Throughout the postwar era, the question of military power has sparked some of Japan’s most intense political debates. After a devastating and destructive war that many blamed on the imperial military, the question of whether a peaceful and democratic Japan should or could possess military power was extraordinarily potent. The country’s new constitution, which was written by the US occupiers, declared that military power was incompatible with Japanese democracy; asserting that the Japanese people “renounce[ed] war as a sovereign right of the nation,” Article 9 declared that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.”[1] Many members of the Japanese public, including the organized left, embraced this link between democracy and pacificism. Rebuilding military power, they claimed, even it if was explicitly defined as defensive, risked revitalizing wartime militarism. Japanese conservatives, on the other hand, argued that military power was key to Cold War security, to rebuilding national power, independence, and sovereignty, particularly as US military bases remained widespread in post-occupation Japan, and to restoring a healthy and “normal” patriotism, free of guilt and shame. US General Douglas McArthur’s 1950 decision to create the Police Reserve Force (PRF), which was the origins of today’s Self Defense Force (SDF), was therefore a moment with considerable repercussions. Even though it was the product of immediate calculations—the PRF was meant to enhance Japanese internal security as US occupation forces departed for the battlefields of Korea—the shift from demilitarization to the restoration of military capabilities generated decades of controversy and political mobilization.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review Essay 78
Aaron Herald Skabelund, Inglorious, Illegal Bastards: Japan’s Self-Defense Force during the Cold War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022. ISBN 9781501764370 (hardcover, $54.95).
Reviewed by Jennifer M. Miller, Dartmouth College
26 September 2023 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE78 | Website: rjissf.org
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Cindy Ewing | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Throughout the postwar era, the question of military power has sparked some of Japan’s most intense political debates. After a devastating and destructive war that many blamed on the imperial military, the question of whether a peaceful and democratic Japan should or could possess military power was extraordinarily potent. The country’s new constitution, which was written by the US occupiers, declared that military power was incompatible with Japanese democracy; asserting that the Japanese people “renounce[ed] war as a sovereign right of the nation,” Article 9 declared that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.”[1] Many members of the Japanese public, including the organized left, embraced this link between democracy and pacificism. Rebuilding military power, they claimed, even it if was explicitly defined as defensive, risked revitalizing wartime militarism. Japanese conservatives, on the other hand, argued that military power was key to Cold War security, to rebuilding national power, independence, and sovereignty, particularly as US military bases remained widespread in post-occupation Japan, and to restoring a healthy and “normal” patriotism, free of guilt and shame. US General Douglas McArthur’s 1950 decision to create the Police Reserve Force (PRF), which was the origins of today’s Self Defense Force (SDF), was therefore a moment with considerable repercussions. Even though it was the product of immediate calculations—the PRF was meant to enhance Japanese internal security as US occupation forces departed for the battlefields of Korea—the shift from demilitarization to the restoration of military capabilities generated decades of controversy and political mobilization.
Despite the intensity of this debate, the creation and expansion of Japan’s armed forces have received surprisingly little English-language scholarly attention. Aaron Herald Skabelund’s Inglorious, Illegal Bastards: Japan’s Self-Defense Force during the Cold War joins a growing literature that examines Japanese military development, tracing the origins and growth of Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) from its founding in 1950 through the 1970s. While Skabelund draws from rich archival materials, newspaper coverage, and oral histories, he does not simply seek to provide a history of the GSDF itself, which alone would be a significant contribution to the small English-language literature on the Japanese military.[2] He also probes its relationship with Japanese society. In a country where pacifism and opposition to military power were powerful ideological forces, a core element of Japan’s postwar origins story is the question of how the GSDF established and legitimized itself, which strategies it used to facilitate social and political acceptance, and how this process changed both the GSDF and postwar Japan.
To answer these questions, Skabelund traces the growth of the GSDF through a paradigm of “military-society integration” (5). This paradigm, he argues, captures how the GSDF and Japanese society have transformed each other. Indeed, unlike some scholars, Skabelund rejects the notion that the military’s creation and expansion brought about militarization, in which the state and society organized themselves around the production of military violence.[3] Rather, he asserts that the GSDF’s quest to become, in the words of military commander Hayashi Keizō, “a beloved Self-Defense force,” has fundamentally shaped its self-conception, training, and deployment (21). In tracing these processes of mutual constitution between the GSDF and Japanese society, Skabelund is particularly interested in processes of identity formation and self-understanding within the GSDF. He claims that through its training practices, public activities, and self-conceptualizations, the GSDF established a “Cold War defense identity” premised on anti-Communism, civilian control of the military, and a commitment to helping and protecting the people in a democratic Japan; the latter goal has most prominently manifested in the extensive disaster relief work undertaken by the GSDF (4). What is more, Skabelund argues that this identity has been largely accepted by the Japanese public. Many Japanese eventually abandoned their fears that the GSDF would function as a militarist bastion that undermined country’s postwar democracy. The SDF is now “regarded as one of the most respected and trusted institutions in the country” (254).
