He is eager, even frantic, in courting death, and he eventually pays the price: Russian shrapnel catches him in the first Japanese assault on Port Arthur and shatters his right arm. Before every engagement, he shares the ceremonial drink of water with his comrades, the ritual of purification before death. He describes a comrade actually committing ritual suicide ( sepukku) to make up for the “shame” not being mobilized rapidly enough. He describes soldiers weeping at not being allowed into battle. He actually wanted to die, he courted it, he demanded it, and he wanted every soldier in the army to do likewise. To say Lieutenant Sakurai was “brave” misses the point completely. What does an “army of will” look like? How does it behave? How does it fight? How does a relatively small nation like Japan take on giant Russia in the war of 1904–05, for example, and triumph? We are lucky to have evidence from the army itself for this war, a memoir by a junior officer named Tadayoshi Sakurai entitled Human Bullets. If it did, it would have paralyzed itself. So the IJA was never an army that spent a lot of time adding up the material odds. You look around, you assess your situation, and you do what you can. Given the army’s origins, the shock of its birth, the sudden realization that it had missed out on 300 years of world history, none of this is surprising.
It resurrected a supposedly ancient code of behavior, bushido, as a guide to modern operations.
As we saw last time out, the IJA stressed will and morale (where it believed it could compete with the western powers) over the material factors (where it knew that it could not). It’s an amazing story-a military force dragged from the feudal era into the modern world virtually overnight-and it deserves to be more widely known.
Human Bullets: The Imperial Japanese Army | HistoryNet Closeįirst off, thanks to everyone for following me on this journey into the past of the Imperial Japanese Army.