Provincial Life and the Military in Imperial Japan

The Civil-Military Contract

By Stewart Lone

Price: $125.00

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About the Book

The book challenges the long-standing view of prewar Japan as a ‘militaristic’ society. Instead of relying on the usual accounts about senior commanders and politics at the heart of government, it shows the realities of provincial society’s relations with the military in Japan at ground level. Working from the perspective of civil society and both rural and urban life in the provinces, Lone investigates broader civil contacts with the military including schools, local businesses, leisure and entertainment, civic ceremonies and monuments, as well as public attitudes towards the military and its values. From this, three central themes emerge.

First, on the theoretical level, that militarism as a concept can only begin to reveal something about a society if it examines local relations between a military and a community. Second, it shows in detail and over an extended time period just how gravely misleading were the stereotypes of imperial Japan and the Japanese people which were accepted in the West up to WW2 and which influenced diplomatic and military decisions concerning Japan. Third, it can be seen that instead of governed by militarism, civil-military relations in imperial Japan were contractual. In this, the general public gave its support to the military on condition that wartime costs in men and money were minimized and that that there was some direct form of economic benefit from the military or war to the civilian community. This pragmatic and contractual form of relations between the military and civil society was in place from the 1890s to 1920s and effectively was unchanged by the experience of three wars and political shifts ranging from authoritarianism to liberalism.

This book will be of interest to upper undergraduates, postgraduates and academics interested in military history and Japanese history.

Table of Contents

1. Ambivalent Hosts 2. The Profits of War: China 1894-95 3. The Costs of War: Russia 1904-05 4. The Business of Bases 5. The Local Regiment 6. Saving an Asset

About the Author(s)

Stewart Lone is Associate Professor of modern Northeast Asian social history, University of New South Wales