“Protect someone,become yourself”: How the Japanese military reinvents childhood for the 21st century

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In contrast to these examples, appealing to the next generation of potential service members is quite a different task in Japan. In addition to being digital natives, youngsters in Japan also belong to the third or fourth generation in a country that is self-conscious of its post-combat state. Given that the Japanese armed forces’ constitutional legitimacy has remained ambiguous since their foundation in 1954 (Frühstück, 2011; Lummis, 2018), service members had been pretty certain that combat would not be part of their duties. Since World War II, Japan has shifted its energies from inflicting mass violence, in the name of the Greater Japanese Empire, to instead providing aid—be that reconstruction aid, support of community and other large-scale events, disaster relief, and, since 1992, peacekeeping (Frühstück, 2007).

Given the challenge of effecting this about-turn, the Japanese state, the education establishment, a range of public institutions, and the publishing world have worked hard to normalize pacifism as a new kind of state doctrine. Instilling an appreciation of peace became a key goal of child (and adult) education, one pursued with as much meticulousness and sincerity as wartime propaganda and militarism had been previously. To this day, larger bookstores stock numerous books on “peace education”; the more progressive titles propose actively involving children in creating the curriculum in order to resignify Japan’s role as peacemaker and keeper (Asai, 2015; Kozono et al., 2019; Mitsuhashi, 2019; Onimaru and Ogawa, 2005; Satō et al., 2011).

Military public relations strategists also grapple with the fact that there is no ready military language and imagery to endear children to the military and attract recruits. Whereas Independence Day in the United States could inspire a youngster to serve, National Foundation Day in Japan (when the first emperor Jimmu ascended the throne in 660 BCE) does not offer the same pomp and glory. Similarly, though Constitution Memorial Day marks a significant historical moment in Japan, it does not celebrate the armed forces or military victories. Only in the last decade has the Japanese film and television industry begun to produce an increasingly commercially successful body of works that feature either the current armed forces or the Imperial Army and Navy. ⁶

Recent legal and political developments make the task even harder. The far-reaching and divisive revisions to Japan’s national security laws, effective since the end of March 2016, now authorize military action that would previously have been unconstitutional (Martin, 2016; Wakefield and Martin, 2012). And that very population of young men (and women) who might consider joining has been shrinking for decades. The recruitment shortage is worsened by a labor market with the highest job availability in a quarter century. And, perhaps, most important, despite the occasional panic about new patterns of youth behavior, ranging from instances of voluntary child prostitution in the 1990s to child murderers in the early 2000s, the governing concept of childhood in Japan has remained anchored in notions of vulnerability, innocence, and the need for protection—a construct that has political weight and that cannot fit into a realm of potentially dangerous military training and service. ⁷

The public relations efforts of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces do not usually target teenagers or 20-somethings; nor do they allude to grand adventures, honorable missions, or miraculous courage. Instead, they focus on the next-younger age group, from the age of about 6 to 13. These children are seen as not-yet distracted, nor set in their political thinking—and, thus, they are teachable. They are also readily cast as vulnerable and cute creatures, and thus can be metaphorically enlisted to create a positive, warm, non-threatening public image of the Self-Defense Forces. In this PR machine, girl figures are particularly useful, as they can trigger recognition and familiarity simply with the enormous cultural currency of their popular cultural incarnations as hyperfeminine magical girls or super girls. To this end, ever more often, the Self-Defense Forces contract some of the most prominent artists of currently popular bands, television series, manga, and animation so as to rework notions of the child (and of childhood) and the self. The self-defense forces trust that children today are more likely to embrace the Self-Defense Forces if they look like or appear with popular animation characters—childlike, cheerful, and non-threatening. In thus moving attributes of childhood into the realm of the soldier, it is possible to familiarize, normalize, and—at least a little bit—glamorize both service members and their charge.

Pulling from a range of examples informed by different and, indeed, contradictory visions of childhood, in the following pages, I will describe how three types of efforts from the Self-Defense Forces’ PR apparatus have worked to appeal to the next generation of Japanese recruits. Perhaps more aggressively than any other military establishment, the SDF have produced a public relations campaign aesthetic that both meshes seamlessly with mainstream popular culture and evokes the potential for individualism via military training and service. This latter feat is particularly relevant in the second example I will discuss, a commercial production in animation, manga, and book formats, a typical trans-medial product that succeeds with a dual objective: pairing child figures with large-scale military power, and rendering nearly invisible the boundaries between outright military PR campaigns and commercial popular culture (that just happens to be) infused with military content.

