Samurai Japan
Today everybody knows that there is no militarism in Japan.
But during WWII, Japan was guided by leaders who observed militarism. And those generals and admirals of the Imperial Army and Navy were of a very different kind of military men in the world, including the US.
From the beginning, the modern and westernized Japan was established in the late 19th century not by revolutionary civilians but by professional warriors called samurai.
This modern Japan was a product of a civil war between samurais subject to the samurai king (shogun) from the Tokugawa clan and those who had been potential enemies of the Tokugawa clan since the early 17th century. Tokugawa shoguns had governed Japan from 1603 to 1868. It was a rule by sword.
In the Japanese society, samurais formed their own social class. Originally they were from the noble class and gradually became feudal lords controlling a certain feud and their vassals while being subject to the imperial court in Kyoto. But since the 12th century, they came to take over political power from the imperial court and the noble class so as to establish the central government of Japan apart from the traditional and nominal imperial government in Kyoto where the emperor lived. Though the emperor was not abolished, the head of all the samurai clans in Japan who formed government was actually king of Japan.
Samurais performed functions of not only warriors but also of bureaucrats, scholars, engineers, artists, and so on. They lived on rice farmers in their territory produced and paid as tax. They sold rice in big market in Osaka, southwest of Kyoto, to get money.
And, while heads of the Tokugawa clan became a shogun generation after generation, they closed the country. It was because Tokugawa samurais had observed many Vatican missionaries coming to Japan and preaching Christianity in the latter half of the 16th century. But Japanese Christians showed more faith in Christ, the Vatican, or Spain or Portugal than in samurai lords. Tokugawa leaders were afraid that Japan might come to be under a strong influence of Europeans. So, to forbid Christianity, they closed the country.
But in the late 19th century, the Tokugawa regime could not any more resist strong requests from western powers, especially the US, to open the door of Japan.
And as other samurai clans, including potential enemies of the Tokugawa clan, saw the shogun unable to stand the foreign pressure, they lost respect to the shogun. They thought it was time to topple the Tokugawa regime and take over power. Those anti-Tokugawa samurais took the emperor in Kyoto on their side to launch a war against the shogun who presided over Japan from Edo (presently Tokyo). And after a civil war, the Tokugawa regime fell, though a decisive battle in Tokyo could be avoided.
So, this big change of the political regime is called the Meiji Restoration (of the imperial authority) as anti-Tokugawa samurais set the emperor as the sole and absolute monarch of new Japan.
Along with modernization and westernization of the Japanese society following the Meiji Restoration with Meiji Emperor, samurais became modern bureaucrats, policemen, army and navy generals, professors, teachers, medical doctors, engineers, businessmen, etc. They formed the leading core of new Japan as the elites. And finally, they founded the Empire of Japan with the constitution they made in reference to that of Germany.
So, the Empire of Japan was ruled by the underlying samurai spirit. Old codes of conduct samurais had followed for centuries also survived. In this context, the Empire of Japan was from the beginning established by professional military men or warriors unlike other nations in Europe, America, and Asia. So, the Empire of Japan was unique. At the core in the minds of the elites of the Empire, there was the samurai spirit.
In other word, the Empire of Japan was essentially a nation of militarism, though in the Japanese sense.
That is why Japan could catch up with western powers by rapidly introducing technology and modern weapons into the nation from the late 19th century to the end of WWII.
However, the political paradigm of samurais could not allow the Imperial Government to avoid a military clash with the US. The Pearl Harbor attack became inevitable due to their samurai paradigm.
And, as the Empire of Japan fell in August of 1945 through the cruel war against the US, this samurai spirit had gone. Today, no Japanese elites identify themselves as direct descendants of samurais of the middle of the 19th century.
Democratic Japan after WWII is truly something new in its history. But Japan and Japanese cannot be free from its 2000-year long history. As Japan has still the emperor, it should still keep some part of the samurai spirit.
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Mat 8:15 And he touched her hand, and the fever left her: and she arose, and ministered unto them.