Logo: to the web site of the Swedish Defence University

This study is about mapping out the Swedish General Staff's focus areas for information gathering through the military and naval attaches in Japan between the end of the Russo-Japanese War and the beginning of the First World War. More specifically the years 1908-1911. The study deals with experience management as well as how knowledge was obtained from abroad and what this says about the organisational culture of the Swedish armed forces. The study’s purpose is answered through three different questions, one mainquestion and two operationalizing questions. The method used in the study is qualitative text analysis with a hermeneutic approach. The approach aims to find out what the Swedish military attachés intended to study and what they considered important to report home from Japan and what this can tell us about the organisational culture of the Swedish armed forces. This method is thus about interpreting, deciphering, and understanding the received writings, reports, and messages. The theoretical starting point for this study is based on parts of the book The Culture of Military Organizations. Two categories of analysis from this theory have been selected: performance orientation, which is a measure of the extent to which a military organisation encourages and rewards members to challenge goals, promote innovation, and improve performance, and future orientation, which is a measure of the extent to which the military organisation engages in future-oriented behaviours such as delaying in order to enjoy the moment, planning and investing in the future. The concept of orientalism is also used in order to understand why certain lessons were accepted or rejected. The investigation is based on material taken from the General Staff's Foreign Affairs Department, specifically a volume of correspondence, reports, and messages from the military and naval attachés in Tokyo and Peking 1908-1911. The conclusions drawn in the study are that orientalism was an occuring element, but the Swedish attachés despite that enthusiastically took part in war experiencesand reported home their learned lessons, observations and assessments. Based on the lessons learned and the two categories of analysis stated above, Sweden's military organisational culture could at the time be considered to contain a relatively high future orientation and performance orientation.