In 1943, Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, President of the Japanese Naval War College, told Professor Iwao Koyama of Kyoto University gravely that ‘Now Japan is at war with the maritime nations, the United States and the United Kingdom. There were many reasons to enter the war, but I believe one of the main reasons was that in educating officers of the Imperial Navy and Army, we put too much emphasis on the techniques and technologies of battle.’

Oikawa admits the failure of higher education in the Japanese Navy, which focused on battle rather than on war. The education was based on memorisation rather than on creativity and originality, and tended to suppress flexible thinking. But it is not fair to judge the officers of the Showa era (1925–89) in isolation; we have to consider how the Japanese Navy had evolved since the days of its creation in the 1860s. The failure of naval higher education was not simply an institutional or educational problem, but sprang from the lack of an ‘intellectual attitude’. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the root causes of this failure, from the foundation of the Imperial Japanese Navy, up to 1905 when it triumphed over the Russian Navy.

In the same period, the US Navy was also in the process of modernisation. Its higher education system was shaped by Commodore Stephen B. Luce, who ‘taught the Navy to think, to think about the Navy as a whole’. That is, he defined a system of naval professional thinking, and a method of teaching it. In this chapter, this intellectual system is referred to as ‘Naval Intellectualism’. Among Luce's many achievements, the establishment of the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island to teach the art and science of war, was the key to a revolution in military higher education.

This chapter's key term is therefore ‘naval intellectualism’. To understand this concept, I first examine the evolution of the US Navy's intellectual posture in the late nineteenth century, which guided the rise of the US Navy in the twentieth century.