In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army

by Edward J. Drea

Japan’s war in Asia and the Pacific from 1937 to 1945 continues to be a subject of great interest, yet the wartime Japanese army remains little understood outside Japan. Most published accounts rely on English-language works written in the 1950s and 1960s. The Japanese-language sources have remained relatively inaccessible to Western scholars in part because of the difficulty of the language, a difficulty that Edward J. Drea, who reads Japanese, surmounts.

In a series of searching examinations of the structure, ethos, and goals of the Japanese military establishment, Drea offers new material on its tactics, operations, doctrine, and leadership. Based on original military documents, official histories, court diaries, and Emperor Hirohito’s own words, these twelve essays introduce Western readers to fifty years of Japanese scholarship about the war and Japan’s military institutions.

In addition, Drea uses recently declassified Allied intelligence documents related to Japan to challenge existing views and conventional wisdom about the war.

Genres: History, Japan, World War II, Japanese History, Military History, Military Fiction

300 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1998

About the author

A specialist in Japanese military history, Edward John Drea graduated from Canisius College in Buffalo, in 1965. After service in the United States Air Force, Drea entered the Sophia University in Tokyo in 1971, where he earned a Master of Arts (M.A.) degree. He was awarded a Japanese ministry of education dissertation fellowship, which allowed him to gain a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in modern Japanese history from the University of Kansas in 1978.

Drea joined the Combat Studies Institute of the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1975, and became the head of the Research and Analysis Department at the US Army Center for Military History in Washington, D.C. He also taught at United States Army War College.

Reviews

[Matt Ely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rounded up a 3.5. Going in you need to recognize it's a collection of essays that are only loosely connected. They're written at different times for different audiences, so there can be a mixture of repetition between them, as well as insufficient explanation of references that would be more familiar to a specialist readership.

That being said, the focus on the Imperial Army gives an uncommon lens through which to view some familiar events. I am, perhaps to my discredit, one of the legion of white guys endlessly fascinated by the Second World War. And there are several essays that helped me rethink so many simple conclusions I thought I had. The longest essay is probably the best in this regard as it translates and contextualizes some (then-)recently discovered first-person accounts of the war from Hirohito himself. I also found the collection based on its two essays about enlisted and officer education programs in the peacetime IJA. The enlisted essay was much more systematic while the officer essay was an individual profile.

The topics are a bit scattered, but if this sounds like the kind of niche material you'd like, this will likely have at least a few essays that really engage you. It reads pretty quickly as all but the final essay are 20 pages or fewer.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Save for a few chapters that do not focus much on the Japanese the book is a good look a various little aspects of the Imperial Japanese Army at points in the late 1930s til the end of WWII