Samurai to Soldier

In Samurai to Soldier, D. Colin Jaundrill rewrites the military history of nineteenth-century Japan. In fifty years spanning the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the rise of the Meiji nation-state, conscripts supplanted warriors as Japan's principal arms-bearers. The most common version of this story suggests that the Meiji institution of compulsory military service was the foundation of Japan's efforts to save itself from the imperial ambitions of the West and set the country on the path to great power status. Jaundrill argues, to the contrary, that the conscript army of the Meiji period was the culmination—and not the beginning—of a long process of experimentation with military organization and technology.

Jaundrill traces the radical changes to Japanese military institutions, as well as the on-field consequences of military reforms in his accounts of the Boshin War (1868–1869) and the Satsuma Rebellions of 1877. He shows how pre-1868 developments laid the foundations for the army that would secure Japan's Asian empire.

D. Colin Jaundrill is Assistant Professor of History at Providence College.

D. Colin Jaundrill's Samurai to Soldier is an important, well-argued book that addresses a significant gap in our understanding of Japan's transition from the Tokugawa to Meiji periods.

... a genuine contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century Japan—rich in detail, but also focused and succinct.

An enthralling story with numerous twists and turns.... We already know a fair amount about the role the modern Japanese military played in inspiring innovations in science and public health, as well as in more generally modernizing society at large. Jaundrill provides a much-needed inverse perspective on what such innovations meant for the military by elucidating how the enormous conscription obstacles were overcome.... Historians of military and war in the Japan field have much favored writing about earlier periods—or of the Imperial armed forces of the twentieth century, particularly of the Asia-Pacific War. Samurai to Soldier constitutes an important missing link between these two strongholds.

Jaundrill’s impressively researched study traces the origin of the modern Japanese military to the 1840s, when one martial arts teacher introduced a more westernized style of musketry and artillery training based on the Dutch example.