Japan’s army father was a low-rank samurai who modernized via Dutch texts
Evidence
Here the key figure was Omura Masujiro (1824–1869), the so-called ‘Father of the Japanese Army’. A low-ranking Choshu samurai, he started his career by studying Western medicine through Dutch-language manuals. (It will be recalled that until 1854 the Dutch were the only Westerners permitted access to Japan, and this access was limited essentially to the island of Deshima off the Bakufu-controlled port of Nagasaki.) On graduating from the Tekijyuku in Osaka, then the best Dutch-language training centre in the country, he returned home to practise medicine – but without much success. In 1853, he took a position in Uwajima as instructor in Western learning, with a foray to Nagasaki to study naval science. (He designed and supervised the building of Japan’s first steamship on the basis of written manuals.) His chance came after Perry’s arrival; he moved to Edo in 1856 to work as an instructor at what would become the National Military Academy and at the Bakufu’s top research office for the study of Western texts. His translations of European military works especially on Napoléeon’s innovations in strategy and tactics, won him fame and recall to Choshu in 1860 to serve as military adviser. In 1864–65, he proved the relevance of his writing as a successful commander in the Choshu civil war. Subsequently he became the first Meiji Minister of War, and drew up the regime’s revolutionary plans for mass conscription and elimination of the samurai as a legal caste. For his pains he was assassinated by an outraged samurai. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 418
Categorization
- XREF: Parallels the European military-reform figures like Blücher’s Prussia in the following note — same chapter’s comparative argument.