Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

AKIYAMA, SANEYUKI • 35
town of Aizu was Wakamatsu, now the city of Aizu-Wakamatsu.
The lord of Aizu, Katamori Matsudaira, and his samurai warriors
were the last major supporters of the Tokugawa shogun, fighting the
bloody Boshin War against the imperial forces from Satsuma and
Choshu domains until surrendering in the fall of 1868. A few people
from Aizu migrated to California in 1869 and 1870 in an attempt to
start a tea and silk colony. The Aizu region was incorporated as
Wakamatsu Prefecture in 1871, and integrated into Fukushima Prefecture
five years later. See also WAKAMATSU COLONY.
AKIYAMA, SANEYUKI (1868–1918). A disciple of the celebrated
naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, Saneyuki Akiyama emerged
in the early 1900s as an extraordinarily influential naval tactician and
doctrinaire. He graduated top of his 1890 Naval Academy class. He
participated in the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–1895, after which
he left for an extended period of study in the United States. Unable
to enroll in the Naval War College at Newport—where, because planning
for war against Japan had begun, officers from that nation were
no longer welcome—Akiyama approached Mahan directly. Mahan
provided Akiyama with a list of works in naval history, which the
young Japanese officer read voraciously. He also sought and received
permission to serve as a foreign observer aboard an American vessel
during the Spanish–American War of 1898.
In 1902, Akiyama was appointed instructor on tactics and strategy
at Japan’s own Naval War College, where he instituted a systematic
study of naval warfare. Impressed by the U.S. Navy’s meticulous
planning processes, he insisted on a rational and scientific approach
to any planning for naval operations. Most significantly, he adopted
what was standard practice in the U.S. Navy: war-gaming, where exercises
were conducted on large tables with models and markers to
simulate real combat conditions.
During the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–1905, Akiyama was assigned
as staff officer with Commander-in-Chief Heihachirō Tōgō’s
Combined Fleet. Soon after the war, he devoted his energies to the
navy’s most pressing issue: the designation of the United States as hypothetical
enemy number one. Once World War I broke out, however,
he split with the majority of his naval colleagues to stress the centrality
of China to Japan’s future. In a further deviation from the thinking