This is a great book, and anyone interested in the history of Japan should put it on their reading list. This is a serious academic work, but it is far from boring. Indeed, the amount of cloak-and-dagger material in here is shocking.

Orbach explores the role of the Japanese army in politics and the instability of the Japanese government in the years between the Meiji restoration and the start of WWII, ending this account briefly after the coup attempt of 1936. He identifies a number of “bugs” in the Japanese polity both as it was formally defined in its constitution, and as it worked in practice. The Meiji Constitution was an audacious blend of Japanese tradition and Western constitutional ideas. Japanese politicians in particular took inspiration from Germany, newly unified after the Prusso-French war of 1870 and a power in the ascendance. But it has been said that the constitution that Bismarck created for his new fatherland was one that he alone could make work. Maybe the Japanese made a poor choice in following his lead.

I won’t repeat Orbach’s enumeration here. But the winners of the Boshin War, after overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate, made decisions that would haunt Japan. One decision was to unify Japan behind the Emperor, an institution which was given a thorough make-over and modernisation to achieve this goal. But this was not done by imposing the will of the emperor on everyone; instead everyone was allowed to state that they followed the will of the emperor, no matter how fiercely they might argue among themselves. While this provided an effective formal focus for national unity, this reverential “agreement to disagree” also offered a built-in justification for rebellion. This was worsened by the second decision the new leaders made, their refusal to give up power. This was understandable, if only for their own safety, but it set a precedent for rebellion being necessary, successful, and rewarded.

Whatever the flaws of the Tokugawa Shogunate, they would probably have been baffled by the attitude that their successors took to rebellions against the government. The coup plotters of 1931, who wanted to use bombardment aircraft to wipe out the entire cabinet, where briefly confined... not to jail, but to a comfortable inn. The staff officers of the Kwantung Army who invaded a country in open defiance of their government successfully escaped punishment, however irate their Emperor might be. The lesson was that a government had no power if enough people refused to obey it.

But personally I suspect that the biggest flaw in the system was rooted deeply in Japanese culture. Going back at least to the Heian period, from the 8th to the 12th century, a separation between the theoretical and actual holders of power was a known pattern in Japanese history. A pattern in which the formal holders of office lived sheltered, ritual and comfortable lives, but real power was wielded by practical men (nearly always men) in back offices. In the early 20th century this had evolved in the devolution of considerable power to relatively junior army officers, whose superiors proved unable to stop them. In a bizarre reversal of military logic, their relatively low position in the army hierarchy had the effect of making them less accountable. In one instance described by Orbach, a prime minister balked at the idea of negotiating with a mere bureau chief in the Army Ministry, but the main effect of this was that the government was unable to control the situation.

Orbach recounts the story of a long series of rebellious events both at home and abroad, including the Satsuma rebellion, the murder of queen Min of Korea, the murder of the Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin, the invasion of Manchuria, the Taisho crisis of 1912, the attempted coup of the Sakura-Kai in 1931, and the attempted coup of 1936. He recognises that after this, power dynamics changed. Radical nationalism was no longer the province of young officers, whose political activism was effectively repressed in the aftermath of their failure to grab power. Instead, it was incorporated in the power structures at the top of the army, whose leaders were not ashamed to hint that their subordinates might rebel again if the wishes of the army were not granted. It’s a natural end of the book, but you’d wish that Orbach had continued his story right up to December 1941 and beyond. ( )

Although this monograph is categorized as "military science," it could be just as easily slotted into political science or sociology, as Orbach examines how the congenital issues of the creation of Meiji Japan dogged that society until they helped to induce disaster. These flaws included how the Meiji oligarchs created a governing system where accountability depended on their predominance (and no one really replaced them), how the authority of the imperial throne was more a concept than an operationalized reality, and how a commitment to the expansion of empire as the solution to Japan's domestic issues could never be reexamined after it had ceased to be viable.

Woven through this is the story of the character of the so-called "warriors of high aspirations," young men on the make with high opinions of themselves looking to do well while doing what they considered good. These sorts of men successfully pulled off the Meiji restoration and the success of these rebels remained a shining example to succeeding generations of marginalized junior officers, who were always a potential threat to disrupt affairs, up to the insurrection of 1936, when Hirohito threatened to personally lead the counter-coup if his generals would not suppress their dangerous pets. The revolt was slapped down but by that point the damage was done to normal politics in Japan; not that anyone was really reconsidering the viability of the war with China.

Orbach writes well about these issues and goes to some lengths to illustrate how personal ties in Japan could almost always undermine the links of the formal organization of authority. ( )