To achieve this goal, GSDF authorities sought to build a force-wide identity that was distinctly different from that of the imperial army. GSDF personnel (members were not called soldiers) “were expected to be freedom- and peace-loving, disciplined and educated gentlemen rather than blindly loyal soldiers” (7). Japanese authorities, both political and within the GSDF, sought to associate the force “with the people in both word and deed,” rhetorically dedicating the organization “to defend and serve the people, the country, and democratic constitutional principles rather than the emperor and the homeland” (8-9). Key to Skabelund’s story, then, is the way in which the GSDF has actively pursued social acceptance on terms it believed reflected a democratic Japan. To define itself as an explicitly self-defensive force that differed from its imperial predecessor, the GSDF has pursued specific forms of visibility, particularly by focusing on public service. Going well beyond the traditional realm of military security, it offered logistical assistance to events like the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the annual Sapporo Snow Festival, farming and agricultural help, and an ongoing commitment to disaster relief after floods and earthquakes. This new sensitivity was also captured by Japanese authorities’ careful decision not to employ the force in moments of political upheaval. Though the GSDF was ostensibly created with the goal of domestic stability and order, Japanese authorities resisted deploying it even during the massive 1960 protests against renewal of the US-Japan security treaty due to worries that utilizing the GSDF “might irreparably damage its relationship with society” (21).
Skabelund’s exploration of the GSDF’s founding, development, and quest for social acceptance unfolds over five chapters. The opening two chapters highlight the GSDF’s attempt to forge a distinct identify in its foundational years. The first chapter examines the GSDF’s relationship with the US military, which funded and trained the force; some US policymakers, such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, made it clear they hoped the GSDF would expand and develop the “spirit” of wartime Japan (a strange irony that was not lost on the force’s early critics).[4] Skabelund describes these early years as a time of contradictions; while the US established the force with the goal of internal order, Japanese authorities, who were navigating a fraught relationship with society, resisted using it to quell protests or popular demonstrations, and sought to forge a distinct identity by deploying the force for new goals such disaster relief. Chapter 2 examines the question of training, education, and leadership through the creation of the National Defense Academy (NDA). Focusing in particular on Maki Tomoo, the academy’s first superintendent, Skabelund argues that the NDA was a crucial site of forging a “reconfigured democratic, masculine military identity” that was distinct from the imperial military (67). Indeed, Skabelund traces how military training and publications sought to foster a new conception of masculinity, one that was marked not by ruthless obedience but instead “gentlemanly humanness” and a commitment to “liberal democratic ideas” (67). GDSF newspapers for example ran interviews with women who discussed their attraction to the military’s “disciplined, manly” personnel and GSDF authorities actively encouraged relationships with local women as a mechanism of social acceptance (153).
The next three chapters focus more fully on this quest for social integration on the regional and national level. In the third chapter, Skabelund turns his attention to processes of regional acceptance by examining the GSDF’s Northern Corps in Hokkaido. Because of its proximity to the Soviet Union, Hokkaido hosted more GSDF bases and troops than any other region, while also hosting far fewer US soldiers and bases than elsewhere in Japan (114). The Corps newspaper encouraged stationed officers to distance themselves from wartime imperial soldiers, even as the GSDF took over Imperial Army bases. Instead, they were encouraged to identify with the todenhei, “the farmer-soldiers the Meiji government sent to colonize Hokkaido beginning in the 1870s” (142). Through assistance with public events like the Sapporo Snow festival, agricultural harvests, and relationships with local women—patterns the force would follow elsewhere—Skabelund argues that the GSDF became an accepted and even welcomed part of Hokkaido life.
Chapter 4 charts similar dynamics on the national stage. It looks at significant events in the 1960s to assess how they facilitated or challenges these processes of public acceptance. Skabelund examines the GSDF’s visible role in providing logistical support—and some star athletes—to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics; Tsuburaya Kōkichi, a marathon runner and one of twenty-one GSDF Olympians, even won a bronze medal. GSDF authorities hoped that this public success, against a backdrop of Olympics-inspired national pride, would result in expanded support for the GSDF, but instead it was followed by controversy. In May 1970, the well-known radical rightwing writer Mishima Yukio committed ritual suicide on a GSDF base after sharing leaflets and a manifesto that encouraged members of the GSDF to overthrow the government. Mishima’s shocking act was meant to echo violent acts from the 1930s, when military radicals destabilized and ultimately helped destroy Japanese democracy. For Skabelund, however, it shows that extent to which the Japanese military had changed since the imperial period; the fact that force personnel found purpose and national pride in an event like the Olympics, rather than Mishima’s call to revolution, demonstrates the extent to which they had largely internalized the GSDF’s postwar ethos as protector of the peaceful, democratic people of Japan.
