Imperial Guards Badge [Akira Komiya]

[ghp95134]

[Posting on behalf of Akira Komiya]

...As for your question regarding the Imperial Guard's cap insignia, the leaves are cherry leaves, more precisely cherry sprigs as the original Japanese description is 櫻枝. (In fact you can see cherry blossom buds at their ends.)

They were introduced by Imperial Edict No. 196 of July 11, 1905 which established the khaki Army Wartime Uniform (陸軍戦時服) which superseded the previous wartime uniform established in the previous year and became the standard army uniform after the Russo Japanese war.

I believe the reason for the special cap insignia was due to the Meiji 38 wartime uniform specifications abolishing the distinguishing features of the Guard Unit uniforms in the Meiji 19 uniform such as the red cap bands as opposed to yellow for normal units, and the red piping to the edges and bayonet loop of the tunic. I am sure Nick would have uncovered some correspondence showing the discussions leading to such decision in the archives.

I am attaching a copy of the Edict for your reference. Besides the illustrations, mention of the cherry sprigs for guard unit cap insignia appear as note 2 on the right hand side of page 6 for officers and Note 1 on the left hand side of page 17 for enlisted men.

I first looked at the 1938 uniform specifications but the 1938 specifications do not appear to identify what the leaves below the star is. They only mention Star Insignia and just refer to the drawings which do show the star and cherry sprig insignia as being for Guard units.

As for the imperial palace police, I had always wrongly assumed that they were just members of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police assigned to guard the Imperial Palace but in fact the members, other than officer ranks who are seconded from the National Police Agency, are recruited independently by the Imperial Palace Police specifically for palace duty and they even have their own police academy. Link

It appears that the uniforms are the same as the regular police except for guard and ceremonial duties for which they wear a special dress uniform with a red aiguillette, although they apparently wear special collar insignia of paulownia leaves as distinguishing insignia according to a Wikipedia article on 皇宮護衛官： Link

I thought the cap insignia of the Ground Self Defense Forces even more closely resembled the guard units' insignia in that the merely replaced the star in the center with a cherry blossom.
Link

[Guy's note: I did a mark-up of the image in the last link above]

[ghp95134]

Edict pages mentioned by Akira-san:

Officers


Other Ranks & NCOs

[Bruce Pennington]

Guy,
This is the quality reference material that deserves to be pinned. I wonder if Akira is going to join and continue to contribute, if we should add posts like this to Nick's Master Index? I could check to see if we could even change the title to something like "Master Index of Komiya Brothers...." or something appropriate.

Any thoughts? Anyone? As a note, I'll clean this off-topic discussion off when we're done.

[jeeplover]

I think it would be a great ideal. I think we all miss Nick very much

[ghp95134]

Hi Bruce & jeep,

Let's wait to see what Akira-san will want. Akira-san holds his brother in high regard and may not want to have people confuse Nick's work as his.

Cautiously yours,
-- Guy

[ghp95134]

If you want a copy of the 28-page pdf, send me a PM with your email address.

12,551,888 bytes (12.6 MB)



-- Guy