ABSTRACT
From its creation in the 1870s through to the 1920s, the imperial army had continued to expand in numbers, conscripting more civilian men and increasing its bases around the provinces. This expansion was particularly rapid after each of the wars against China and Russia and, by 1920, there was a total of 21 army divisions across Japan. In the 1920s, however, the process of expansion was halted and reversed. Confronted with a depressed economy after World War I, parliamentary critics used the failure of the Siberian expedition (which had cost nearly 440 million yen or more than double the bill for the Sino-Japanese war) to bring about massive cuts in military spending. These cuts were made more urgent by the expense of rebuilding Tokyo and Yokohama after the great earthquake of late 1923. As a result, between 1922 and 1925, the size of the army was reduced by the equivalent of nine divisions. These reductions over several years meant that the mood in barracks, more so among the officers whose careers were suddenly and surprisingly under threat, was as riddled with insecurity as that of any civilian workplace at the time. They also meant that provincial communities with an army base, whatever their personal attitudes towards the military, its values, or the morality of soldiers, were threatened with the loss of an economic asset. This forced them to re-evaluate their relations with the army. The acceptedwisdom among historians is that the Japanese public abandoned
militarism in the late 1910s and converted to anti-militarism in the 1920s.1
However, as we have seen, in the years preceding World War I, there was only fragmentary evidence of popular militarism and considerably more evidence of public coolness, criticism or even hostility towards the army. The events of the rice riots and the Siberian expedition did nothing to improve the army’s image with its critics, opponents, or even its supporters. One response by the army to its poor reputation in the last years of the Meiji era had been to reach out to regional communities, sending officers to talk to local gatherings in order to explain the army’s position and to hear the comments of ordinary people. Clearly, that strategy had not been adequate to bridge the gap between army and society which existed then, and which appeared only to be widening in the early 1920s. The extent of this gap can be measured from an article by an army paymaster named Shimizu in the May 1924 issue of
Kaiko-sha Kiji, the long-established journal written by and for army officers. Shimizu began by citing at length a survey from the new academic discipline of social science which had just been reported in the national press. From the data they had collected, the researchers concluded that Japanese women refused to marry men from only one occupation – the military – while civilian men categorically refused to marry any daughter of a soldier or sailor. The absolute nature of these conclusions, at least as summarized by Shimizu, inevitably raises questions about their reliability but the reason he accepted them at face value is because they confirmed his own general observations. In fact, in his experience, he wrote, it was almost exclusively drunkards on trains who were ready to sing the praises of the military. As he put it, many drunkards upon seeing a serviceman at a station or in a train would call out, ‘Ah, sir, I am really sorry to bother you but, you know, I love military men’, and then, addressing the people around, ‘Oy, you lot, listen up! Men in the military, they do it for the country … Banzai for the military!’ Shimizu did not explain the crowd’s response to this boozy brand of militarism but the logic of his article is that they ignored it.2
