Battōtai

The story

The Battōtai ("Drawn-Sword Unit") was a squad of police swordsmen formed by the Meiji government in 1877, during the Satsuma Rebellion, the uprising led by Saigō Takamori. At the Battle of Tabaruzaka the government's conscript army, mostly commoners who had never learned to fight with the sword, suffered heavy losses in close combat with Saigō's samurai. Officers of the police brigade, many of them of samurai origin from Satsuma itself, proposed to the army commander Yamagata Aritomo that the best swordsmen of the police be sent in; Yamagata, the champion of conscription, agreed reluctantly and named the unit himself. About a hundred men attacked on 14 March 1877. The charge proved decisive for the taking of Tabaruzaka, but the unit lost heavily, by the English article's figures 25 dead and 54 wounded in two days.

A report by the journalist Inukai Tsuyoshi, then of the Yūbin Hōchi Shimbun, said that former samurai of Aizu, branded rebels in the Boshin War, charged crying for revenge for that war. The report rested on hearsay and is not in the official records, and the Japanese article notes that the core of the unit was in fact men of Satsuma, fighting their own countrymen. The unit's success revived interest in swordsmanship, abandoned after the Meiji Restoration: Kawaji Toshiyoshi, the founder of the Japanese police, wrote a treatise calling for its revival, and from 1879 the Tokyo police hired fencing instructors, a step toward modern kendo.

In 1882 Toyama Masakazu, a professor at the University of Tokyo, published a poem on the unit's fight in the collection Shintaishi-shō. Charles Leroux, a French military bandmaster employed by the Japanese government, set it to music, and the war song "Battōtai" was published in 1885. In 1886 its music was combined with the melody of the song "Fusō-ka" to make the Army March-Past (Rikugun bunretsu kōshinkyoku), adopted as the official march of the Imperial Japanese Army. In the Pacific War the march was among the pieces used for radio announcements of victories.

The march is still the official march of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force and of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and the prefectural police forces, played by their bands at reviews. When the First Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894, Sonoda Yasukata, by then Superintendent-General of the Tokyo police and once one of the unit's officers, proposed sending a new Battōtai to the front; the army's vice chief of staff, Kawakami Sōroku, rejected it as childish, saying that the army had long outgrown such things.

What it says

A poem on the fight of the police sword unit at Tabaruzaka in 1877, set as a stirring military song.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.