The Imperial Japanese Navy

by Fred T. Jane

The uniform of Japanese seamen is identical with that of British seamen, save that the cap is a little flatter and nearer the French shape. The cap ribbon is just like ours—the name of the depôt instead of ship is on it in Chinese characters.

XIX
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
Officers.

Japanese naval officers, like as they are to European ones in many characteristics, are yet of a more distinct class by themselves than any other body of men in the world. The likeness to European officers is superficial, a first impression; the real Japanese officer is not to be known or understood at a casual glance; he needs knowing.

Whether the Western brain can ever get to truly comprehend the Oriental is a favourite question, usually answered in the negative. But, true as the negative may be in a general way, it is only true to that extent. Sea service marks all its votaries as a class apart; and additionally apart as the Japanese may be by race, they are not more so than Russians or Frenchmen. It is just as easy or just as impossible to “bottom” a Japanese as a Russian. Still, Japanese officers as a class are, as before stated, a unique class.

Their primary and principal characteristic is that they are utterly different to the Japanese that we read about in books. Art books tell us of Japanese art instinct, of their feeling for decorative art, and so forth. Japanese artists may possess, or have possessed, this feeling, but it is conspicuous for its absence in Japanese naval officers, who are as “Philistine” as British officers—if possible, more so. The decorative art that their nation is supposed to live for they cordially despise. I have never heard one admire a picture for its colour, but light and shade (that decorative art knows not) appeals to many. Effects, action, motion, sentiment they will understand, but abstract art, never. They are truly and healthily “Philistines.”

So much for art, which I have touched on because it is said to be, over here, the keynote of Japanese character. Illustrated as a good deal of this work is with Japanese drawings and photographs, selected for the book by Japanese officers, this matter deserves mention apart from the question of artistic influence on national life. We may note, therefore, that “art-instinct” was the first thing flung behind him by the Japanese when he “advanced.” If the so-called taking to civilisation of the Japanese means anything, it means having abandoned art for something more utilitarian and more forceful.

Some slight recapitulation is now necessary. When Japan, as the saying goes, “adopted Western civilisation,” she did little but adopt Western methods of war and business, and, in the strictly ethical sense, discarded a good deal of civilisation rather than adopted it; she abandoned all those forms of civilisation that have a decadent tendency. Her advance was not the birth of a new empire with a new civilisation, but the awakening of an old nation that for centuries had been sleeping, steeped in ultra-civilisation. In this fact lies her strength and her weakness.

A forgotten history was studied, and with that study slumbering ambitions were revived. The man of action, relegated to the background by ultra-civilisations,[30] again began to loom upon the stage. Disputes with foreigners called him on to it; Japan awoke determined to be again a nation. “Let us have intercourse with foreigners, learn their drill and tactics, and ... we shall be able to go abroad and give lands in foreign countries to those who have distinguished themselves in battle,”—this sentiment every Japanese officer has imbibed with his mother’s milk. The introduction of Western social institutions, such as newspapers, railways, telegraphs, the new criminal code, the abolition of torture as a punishment, all these things are side issues. They have contributed to build commercial Japan; but they have had small part in making her Navy; the Navy, indeed, would perhaps have been stronger without them. The mechanical arts and the food[31] of the West, not its social institutions, have made the new Japan an empire.

Now, having decided to adopt Western methods, the Japanese sought Western instructors. The British being the premier navy, they sought naval instruction from us, and were chiefly supplied with officers of what even then was the “old school.” In one of Major Drury’s books of naval stories[32] there is a British admiral who always read his Bible in his shirt-sleeves, because the sight of his uniform made it difficult for him to realise the existence of a Higher Power! Absurd, no doubt; but this seemingly far-fetched yarn exactly represents the “old-school” sentiment, and the sentiment upon which every Japanese officer has been dry-nursed. Even to-day a British admiral is encircled with a halo of pomp, formula, and etiquette equal to that of any Court; in the old days the reverence was greater still. The young Japanese officers’ first lessons in “sea-power” were in reverence to its chief practitioners. With their reverential loyalty to their Emperor, they proved apt pupils. As the seat of power the quarter-deck is revered in the British service; lesson number two taught this to the Japanese, and included the bridge and a few other places. Practical work they were taught on our model; the theoretical they more or less taught themselves. Japanese naval strategy and tactics are much less the result of European tuition than we suppose. What they learnt from the West was after the Nelson model.