organizing the army and elaborating its system of tactics and
strategy, and during several years a military mission of French
officers resided in Tōkyō and rendered valuable aid to the
Japanese. Afterwards German officers were employed,
Foreign Assistance.
with Jakob Meckel at their head, and they left a
perpetually grateful memory. But ultimately the services of
foreigners were dispensed with altogether, and Japan now adopts
the plan of sending picked men to complete their studies in
Europe. Up to 1904 she followed Germany in military matters
almost implicitly, but since then, having the experience of her
own great war to guide her, she has, instead of modelling herself
on any one foreign system, chosen from each whatever seemed most
desirable, and also, in many points, taken the initiative herself.
When the power of the sword was nominally restored to the Imperial government in 1868, the latter planned to devote one-fourth of the state’s ordinary revenue to the army and navy. Had the estimated revenue accrued, this would have given Military Finance. a sum of about 3 millions sterling for the two services. But not until 1871, when the troops of the fiefs were finally disbanded, did the government find itself in a position to include in the annual budgets an adequate appropriation on account of armaments. Thenceforth, from 1872 to 1896, the ordinary expenditures of the army varied from three-quarters of a million sterling to 112 millions, and the extraordinary outlays ranged from a few thousands of pounds to a quarter of a million. Not once in the whole period of 25 years—if 1877 (the year of the Satsuma rebellion) be excepted—did the state’s total expenditures on account of the army exceed 112 millions sterling, and it redounds to the credit of Japan’s financial management that she was able to organize, equip and maintain such a force at such a small cost. In 1896, as shown above, she virtually doubled her army, and a proportionate increase of expenditure ensued, the outlays for maintenance jumping at once from an average of about 114 millions sterling to 214 millions, and growing thenceforth with the organization of the new army, until in the year (1903) preceding the outbreak of war with Russia, they reached the figure of 4 millions. Then again, in 1906, six divisions were added, and additional expenses had to be incurred on account of the new overseas garrisons, so that, in 1909, the ordinary outlays reached a total of 7 millions, or about one-seventh of the ordinary revenue of the state. This takes no account of extraordinary outlays incurred for building forts and barracks, providing new patterns of equipment, &c. In 1909 the latter, owing to the necessity of replacing the weapons used in the Russian War, and in particular the field artillery gun (which was in 1905 only a semi-quickfirer), involved a relatively large outlay.
The Navy.—The traditions of Japan suggest that the art of
navigation was not unfamiliar to the inhabitants of a country
consisting of hundreds of islands and abounding in
bays and inlets. Some interpreters of her cosmography
discover a great ship in the “floating bridge
Early Japanese
War-vessels.
of heaven” from which the divine procreators of the
islands commenced their work, and construe in a similar sense
other poetically named vehicles of that remote age. But though
the seas were certainly traversed by the early invaders of Japan,
and though there is plenty of proof that in medieval times the
Japanese flag floated over merchantmen which voyaged as far as
Siam and India, and over piratical craft which harassed the
coasts of Korea and China, it is unquestionable that in the
matter of naval architecture Japan fell behind even her next-door
neighbours. Thus, when a Mongol fleet came to Kiūshiū in
the 13th century, Japan had no vessels capable of contending
against the invaders, and when, at the close of the 16th century,
a Japanese army was fighting in Korea, repeated defeats of
Japan’s squadrons by Korean war-junks decided the fate of the
campaign on shore as well as on sea. It seems strange that an
enterprising nation like the Japanese should not have taken for
models the great galleons which visited the Far East in the second
half of the 16th century under the flags of Spain, Portugal,
Holland and England. With the exception, however, of two
ships built by a castaway English pilot to order of Iyeyasu, no
effort in that direction appears to have been made, and when
an edict vetoing the construction of sea-going vessels was issued
in 1636 as part of the Tokugawa policy of isolation, it can
scarcely be said to have checked the growth of Japan’s navy,
for she possessed nothing worthy of the name. It was to the
object lesson furnished by the American ships which visited
Yedo bay in 1853 and to the urgent counsels of the Dutch
that Japan owed the inception of a naval policy. A seamen’s
training station was opened under Dutch instructors in 1855
at Nagasaki, a building-slip was constructed and an iron factory
established at the same place, and shortly afterwards a naval
school was organized at Tsukiji in Yedo, a war-ship the
“Kwanko Maru”[1]—presented by the Dutch to the shōgun’s
government—being used for exercising the cadets. To this
vessel two others, purchased from the Dutch, were added in
1857 and 1858, and these, with one given by Queen Victoria,
formed the nucleus of Japan’s navy. In 1860, we find the
Pacific crossed for the first time by a Japanese war-ship—the
“Kwanrin Maru”—and subsequently some young officers were
sent to Holland for instruction in naval science. In fact the
Tokugawa statesmen had now thoroughly appreciated the imperative
need of a navy. Thus, in spite of domestic unrest
which menaced the very existence of the Yedo government, a
dockyard was established and fully equipped, the place chosen
as its site being, by a strange coincidence, the village of Yokosuka
where Japan’s first foreign ship-builder, Will Adams, had
lived and died 250 years previously. This dockyard was planned
and its construction superintended by a Frenchman, M. Bertin.
