Samurai to Soldier: Remaking Military Service in Nineteenth-Century Japan by D. Colin Jaundrill (review)

No special pleading is needed to establish the importance of the military in nineteenth-century Japanese history. The weakness of samurai armies in the face of Western imperialism helped to undermine the Tokugawa regime and then the entire samurai estate. The conscription of commoners under the new Meiji government transformed the relationship of ordinary farm families to central state institutions, imposing new burdens but also providing new opportunities. Like reforms in education and taxation, conscription created the shared experiences of citizenship essential to shaping modern nationalism. Yet surprisingly, Anglophone research on military service in nineteenth-century Japan has been relatively fragmentary: there has been robust scholarship on late Tokugawa-era military reforms and on Meiji-era conscription, but little connecting the two processes. D. Colin Jaundrill’s singular accomplishment is to explore those causal and institutional connections, showing how both late-Tokugawa and Meiji reformers struggled with many of the same issues, most notably the challenge of weakening conventional status distinctions while establishing military discipline. His study is a genuine contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century Japan—rich in detail, but also focused and succinct.

The first chapter, “The Rise of ‘Western’ Musketry, 1841–1860,” explores the ascendancy of the Takashima school of military science, which introduced not only modern Western weapons and military dress but also European-style drill, complete with commands in Dutch. Such overt foreignness drew fierce opposition from traditionalists, so Takashima proponents hybridized clothing and even language, issuing commands using Japanese words with Dutch syntax. Because military drill threatened to strip samurai of their independence, Takashima advocates stressed how hunting with firearms could restore samurai vigor. Nonetheless, to avoid challenging the perquisites of rank, most reforms were confined to the lower levels of the samurai estate.

Chapter 2, which discusses military reforms from 1860 to 1866, delineates how both the shogunate and major domains struggled with common problems. How could they develop a new military while still supporting traditional forces, and how much should the new force challenge status hierarchies? Jaundrill disputes the obsolete dichotomy between a hidebound shogunate and the more dynamic western domains. As early as 1863, the shogunate was drilling commoner recruits in Western-style barracks and using a Western clock. By 1865, it was contacting the British in Yokohama for help with military drill. Nonetheless the shogunate still worked within the conventional status hierarchies of four estates. In order to maintain the samurai monopoly on military service, it treated commoner infantrymen as quasi-samurai who were given the right to bear a short sword for the duration of their service, although the “sword” was actually a bayonet (p. 52). In parallel fashion, Chōshū both challenged and reinforced status hierarchies. It took the bold steps of issuing firearms to outcaste (eta) recruits and granting them the right to bear short swords, but at the same time reaffirmed the distinction between eta and other commoners by assigning distinctive uniforms to the former (p. 62).

In chapter 3, “The Drives to Build a Federal Army, 1866–1872,” Jaundrill elegantly writes across the 1868 divide. His contrast of a “federal” with a “national” army neatly points to continuities between late-Tokugawa and early-Meiji policy. In both cases, the government in Edo/Tokyo sought to rely on regional forces while simultaneously building its own military. In both cases, “federalism” failed: the domains did not rally to the shogunate’s federal vision (p. 83), while for the Meiji government, regional militaries were ultimately defined by regional loyalties. For example, instructors at the Meiji government’s Osaka Military Academy were primarily from Chōshū, and samurai from other domains chafed at their attempts to impose basic military discipline such as curfews. Rather than endure challenges to their status, the Tottori company deserted en masse (p. 99).

Chapter 4 covers the adoption of universal military service, which, as Jaundrill notes, presented multiple challenges. Many samurai resented losing their monopoly on military service, and...