(Found) Mutiny aboard a Japanese space ship en route to a war

[tachyon]

This would have been a paperback, read in the 90's.

A part of this book is set on a space ship en route from Earth to another planet (extrasolar I'm pretty sure, implying FTL.) The ship is run by a Japanese crew, the passengers (possibly criminals) are being trained as soldiers en-route to the destination planet where they'll be fighting in a war.

The passengers are not happy with the brutal training conditions and stage a mutiny which is quickly put down, the main character is one of the leaders of the mutiny and the only surviving leader. He is put in suspended animation and the rest of the soldiers-in-training continue to train.

When they arrive at the planet the leader is revived and finds that the training he'd missed out on made a massive difference, he'd only gotten the very basics and was a huge liability to his unit, who nevertheless help him survive.

That's all I've got, ring any bells for anyone?

 

[tachyon]

Sorry to steal the find from someone else but, found:

On My Way to Paradise by Dave Wolverton

I finally got the right search keywords: "mutiny" "japanese crew" "space ship" "war" scifi "novel"
and the search engine was duckduckgo, not google

first result:

Trying to figure out the name of a science fiction paperback maybe 90's

What I remember or think I remember. A guy goes on a spaceship to another world by accident, because he is in trouble. The ship is owned by an Asian group and they are going to attack another Asian...

scifi.stackexchange.com

 

[tachyon]

This can be marked FOUND, btw.