voting requirements. The new constitution was to the benefit of the white, foreign plantation owners. Of interest to this series is that Asian immigrants were completely shut out and were no longer able to acquire citizenship or vote at all.

The ruling elite almost immediately began to petition the U.S. to annex Hawaii. They sent a delegation to Washington in 1894 seeking annexation, but the new President, Grover Cleveland, opposed annexation and tried to restore the Queen. Spurred by the nationalism aroused by the Spanish-American War, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898 at the urging of President William McKinley. Hawaii was made a territory in 1900.

Why annex Hawaii?

What were the considerations when the U.S. annexed Hawaii? Perhaps it can best be explained in three arenas: strategic considerations, economic motivations, and political rationale.

The strategic motivations can arguably be seen as an extension of “manifest destiny” extended into the Pacific for access to Asian markets. At the same time, acquiring territories like Florida and Louisiana was crucial to secure borders, control Gulf Coast ports, and prevent European powers from establishing footholds near U.S. territories. In the same light, security and economics merged by establishing Hawaii (Pearl Harbor) and the Philippines as vital naval bases and coaling stations, projecting American power into the Pacific and challenging European empires. This was also part of the political calculus

Economic motivations were basic: American industry needed raw materials and new consumers, making territories rich in resources or with potential trade routes in the Pacific highly valuable. This also gave added impetus to the development of west coast ports such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland. 

From a distance

By the 1880s Hawaii had become strategically and demographically important to Japan as Japanese laborers were the single largest ethnic group on the islands with many under state-supervised emigration contracts. Hawaii was also strategically important sitting astride Pacific sea lanes. Japanese naval planners viewed it as vital to Pacific security. Hawaii also had a symbolic importance to the Japanese. It was an independent non-Western monarchy, like Japan. Thus, its fate was watched closely as a test of whether non-Western states could survive. Thus Hawaii was both a practical concern (citizens, trade, security) and a symbolic mirror of Japan’s own vulnerability.

After the Hawaiian coup, Japan formally protested, viewing the coup as an illegal seizure of power and a threat to Japanese residents’ rights. The protests focused on unequal treatment of Japanese subjects as agreed to under international law. Japan dispatched the warship Naniwa to Honolulu (1887) to signal their protest in sign of deliberate restraint as there was no attempt to restore royal authority.

Despite outrage in some Japanese newspapers and among naval officers Japan feared diplomatic isolation and being labeled an “uncivilized” power – and mostly conflict with the United States and Britain. Many Japanese commentators concluded: “Even civilized, independent states can be destroyed if they lack power.”  This sentiment was to come to a fuller fruition in the years to come. 

When the U.S. annexed Hawaii, there were diplomatic objections similar to the ones a decade earlier, but there was also a pragmatic realism: Hawaii was firmly within the U.S. sphere. At the same time Japan was between wars in their own home region. The First Sino-Japanese War had just concluded and other war clouds were gathering for possible conflict with Russia. Japan protested symbolically but accepted the new reality.

Lesson learned

The events in Hawaii had a tremendous influence on the Japanese strategic mindset. The elites and military of Japan drew these lessons:

• International law follows power
• Legal sovereignty offers no protection without force.
• Western powers will not tolerate non-Western autonomy in strategic zones
• Emigration creates strategic vulnerability
• Japan must secure its own buffers and so Korea and Manchuria became increasingly urgent.

Japan responded to the Hawaiian crisis with protest and symbolic force but no intervention, and it accepted U.S. annexation as unavoidable—drawing from Hawaiʻi the sobering lesson that even “civilized” non-Western states could not survive without overwhelming power, a conclusion that hardened Japan’s later imperial strategy.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.