Skabelund’s final chapter intriguingly shifts the focus to Okinawa, looking at the GSDF’s presence on the island after it reverted to Japanese control in 1972. Many Okinawans did not welcome the GSDF, hoping for a reversion that would rid the island of the military in all forms (this did not come to pass, as the US military continues to have a significant footprint on Okinawa). The GSDF’s entry to Okinawa was also fraught due to the actions of the Japanese military during the devasting World War II battle; thousands of Okinawans died, and many were encouraged or forced to commit suicide by the Japanese military. All the critiques and challenges that the GSDF faced in the main Japanese islands— particularly the fact that “society regard[ed] the force as illegitimate, commensurate with the discredited imperial military, and a surrogate of the US military”—were magnified considerably in Okinawa (205). Yet, by the early 1970s, the GSDF had well-honed techniques for facilitating social acceptance; it contributed to civil engineering projects and disaster relief, encouraged relationships with local women, undertook medical evacuations, and sought out and deposed unexploded Second World War ordinance. Skabelund notes that these opportunities for public visibility were scarcer in Okinawa than elsewhere, in part because of politicians’ reluctance to request assistance, but that the population of Okinawa has “grudgingly” come to accept the GSDF, even if this acceptance remains less enthusiastic than elsewhere in Japan (208). Concluding with Okinawa thus reiterates his central argument that the GDSF’s quest for social acceptance has shaped surrounding society, even in places like Okinawa that were long dominated by military needs and had little choice in whether or not GSDF bases joined that larger militarized landscape.
This is a much-needed and compellingly written book. Skabelund’s use of evidence from the GSDF, such as interviews and newspapers, successfully brings out the voices and experiences of GSDF personnel and effectively highlights how this force developed a distinct identity in the shadows of both the imperial military and the US military. For a long time, the English-language literature on postwar Japan has been focused on questions of war memory, popular activism, and the Japanese left, in part reflecting the desire of many Japanese to avoid repeating the horrors of World War II. While fruitful, this focus has meant that Japanese conservatism, new state institutions like the SDF, and processes of Cold War mobilization have received far less attention. Skabelund’s work is thus part of an important and welcome trend that examines the place of military power in postwar Japan, pushing us to reassess the complex and shifting relationships between pacifism, military power, and democracy that played a central role in postwar debates about Japanese politics and Japanese identity. It also opens up new possibilities for comparative work between Japan and other countries; rather than Japan being portrayed as unique with its commitment to pacifism, it is engaged in processes of Cold War identity formation and mobilization that echo and parallel other states.
While Skabelund’s focus on understanding the GSDF on its own terms is generative and insightful, it also sometimes overshadows the vigorous debates that surrounded the SDF. This is in part because the book occasionally duplicates the language and claims that the SDF developed and utilized to legitimatize itself as a “natural” element of postwar Japan. Skabelund only fleetingly discusses those who criticized (and still criticize) the SDF’s creation and expansion as a re-militarization of Japanese society or a violation of Japan’s postwar constitution and democracy. This raises an interesting question: to what extent do the processes that Skabelund describes, wherein the SDF became socially accepted by taking on crucial public functions, such as disaster relief or logistical assistance, actually differ from militarization? In defining militarization, Skabelund quotes Cynthia Enloe’s work in describing a process wherein “society comes to imagine military needs and militaristic presumptions as normal;” he further uses Michael Geyer’s work to emphasize that militarization means that “civil society has organized itself for the production of violence” (5).[5] Skabelund argues that these definitions do not really describe the GSDF, since they assume that the military shapes society without meaningful reciprocity. But does mutual constitution preclude the possibility of some sort of militarization? One immediately thinks about the US military, which, like the SDF, engages in disaster relief at home and abroad and depicts itself as committed to democracy and the civic good. Yet such efforts also help US civil society to continue to imagine military needs and action as a “normal” contribution to the public good, which allows the US government to continue to mobilize the resources and personnel that necessary to sustain military power. Perhaps what the GSDF highlights is the need to develop expanded definitions of militarization that do not just emphasize the production of violence, but the ways in which civil society has increasingly accepted an outsized and unique role for the military in a many different spheres. Thanks to Skabelund’s impressive contribution, the GSDF will surely be a crucial case study in this larger historical exploration.
Jennifer M. Miller is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College and the author of Cold War Democracy: The United States and Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
[1] The Constitution of Japan, promulgated November 3, 1946, https://japan.kantei.go.jp/constitution_and_government_of_japan/constitution_e.html.
[2] See Robert D. Eldridge and Paul Midford eds., The Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force: Search for Legitimacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Thomas French, National Police Reserve: The Origins of Japan’s Self Defense Forces (Leiden: Global Oriental, 2014), Sabine Frühstück, Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), Jennifer M. Miller, Cold War Democracy: The United States and Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), Tomoyuki Sasaki, Japan’s Postwar Military and Civil Society: Contesting a Better Life (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
[3] For example, this framework of militarization is employed by Tomoyuki Sasaki’s Japan’s Postwar Military and Civil Society.
[4] Miller, Cold War Democracy, 109.
[5] Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 3; Michael Geyer, “The Militarization of Europe, 1914–1945,” in John Gillis, ed., The Militarization of the Western World, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 79.