Punishment: The Making of War Ethics in Meiji Japan

Danny Orbach (Associate Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) will share his thoughts on the development of Japanese war ethics in the late nineteenth century: 

The war crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy during the Second World War have prompted many scholars to characterize Japanese warrior culture as inherently brutal. These heinous acts—including mass murder, rape and looting—have frequently been attributed to an essentialized “Bushido,” perceived as a merciless samurai code of warfare. Yet, this perspective clashes not only with the fact that Bushido was an “invented tradition”, but also with historical evidence from the Meiji Era, during which the Japanese Army exhibited comparative restraint. Nonetheless, many of the severe atrocities observed later were already beginning to surface on a smaller scale during this period. Unlocking this complex pattern necessitates a thorough, longitudinal examination of Japanese war ethics from premodern, modern and transnational viewpoints alike. 

In this presentation, based on a new book project, we will retrospectively analyze the evolution of these ethics looking backwards from the 1870s—a critical decade when traditional Japanese conceptions of war ethics first encountered evolving ideals of Western international law. Our exploration will transcend simple comparisons of “Japanese” versus “Western” war morality, delving into how specific doctrinal developments in Europe and Japan over the previous centuries, as well as their interaction with one another, established an ideological framework that significantly shaped Japanese military law and the conduct of war for decades to come.