The Imperial Japanese Navy

by Fred T. Jane

They are, in a way, a discontented lot of men as a whole, despite all their fatalism, their enthusiasm, and their joviality. Every civilian officer fumes over to himself that he is not an executive; every lieutenant curses the time that must pass before he is a lieutenant-commander, and so on all through. Wherever they are in the professions, they want to be better and higher. Sometimes this is a defect, sometimes not. When it is a defect, it is again a case of the good thing overdone.

With all this, however, they are not ambitious in the exact way that we define the word. A friend of mine was appointed skipper of a destroyer, to take her out to Japan. He had worried everything and everybody for the post. Now, he could have gone back to Japan as a passenger in a steamer, drawing more pay, and without the risks and heavy responsibilities of being a destroyer captain; but, having got his wished-for ship, there the matter ended. There was no “another rung in the ladder” about it; it was simply “a good opportunity to get experience.”

He got it. He left the Thames in a blizzard. Down Channel he had a gale, a head sea, and a thermometer well below freezing-point. Not having been to sea for some time, he was seasick continually, and the weather gave him neuralgia and bronchitis in addition. Having a crew new to the ship, he had to spend nearly the whole trip from the Thames to Portsmouth on deck, and when he snatched a brief watch below a defective cowl gave him shower-baths in his bunk. Yet, when he put into Portsmouth Harbour to coal, I found him sitting in the wardroom, expatiating to his officers on his good luck in having thus early been favoured with some bad weather experience.

“Duty,” in the sense in which one finds it in the British or Russian navies, is not much of a motive-power to Japanese officers. The religion of war, the interest of their profession, the longing to put theories to a fuller practical test—here lie the springs of their motive-power. To quote one of them, they “like being killed.” I believe they do.

Personal glory is, again, discouraged rather than otherwise; a solidarity of glory is rather aimed at. In the torpedo attacks at Wei-hai-wei some boats “got in,” some failed. No Japanese officer who participated will tell you his share. I once asked one of these, whom I met, about the famous action. “Oh yes,” said he, “I was there. It was a very cold night.”

Subsequently I learnt from another officer that this particular one had commanded the boat that sank the Ting Yuen. “But,” added my informant, “he would not tell you, and you should not ask. All did well; some were lucky, some not; since all did well, they agreed not to speak of it after and say who did this or did that, for all were equally worthy of praise.”

Ethically our socialists theorise on this sort of thing, but only the Japanese have actually practised it. Such are Japanese naval officers. To sum up, they have little ambition, little thirst for personal glory, but a good deal of thirst for the thunder of battle. The only religion that they wot of is the worship of their fleet; their only heaven, that fleet in action. They cannot originate, but they are peerless at practising the things that they have learnt. And there is only one possible way of beating a Japanese fleet—by sinking it.

In many of these things the trail of Samaurai may be visible. The Samaurai were trained to kill and to be killed; it was the thing they lived for. Take the case of the old Japanese duelling laws, which ceased to exist quite recently comparatively. No French affaire about these duels. To a Japanese serious European duels are as comic as French duels are to us. With the Japs the vanquished had to die, only death or a mortal wound stopped the duel, and the victor had then to commit suicide.

Hari-kari, though now illegal, is not yet entirely dead. It is not very many years ago that a Japanese sub-lieutenant disembowelled himself because of the disgrace of some affront that he felt had been put on him; in the war with China there were one or two cases. Hari-kari is not a nice thing to describe, and has been described in detail often enough before to-day. It has altered somewhat from the orthodox manner. The torpedo-gunner who, after his frozen-in torpedo failed to leave the tube at Wei-hai-wei, committed hari-kari, slit his stomach across with a knife, and then fired a pistol at his throat—according to the captain of his boat, who told me about it. This was not quite after the orthodox manner, but it was a singular painful means of death for a man to choose of his own accord. The ancestors of Japanese officers, near and remote, lived for centuries under the hari-kari régime. In other ways human life was cheap, and torture was common. Their descendants reap the results in an age when war has become so much a matter of “moral effect.” And this is one great reason why a Japanese fleet will have to be sunk en masse for it to be defeated.

I will close this chapter with one anecdote, a trifle shocking to our convictions possibly, but so eminently characteristic that I must give it. One Japanese I know was studying naval history, noting the most effective dying words of great commanders (the distant future in his mind’s eye very probably). “They are pretty, some of them,” he said, “but I do not think them very useful. Now, if I get killed, I think I shall say, ‘I die a good Christian, and shall soon be an angel with very pretty wings.’”