Peasants into Citizens?: The Meiji Village in the Russo-Japanese War

Between February 1904 and August 1905, Japan—a small, economically undeveloped Asian nation that just forty years earlier had been a patchwork of squabbling feudal domains—fought a major war against Russia, one of the world's Great Powers. The Japanese, regarded by most of the world as the underdog in their struggle against the Russian giant, won dramatic victories, culminating in the great naval battle of the Tsushima straits, in which the entire Russian Baltic fleet was destroyed. The war against Russia was a colossal enterprise and in many ways continues to stand out as a watershed in modern Japanese history. The scale of the war (it cost more than 1.7 billion yen, deployed more than one million soldiers and sailors, and claimed more than eighty thousand Japanese lives), demanded an unprecedented mobilization of the nation's financial, industrial, and human resources. This article examines that mobilization in the place where most Japanese lived at the turn of the twentieth century: the village.¹

The mobilization of villages was among the most essential components in Japan's war effort. Villages were the fountainhead of male conscripts for the army and navy. They were the source of food supplies, both for the army overseas and for the nation as a whole—helping to preserve foreign exchange for essential military purchases. They provided the horses on which the army depended so heavily for its movement overseas. And they contained reserves of savings, which the government sought to tap to help finance the war effort.

Yet in 1904, most Japanese villages were still fairly remote places. The railway network had barely penetrated beyond the major cities. Roads connecting village to town and city were mostly narrow, muddy, and unpaved. The telegraph linked towns, but few villages were on the network. The telephone was still an exotic novelty. Most villagers had never seen electric lights, mechanized factories, streetcars, automobiles, moving pictures, or many of the other symbols of modernity that were rapidly transforming Japan's major cities. How ready were they to meet the demands placed on them by a modern war? How applicable to villagers is James McClain's characterization of the war as a "people's war, infused with their ardor and emotional commitment"?² The war effort was a crucial test of village Japan's integration into the national community, and it offers an opportunity to assess the transformation of Japanese peasants (to use the terminology proposed by Eugen Weber in his classic work Peasants into Frenchmen) into Japanese citizens.³

Japanese scholars of rural society have tended to date the modernization and integration of villages into the national political fabric to the administrative reforms of the turn of the 1890s. Those reforms, once fully implemented, drastically reduced the number of villages in Japan, from seventy thousand to twelve thousand. Each of the new "administrative" villages (which were created by the amalgamation of several villages into a single organizational unit) reported to county (gun) authorities, and the county in turn was governed by the prefecture—effectively co-opting the village into a hierarchy of national governance. The new administrative framework managed the major components of the village-state relationship: taxation, conscription, health, agricultural affairs, and education. In the context of the two major wars that followed these reforms (the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905), Ōkado Masakatsu links the evolution of this administrative framework to the development of the government's imperialist agenda, a process that he describes as the "penetration of emperor-system nationalism" in the Japanese countryside.⁴

The nationalistic "emperor-system"—that "hideous miasma, enveloping and subsuming the popular mind"⁵—is of course a central theme in the Japanese historiography of imperialism leading to the atrocities of World War II, and as such it has its own very specific nuance. But in the context of Ōkado's analysis, it probably also shares some common ground with Eugen Weber's interpretation: that "roads, railroads, schools, markets, military service, and the circulation of money, goods, and printed matter provided [significant shared] experiences...