The army was divided into nineteen divisions, four independent cavalry brigades, three independent field artillery brigades, six regiments of heavy field artillery and a communication brigade. Each divisional unit consisted of two infantry brigades of six battalions each, a cavalry regiment (three squadrons of 120 men each), a field artillery regiment (six batteries of six guns), and a battalion of army service corps. A battalion of mountain guns was attached to certain divisions. Thus the army on a peace footing consisted of seventy-six infantry regiments (228 battalions), twenty-seven regiments of cavalry. 150 field batteries, nine mountain batteries, nineteen battalions of garrison artillery and nineteen battalions of engineers. When the reserves were summoned to the colors the Japanese system provided for an indefinite increase in the number of battalions for each regiment.
The Japanese navy had weathered a storm which at one time threatened to interfere seriously with its steady growth, and the year 1914 found it at a formidable climax of strength and efficiency. The war with Russia had left the nation on the verge of bankruptcy and the annual budgets from 1907 to 1910 contained no appropriations for naval increases. The lull in naval construction, however, was of short duration. The wisest statesmen realized, from the time when Japan first emerged from her Oriental seclusion and eagerly set out to learn the lessons of western civilization, that their country's insular situation made a strong navy the first requisite of national independence. It was the warships of the western world that forced the Japanese to open their door to the foreigner. Fifteen years after the Japanese had seen the foreign men-of-war riding dominant in their harbors, their antiquated collection of war junks had been replaced by an up-to-date navy, manned and officered by sea fighters trained upon the best western models. In 1910 the Japanese began to compare their naval equipment with that of Germany, and from that time their shipbuilding program was designed to make them secure against the chance of German aggression, ever present since the leasing of Kiao-chau.
At the outbreak of the Great War the Japanese navy had nearly doubled its strength since the close of the war with Russia. It included two battleships of the dreadnought class, the _Kawachi_ and the _Settsu_, both over 21,000 tons, with a speed of twenty knots, two dreadnought battle cruisers of 27,500 tons each and a speed of twenty-seven knots, the _Kongo_ and the _Hiyei_; two semi-dreadnought battleships, the _Aki_ and _Satsuma_, between 19,000 and 20,000 tons each and a speed of twenty and eighteen and a quarter knots, respectively; four first-class battle cruisers with speeds ranging from twenty to twenty-three knots and averaging 14,000 tons; six battleships of slightly heavier displacement and slightly less speed; six first-class coast defense ships, averaging 13,000 tons and seventeen and a half knots; nine first-class cruisers ranging from 7,300 to 9,800 tons and twenty to twenty-one knots; thirteen second-class cruisers, some of which had a speed of twenty-six knots; seven second-class coast defense ships; nine gunboats, two first-class destroyers capable of thirty-five knots an hour; two second-class destroyers with a speed of thirty-three knots; and forty-six other destroyers of varying speeds; thirty-one torpedo boats and thirteen submarines, besides auxiliary craft, hospital ships, dispatch boats, etc.