Samurai to Soldier: Remaking Military Service in Nineteenth-Century Japan
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In Samurai to Soldier, 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.
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Reviews for Samurai to Soldier
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One can take the tile of this book as an efficient description of the contents. Starting with the introduction of modern marksmanship to late Tokugawa Japan, Jaundrill examines the twists and turns in how the Meiji regime came to dismantle the samurai class in favor of a conscript army led by professional officers. The irony in all this is how many of the traditional warriors who forced the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate ultimately found themselves on the losing end of the stick. Probably not the first book you should read on the topic, Edward Drea's "Japan's Imperial Army" would be a good starting point, but what Jaundrill does well is to trace the tortuous process of making the "new model" army stick.