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

My reading of Sabine Frühstück's Uneasy Warriors happened to coincide with my first-ever visit to the Yūshūkan at Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo. Despite my interest in Japanese militarist propaganda, I had always avoided the Yūshūkan because I assumed that I already knew the story it had to tell. If I had realized when I agreed to review Frühstück's book that it was about Japan's Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), I might have avoided it, too, for the same reason. But both experiences were eye-opening. The Yūshūkan's narrative is much more complex and contradictory than I had expected, and the JSDF is a similarly complicated and fraught institution, with surprising relevance for the consideration of various aspects of postwar Japanese society, politics, popular culture, and gender.

Frühstück's study is a deft combination of historical research, textual analysis, interviews, and participant observation, resulting in a multifaceted and evenhanded introduction to a complex topic: the nature of the JSDF and the role of the military in postwar Japanese society more generally. One of this study's useful aspects is Frühstück's comparison of the Japanese military to that of a number of NATO member countries, highlighting its dissimilarity with, for example, the contemporary military in the United States. Japan, Germany, and the United States receive the most prominent comparative attention; as I read Uneasy Warriors, however, I could not help thinking of the Canadian military, which is hardly mentioned in the study despite its being remarkably similar to the JSDF in a number of ways that would have been fruitful to pursue.

The study begins with a chapter titled "On Base," detailing Frühstück's experiences during a week of "basic training" with a Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) unit and providing a broader view of base life as gleaned from extensive interviews with JSDF personnel all over Japan and in all branches of the service. She covers the daily routine in the barracks, in the mess hall, and of training in the field, providing an absorbing glimpse into a life most of us know little about.

The second chapter, "Postwar Postwarrior Heroism," addresses the conflicted identity of the contemporary Japanese military: although its members train for war, they are only allowed to conduct "peacekeeping" missions; although the traditional masculine virtue of protecting the weak is stressed as part of the JSDF ethos, such "protection" no longer takes the form of fighting, or wielding weapons; rather, today's Japanese soldiers wield shovels to rebuild schools, roads, and dams, or provide other forms of disaster relief. Through interviews with male soldiers of various ranks, Frühstück shows how this conflicted identity is troubling to the socially normative concepts that many Japanese men grew up with, especially those who remember the elements of masculinity associated with service in the pre-1945 Imperial Army. Others, however, use the JSDF to construct new ideas of masculinity in specific contradistinction to the image of Japan's "economic warriors," the "salarymen": "a colorless, faceless, and conformist mass that stands in stark contrast to their own individualism and independence of spirit" (p. 57). The apparent illogic of the idea that a man can increase his individualism by putting on a uniform and constraining his behavior to conform to strict rules does not trouble the interviewees in this category, whom Frühstück identifies as, by and large, socioeconomically underprivileged. They see service in the military as "liberation from societal expectations and boredom, . . . and, above all, from the anonymity of the masses" (p. 59).

Still another group has constructed a new definition of masculinity through the job of "peacekeeping"; these contemporary soldiers find it important to distinguish themselves from the legacy of the Imperial Army, which necessitates their clear acknowledgment of at least some aspects of the brutality...