But although the Dutch had been the first to advise Japan’s
acquisition of a navy, and although French aid was sought in the
case of the important and costly work at Yokosuka, the shōgun’s
government turned to England for teachers of the art of maritime
warfare. Captain Tracey, R.N., and other British officers
and warrant-officers were engaged to organize and superintend
the school at Tsukiji. They arrived, however, on the eve of the
fall of the Tokugawa shōgunate, and as the new administration
was not prepared to utilize their services immediately, they
returned to England. It is not to be inferred that the Imperial
government underrated the importance of organizing a
naval force. One of the earliest Imperial rescripts ranked a
navy among “the country’s most urgent needs” and ordered
that it should be “at once placed on a firm foundation.” But
during the four years immediately subsequent to the restoration,
a semi-interregnum existed in military affairs, the power of the
sword being partly transferred to the hands of the sovereign and
partly retained by the feudal chiefs. Ultimately, not only the
vessels which had been in the possession of the shōgunate but
also several obtained from Europe by the great feudatories had
to be taken over by the Imperial government, which, on reviewing
the situation, found itself owner of a motley squadron of 17 war-ships
aggregating 13,812 tons displacement, of which two were
armoured, one was a composite ship, and the rest were of wood.
Steps were now taken to establish and equip a suitable naval
college in Tsukiji, and application having been made to the
British government for instructors, a second naval mission was
sent from England in 1873, consisting of 30 officers and warrant-officers
under Commander (afterwards Vice-Admiral Sir) Archibald
Douglas. At the very outset occasions for active service
afloat presented themselves. In 1868, the year after the fall of
the shōgunate, such ships as could be assembled had to be sent
to Yezo to attack the main part of the Tokugawa squadron
which had raised the flag of revolt and retired to Hakodate
under the command of the shōgun’s admiral, Enomoto. Then
in 1874 the duty of convoying a fleet of transports to Formosa
had to be undertaken; and in 1877 sea power played its part in
crushing the formidable rebellion in Satsuma. Meanwhile the
work of increasing and organizing the navy went on steadily.
The first steam war-ship constructed in Japan had been a gunboat
(138 tons) launched in 1866 from a building-yard established
at Ishikawajima, an island near the mouth of the Sumida
river on which Tōkyō stands. At this yard and at Yokosuka
two vessels of 897 tons and 1450 tons, respectively, were
launched in 1875 and 1876, and Japan now found herself competent
not only to execute all repairs but also to build ships of
considerable size. An order was placed in England in 1875,
which produced, three years later, the “Fusō,” Japan’s first
ironclad (3717 tons) and the “Kongo” and “Hiei,” steel-frame
sister-cruisers of 2248 tons. Meanwhile training, practical
and theoretical, in seamanship, gunnery, torpedo-practice
and naval architecture went on vigorously, and in 1878 the
Japanese flag was for the first time seen in European waters,
- ↑ The term maru subsequently became applicable to merchantmen only, war-ships being distinguished as kan.
