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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.
"In Samurai to Soldier, D. Colin Jaundrill presents a thoughtful, well-balanced analysis of the transformation of Japan's premodern warriors into the arms and legs of a modern, Western military system during the decades surrounding the Meiji Restoration. This is a shift of great significance, and Jaundrill guides readers through a complicated process with clarity and authority. On one hand, this is a new yet vital story of the Restoration, and, as such, Jaundrill's book will be greatly appreciated by college-level instructors who need to present to their students a clear narrative thread that must detail and explain an extremely convoluted event. On the other hand, this is an important analytical explanation of the birth of the modem-day Japanese serviceman, which means that Samurai to Soldier will appeal to not only historians of Japan but also historians of modern-day military systems that exist all around the world."
David L. Howell, Harvard University, author of Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan:
"Samurai to Soldier is an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century Japan in general and its military history in particular. D. Colin Jaundrill carefully traces the transformation of military organization and soldiering across the divide of the Meiji Restoration, when samurai warriors were replaced by modern soldiers. It's not a straightforward story, and its unexpected complications tell us much not only about the origins of Japan’s modern military but also a key process in Japan’s transition from early modernity to modernity."
Edward Drea, author of Japan’s Imperial Army:
"D. Colin Jaundrill's pathbreaking book is the definitive account of the tumultuous socio-military transformation that created the national army of Meiji Japan. His work opens fresh, fascinating perspectives on the military’s role in an emerging state."
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