From Moral Education to National Mobilization: The Imperial Japanese Army’s Campaigns to Shape Japan, 1872–1944

J. Clarke Bursley

Advisor: Brian W. Platt, PhD, Department of History and Art History

Committee Members: Christopher Hamner, Sam Lebovic

Horizon Hall, #3223
March 19, 2026, 02:00 PM to 04:00 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation argues that the Imperial Japanese Army’s national spiritual mobilization campaigns of the 1930s represented the culmination of a systematic institutional and ideological evolution rooted in Meiji foundations and transformed by the experience of World War I. By the early 1930s, the Army’s propaganda machinery was already operational, implementing capabilities developed over decades through two distinct phases.

The first phase, spanning the Meiji and early Taishō periods, established a durable moral education infrastructure for conscripts and subsequently extended those formative practices to civilians. The second phase was shaped by the Army’s interpretation of the collapse of Russia and Germany in World War I as evidence that modern war turned on national unity, cohesion, and “military mindedness.” While material preparedness remained essential, the Army emphasized the spiritual dimension of mobilization. It built upon earlier moral-educational foundations to create a broader apparatus designed to cultivate popular commitment and solidarity within an increasingly complex and pluralistic society.

Amid tense Japanese–American relations and widespread expectations of future conflict, Army planners developed a total war doctrine in which moral suasion and spiritual mobilization constituted a central pillar of a project targeting Japan’s own population. Throughout the 1920s, the Army expanded its influence on the home front alongside—and at times independently of or even at cross-purposes with—Home and Education ministry mobilization programs, institutionalizing military preparatory education and ideological training in schools and youth organizations, and employing the Imperial Military Reserve Association to extend its reach in local communities.

Drawing on Army, Home, and Education ministry records, along with literature, film, and other visual propaganda, this study demonstrates how the Army developed operational frameworks through which it disseminated the concepts of defense consciousness and civil–military unity. By the mid-1930s, it had professionalized public information production, integrated modern media techniques, and created an institutional architecture that sought the “spiritual conscription” of the nation, thereby transforming moral education into a mechanism for total war.