Naval history of Japan: Encyclopedia II - Naval history of Japan - Meiji restoration and creation of the Imperial Japanese Navy

Naval history of Japan - Meiji restoration and creation of the Imperial Japanese Navy

Main article:Imperial Japanese Navy

The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) (Japanese: 大日本帝国海軍) was the navy of Japan between 1867 and until 1947, when it was dissolved following Japan's constitutional renouncement of the use of force as a means of settling international disputes.

From 1868, the restored Meiji Emperor continued with reforms to industrialize and militarize Japan in order to prevent it from being overwhelmed by the United States and European powers. The Imperial Japanese Navy was formally established in 1869. The new government drafted a very ambitious plan to create a Navy with 200 ships, organized into 10 fleets, but the plan was abandonned within a year due to lack of ressources. Internally, domestic rebellions, and especially the Satsuma Rebellion (1877) forced the government to focus on land warfare. Naval policy, expressed by the slogan Shusei Kokubou (Jp:守勢国防, lit. "Static Defense"), focused on coastal defenses, a standing army, and a coastal Navy, leading to a military organization under the Rikushu Kaiju (Jp:陸主海従, Army first, Navy second) principle.

During the 1870s and 1880s, the Japanese Navy remained an essentially coastal defense force, although the Meiji government continued to modernize it. In 1870 an Imperial decree determined that the British Navy should be the model for development.

During the 1880s, France took the lead in influence, due to its "Jeune Ecole" doctrine favoring small, fast warships, especially cruisers and torpedo boats, against bigger units. The Meiji government issued its First Naval Expansion bill in 1882, requiring the construction of 48 warships, of which 22 were to be torpedo boats. The naval successes of the French Navy against China in the Sino-French War of 1883-85 seemed to validate the potential of torpedo boats, an approach which was also attractive to the limited ressources of Japan. In 1885, the new Navy slogan became Kaikoku Nippon (Jp:海国日本, lit. "Maritime Japan").

In 1886, the leading French Navy engineer Emile Bertin was hired for four years to reinforce the Japanese Navy, and to direct the construction of the arsenals of Kure and Sasebo. He developed the Sanseikan class of cruisers, 3 units featuring a single but powerful main gun, the 12.6 inch Canet gun.

This period also allowed Japan to adopt new technologies such as torpedoes, torpedo-boats and mines, which were actively promoted by the French Navy (Howe, p281). Japan acquired its first torpedoes in 1884, and established a "Torpedo Training Center" at Yokosuka in 1886.

Naval history of Japan - Sino-Japanese War

Japan continued the modernization of its navy, especially as China was also building a powerful modern fleet with foreign, especially German, assistance, and the pressure was building between the two countries to take control of Korea. The Sino-Japanese war was officially declared on August 1, 1894, though some naval fighting had already taken place.

The Japanese navy devastated Qing's northern fleet off the mouth of the Yalu River at the Battle of Yalu River on September 17, 1894, in which the Chinese fleet lost 8 out of 12 warships. Although Japan turned out victorious, the two large German-made battleships of the Chinese Navy remained almost impervious to Japanese guns, highlighting the need for bigger capital ships in the Japanese Navy (the Ting Yuan was finally sunk by torpedoes, and the Chen-Yuan was captured with little damage). The next step of the Imperial Japanese Navy's expansion would thus involve a combination of heavily armed large warships, with smaller and innovative offensive units permitting aggressive tactics.

The Imperial Japanese Navy further intervened in China in 1900, by participating together with Western Powers to the suppression of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion. The Navy supplied the largest number of warships (18, out of a total of 50 warships), and delivered the largest contingent of Army and Navy troops among the intervening nations (20,840 soldiers, out of total of 54,000).

Naval history of Japan - Russo-Japanese War

Following the Sino-Japanese War, and the humiliation of the forced return of the Liaotung peninsula to China under Russian pressure (the "Triple Intervention"), Japan began to build up its military strength in preparation for further confrontations. Japan promulgated a ten-year naval build-up program, under the slogan "Perseverance and determination" (Jp:臥薪嘗胆, Gashinshoutan), in which it commissioned 109 warships, for a total of 200,000 tons, and increased its Navy personnel from 15,100 to 40,800.

These dispositions culminated with the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). At the Battle of Tsushima, the Mikasa led the combined Japanese fleet into what has been called "the most decisive naval battle in history".^[5] The Russian fleet was almost completely anihilated: out of 38 Russian ships, 21 were sunk, 7 captured, 6 disarmed, 4,545 Russian servicemen died and 6,106 were taken prisoner. On the other hand, the Japanese only lost 116 men and 3 torpedo boats.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Meiji restoration and creation of the Imperial Japanese Navy", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki