Imperial Japanese Army

The Imperial Japanese Army was organised around the Army Ministry, the General Staff Office and the Inspectorate General of Military Training in Tokyo, with regional divisions garrisoned in castle towns across Japan and its overseas territories. This theme gathers the command centres, division and regiment sites, army schools, arsenals and army airfields that made up that system; the coastal fortresses built from the Meiji era and the works prepared for the final defence of the home islands are treated under the Homeland Defence theme.

The Army was created in the early Meiji years. The Conscription Ordinance of 1873 established universal male service, and in 1888 the regional garrisons were reorganised as divisions. Divisional headquarters and infantry regiments were mostly placed inside or beside former castles, so that castle towns such as Sendai, Kanazawa, Nagoya, Osaka, Hiroshima and Kumamoto became "military cities" whose barracks, parade grounds, army hospitals and officers' clubs formed part of the urban fabric. Through the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars the Army grew to more than a dozen standing divisions and garrisoned Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan. After the Manchurian Incident of 1931 the actions of field armies repeatedly drove national policy; full-scale war with China began in 1937, and from 1941 the fronts extended across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The Army swelled from seventeen divisions before the war to some five and a half million men at the surrender, and the collapse of supply caused mass deaths from starvation and disease.

The Army is a key to the politics and society of wartime Japan. The independence of the supreme command and the active-duty rule for service ministers allowed it to make and break cabinets; the reservists' association, youth schools and military drill in schools carried its discipline into local society; and conscription tied almost every household to the front. Atrocities in occupied territories and POW camps were prosecuted at the Tokyo Trial and in Class B and C trials across Asia, and their assessment still affects Japan's relations with its neighbours. The Army Ministry was abolished on December 1, 1945.

Under this theme visitors will find former division and regiment headquarters, barracks, gates and guardhouses; the sites of the Military Academy, cadet schools and branch schools; surviving buildings of the Tokyo, Osaka and Kokura arsenals; shelters and runway remains at army airfields; and army cemeteries and memorial towers. Much former army land became universities, parks, hospitals and government offices after the war, or remains in use by the Self-Defense Forces and U.S. Forces Japan.