Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (review)

Posters featuring cute barking dogs and smiling female celebrities hail viewers with slogans such as “Shining people at a workplace of which one can be proud” and “Peace People Japan–Come On!” Instead of promoting one of Japan’s growing number of socially conscious nongovernmental organizations or recruiting for the nation’s civil service, the posters are recruitment and promotion for Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF), the Japanese military. Article 9 of Japan’s postwar constitution outlawed the army, navy, and air force and requires the Japanese people to “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.” But in the context of the cold war, the country created the so-called “Self-Defense Forces.” Although the SDF have never engaged in combat, they consume 38 per cent of Japan’s budget and possess state-of-the-art weaponry (p. 8). (Only the United States, United Kingdom, and France spend more on defense; China spends less.)

The ambivalences and contradictions that gave birth to the SDF define many elements of its operation. The job of all militaries is to fight fiercely when needed, to defend to the death, and to pursue combat. But Japan’s military was imbued with ideals of liberal-pacifism, and the “self-defense” yoke has tightly leashed its soldiers—and, some have argued, hindered clear policymaking in national security more broadly.¹ Frühstück finds a sense of conflict among the Ground SDF (GSDF) soldiers who feel hesitance and even opprobrium toward the mission of combat and who distance themselves from the wartime Japanese army. Those soldiers simultaneously admire and envy their counterparts in other nations (in particular, the United States), whose aggression and patriotism are legitimated through their connection to the ideals of modernity, freedom, and democracy (pp. 76–79).

Uneasy Warriors is not a study of national security or the politics of constitutional revision but a close ethnographic study of the conflicted identity of Japanese soldiers and the military, and the military’s own awkward humanizing, feminizing, and at times infantilizing self-representation. In a country already ambivalent about patriotism, the military sits uneasily, unable to make full-throated calls to nationalism and ethnic pride—an “elephant in the room” in the context of postwar society’s conflicted relationship to its past. Japan’s nonmilitary military emblemizes a deep tension within all democracies between the need to inspire a shared sense of national identity and collective responsibility and the need to promote pluralism, protect individual rights, and foster internationalism. This dilemma has been particularly acute in Japan (along with Germany, the only other nation whose constitution limits the military to defensive actions ²) because of its historically strong reliance on ethnic nationalism in producing a modern nation-state. Resolution of this dilemma is part of a larger set of negotiations that characterize Japan’s postwar democracy, and Frühstück identifies the military as a site where this tension is experienced and perpetually negotiated.

Frühstück is the first scholar to be allowed to conduct participant-observation in this mistrustful and closed-off organization. She obtained introductions and gained the trust of higher-ranking officers, base heads, and diplomats. Her interviews with 195 service members included members of the rank and file, officers, privates, and veterans, and in addition she spent a week in basic training at a GSDF base.

The politics of gender identity is a major focus of the book and a revealing window into the contradictions associated with a military without a battlefield. Frühstück’s second chapter, “Postwar, Postwarrior Heroism,” explores the conflicted identity of male soldiers forged primarily in dialogue with three charged figures: the postwar sarariiman, members of the U.S. military stationed in Japan, and the wartime Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). The idea of soldiers who are preoccupied with their differences from businessmen is perhaps not as illogical as...