Masters of War: Yamagata Aritomo: 54

He was born the son of a low-ranking samurai in a feudal Japan that could not defend its own coastline against four Western warships. He died a field marshal, a twice-serving Prime Minister, and the man who had, more than any other single figure, transformed his country into a recognised great power. In the eighty-three years between those two facts lies one of the most extraordinary careers in the military history of the modern world. Yamagata Aritomo founded the Kiheitai, the radical commoner militia that shattered Japan's seven-century samurai military monopoly. He drafted the Conscription Ordinance that gave the new Japanese Empire its national army. He established the General Staff Office, built the military academy system, and composed the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors that gave that army its soul. He commanded in the field in three campaigns, the Boshin War, the Satsuma Rebellion, and the First Sino-Japanese War, and served as the principal strategic adviser for the war against Russia that shocked the world. He served twice as Prime Minister. He exercised the informal power of the genrō for half a century. And he watched, in private foreboding, as the institution he had built began to travel roads he had not intended it to travel. This volume, the definitive entry in the Masters of War series on the great commanders of Asian military history, traces that extraordinary arc in full: from the classroom of the radical martyr Yoshida Shōin to the shores of the Shimonoseki Strait, from the mountain passes of Kyushu to the banks of the Yalu River, from the cabinet rooms of Meiji Tokyo to the garden at Odawara where the last of the great Meiji generation composed his final letters and contemplated what he had made of the world and what the world had made of it. It is the account of a soldier who built a nation, and of a nation that was not always equal to what its soldier had built for it. About the Series The Masters of War series examines the lives of history's most consequential military leaders across all eras, nations, and sides of every conflict, assessing military excellence on its own terms, without the imposition of modern moral judgment upon the decisions of the past.