“Self-Defense Force service members recruitment: We appreciate it – young strength. There is a future to which I want to connect. There are people I want to help. There is a land I want to protect” (Self-Defense Forces recruitment poster, 2005. Photographed by Jennifer Robertson).
By Sabine Frühstück
Amongst you, are there those
who wish to join Jieitai?
who wish to try your chance?
Jieitai’s looking for capable men.
[refrain]
Let’s join, join, join Jieitai
If you join Jieitai, this world is paradise.
The manliest of men all join
Jieitai and scatter like blossoms.
Those of you who wish to do sports,
you are always welcome to Jieitai.
Spears, guns, we have everything.
Anyway, the body is your capital.
[refrain]
Those of you who take interest
in guns and tanks and planes,
you are always welcome to Jieitai.
We’ll teach you with kindly care.
[refrain]
To protect Japan’s peace
we need guns and rockets.
We’ll also have America to help us;
let’s beat the evil Soviets and China.
[refrain]
Jieitai’s looking for capable men,
regardless of age or educational background.
We look for those who, for the sake of
the fatherland, are meek to the end.
[refrain]
“Let’s Join Jieitai,” anti-war lyrics by Takada Wataru, 1969, set to Pete Seeger’s tune (original lyrics by Malvina Reynolds, Andorra, 1962)
The original tune quoted above, “Let’s Join Jieitai,” was mockingly performed and recorded by Takada Wataru in 1969 as an anti-war song. The National Broadcasting Corporation immediately banned the song as Japan mobilized in support of the US in the Vietnam War, an incident that became emblematic of the fraught relationship between the Self-Defense Forces and Japanese popular culture since the end of the Asia-Pacific War.
While popular culture across the political spectrum has dealt with the imperial armed forces and the Asia-Pacific War (Penney 2008, Gerow 2006), it has been hesitant to embrace the Self-Defense Forces, however, the Self-Defense Forces’ public relations apparatus has long acknowledged the power of popular culture. This essay is about how the Self-Defense Forces tap into Japan’s popular culture and try to fill a void of military representation by employing the techniques and strategies of popular cultural production in their public relations, image-making and self-presentation efforts. Like armed forces in most democratic countries today, the Self-Defense Forces engage in a variety of such efforts. And like most public relations efforts of armed forces around the world, these activities in Japan are culturally and historically specific, due to the experience of militarism and war; the present-day social, political and economic roles of a military establishment in the country in which it is supposed to organize, control and possibly exercise violence in the name of the state; and by the popular culture within which these efforts are embedded.
At least since the Gulf War of 1990–1991, the separation of the military from the civilian sphere that had characterized most of the postwar era has begun to seem obsolete to the Self-Defense Forces leadership. For the most part, they have symbolically “disarmed” the Self-Defense Forces by normalizing and domesticating the military so that they would look like other (formerly) state-run service organizations such as the railway and postal systems. They have also aimed at individuating and personalizing Self-Defense Forces service members. At the same time, they made conventional notions of militarism appear spectacular within the confines of carefully choreographed live-fire performances. At a time when their mission has been extended—to Cambodia, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan—the Self-Defense Forces also have begun to utilize, appropriate, and manipulate popular culture, in order to glamorize their image and align themselves domestically with other state agencies and globally with other internationally operating armed forces and other organizations. For the Self-Defense Forces, these attempts have been major tasks that have been pursued almost in a vacuum, due to the disjuncture between the Self-Defense Forces and Japanese popular culture.
Japan Focus