The Imperial Japanese Navy

This is a document from another era. Written in 1904 as shells were already falling on Port Arthur, Fred T. Jane captured the Imperial Japanese Navy at the precise moment it was about to shatter the European naval monopoly on Pacific power. The book traces a remarkable transformation: a feudal island nation, forced open by American warships in 1854, which built one of the world's most formidable battle fleets within fifty years. Jane examines the dockyards, the armaments, the personnel, and the strategic thinking that made this possible. But he also looks back further, to the samurai fleets of the Sengoku period, to the sealed kingdom of the Tokugawa shogunate, to the moment Japan decided it would not be a victim of history but its author. This is period history, written as events unfolded, by a man who understood that something unprecedented was happening in East Asia.