ABSTRACT
In this work, I take up the thread of an enquiry I began long ago in Japan’s First Modern War: Army and Society in the Conflict with China, 1894-95 (London/NY 1994). In that early foray into Japanese civil-military relations, my intention was simply to add detail and personality, in other words the shades of humanity, to what I believed then, and what I believe now, is a deeply dull and monochrome corner of Japanese historiography. That intention remains in the present study but, with the benefit of more
than another decade of researching and teaching on the social history of modern Japan, I have a more deliberate purpose; it is to engage in an act of creative destruction. The intent is, if not to exorcise, then at least to draw blood from a malevolent phantom which continues to haunt the popular understanding of Japanese society, and which leads either to a mystical fascination with, or demonization of, the Japanese people. As Harold Bolitho wrote some years ago1:
In the popular imagination, Japan and the samurai are often synonymous … [but] the notion that the Japanese are constantly and eternally motivated by instincts, training and ethics of the kind popularly ascribed to the samurai is hilariously inaccurate at best, and at worst racist and defamatory.
