Between Collective Will and Individual Standards: Levels of Discourse within the Japanese Military’s Kōgun Ideal, 1937–1945

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the Second Sino–Japanese War, the Japanese military constructed the kōgun ideal as a code of conduct for its soldiers, stimulating their fervour for a ‘holy war’. The basic principles of kōgun included loyalty, devotion, and sacrifice, which played an important role in controlling frontline soldiers through ideological propaganda. However, the kōgun ideal was inherently contradictory. If the spirit of ‘aggression’ constituted the standard of violence, ‘compassion’ implied an opposing principle of self-restraint. Furthermore, ‘pacification’ became a new expectation for kōgun after the outbreak of the Pacific War, primarily as a means of reconstructing legitimacy under domestic and international pressure, but it was no different from ‘plunder’ from a Chinese perspective. As the gap between the harsh conditions at the front and the luxurious life in the rear became increasingly apparent, the kōgun ideal, specifically glorified sacrifice, created dilemmas and frustration for individual soldiers, which threatened to undermine the ideal. This article explores the diverse and nuanced wartime mentality of frontline soldiers, whose deviations from and negotiations with the collective will reveal their dual identities as victimisers of Chinese civilians and victims of the fascist ambitions of the militarist Japanese government.