Nambu World: Imperial Reservists’s Association Badges

(under construction-much more to come!)

All men in Japan who had passed the medical to join the service were eligible to join the Imperial Reservists’ Association (IRA), even if they were not actually selected to serve (until fairly late, most of those who passed the medical were not chosen to serve). Almost everyone did join, especially in the countryside, where peer pressure was strong, and among those who worked where there was a factory IRA branch set up. Here are two membership badges for the IRA. For more details on them, see the OMJAS book, page 111, Figure 202. I have shown them here with a US quarter for scale. In Japanese the organization was called the Teikoku Zaigo Gunjinkai. For more information on it, I strongly recommend the book A Social Basis for Pre-War Japanese Militarism by Richard J. Smethurst.

This is the larger one. It is about 27mm by 42mm. It seems to be either made of silver or silver-plated. The brass star is a separate piece.

Here you can see the attachment mechanism and, in the centre, the little bit of bent brass that holds the star in place.

This is the smaller badge, about 18mm by 27mm. The brass star is, again, a separate piece of metal, though permanently joined by the same bent over pin as the one above.

The back of this one has two columns of characters. The right column is the name of the organization in Japanese, teikoku zaigo gunjinkai. The left column says kai-in ki-sho, or “member’s badge”. In the rural areas where most Japanese lived before the war, the IRA assumed, which contained almost all the able-bodied local males, came to take over most local service duties and hence earned enormous support for the military in these areas.

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Last updated: July 15, 2006. All contents are copyright Teri unless otherwise specified and may not be used elsewhere in any form without prior permission.