ABSTRACT
Crowding into the big tent of fukoku kyohei (“enrich the country, strengthen the military”) were elites with wildly divergent agendas. Among the ranks of former samurai was a significant group primarily interested in bolstering Japan’s military capacity. Seduced by the promise of kyohei, some appreciated the importance of building up a manufacturing sector that could spew out the battleships, field guns and transport vehicles required by modern warfare. In this sense they saw fukoku as an important, albeit less pressing, priority. This group tended to be pragmatic and rational, calculating the costs and benefits of going to war with a sophisticated appreciation of geopolitical realities. Others were less convinced, joining the ranks of mystical ultra-nationalist societies that were prepared to jettison the economy in order to convince other countries and peoples of the superiority of Japan through the force of Japanese fighting spirit.