The third example features both the SDF and the US armed forces in Japan in the wake of the SDF’s most important mission of the 21st century, the relief effort after the triple disaster in northeastern Japan in March 2011. In many ways, this example constitutes a cross-over of the previous two: it is a comic, produced by a commercially successful manga and animation artist, that serves as a didactic documentation of that important mission, much like other manga the SDF routinely produces for child (and adult) consumption.

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But first, an example situated closest to the military headquarter, so to speak: an animated film released in March 2015 on the Ministry of Defense website, Bōeimon Defense Lecture: The ABC of the Self-Defense Forces (Bōeimon no bōei da mon: yoku wakaru Jieitai). The film’s initial scene paints a family with three children. The mother serves the father, just returned from his night shift as a pilot of a fighter jet and major in the Air Self-Defense Force, breakfast. The youngest child, a third grader, asks the father what he did last night. The older daughter scolds the boy for bothering the tired father. ⁸ Mother and father smile at the caring daughter but neither answers the question. Instead, the film employs a pale-blue-and-white hawk named Bōeimon—a come-to-life rendition of a drawing by the little boy himself—to provide explanations and answers to the many questions posed by both the boy and his older two siblings, who are in the fifth and sixth grades. As the parents blend into the background, Bōeimon flies up from the page into the air slightly above the children’s heads and begins to answer their questions about the composition and purpose of the Self-Defense Forces at large.

Bōeimon proves to be a supremely suitable instructor for what is envisioned as an elementary and middle school audience. The children are front and center in the remainder of the film, and appear in a range of roles. Early on in the film, they are referred to as motivators, the primary reason the father and his all-male comrades became SDF service members in the first place. They are also deemed the most precious members of the Japanese population and territory as a whole, and are the key object of the kind of protection the Self-Defense Forces profess to provide. And children are both the audience for and the voices of the description of the Self-Defense Forces.

The underlying notion of “childhood” in the Bōeimon Defense Lecture (as well as many similar efforts) casts children not only as innocent, naïve, and ignorant but also as curious, teachable, and uniquely endowed with magical powers (or at least potent imagination) rendering them capable of seeing things adults cannot. The most important aspect of this notion of childhood as envisioned by the armed forces, however, is the necessity of parents to be absent: while the return of the father from duty prompts the boy’s initial question, the parents are immediately removed from the scene as soon as the children realize that their parents cannot see or hear Bōeimon.

The initial family scene is informative unto itself. That the wife is a stay-at-home mother is an increasingly rare situation in contemporary Japan, whose birthrate, among the lowest in the world, is widely being considered a “national crisis.” This setting would suggest, of course, that the mother is omnipresent in her children’s home life, but instead she quickly leaves the scene—to presumably occupy herself elsewhere in the unreasonably spacious house. Yet, both parents’ immediate disappearance makes a lot of sense. After all, had they previously done their job of teaching their children about the military, Bōeimon and the animated film that gives him a voice would not have been necessary in the first place. Furthermore, the parents prove to be useless now—unable to see or hear Bōeimon, they cannot participate in the conversation. In response to their parents’ neglectful teaching, the children are eager to learn—a role the makers of the film are all too keen to fulfill. Unsurprisingly, the Bōeimon Defense Lecture aims to correct the children’s assumption that the Self-Defense Forces were designed for invasion; instead, the children are well informed of the “various [purely defensive] roles” that boil down to “securing world peace and security” as a contribution to Japan’s peace and security. The Bōeimon Defense Lecture’s attempt at militarization is carefully framed as a merely pedagogical project. The father, presumably the authority figure most qualified to speak about the Self-Defense Forces, is explicitly excused from answering the little brother’s questions. The mother is really a caricature of a Japanese mother from times past; wearing an apron, her only role is to literally serve her family. The children are also incredulously well behaved, as if the subject matter inspired rapt attention.

The Ministry of Defense website offers many similar concoctions, including shorter manga or animation versions that replicate in one way or another the double move of, first, briefly venerating then permanently disappearing the parents and, second, having two or three children converse with one or more representatives of the Self-Defense Forces, about a particular mission or the content of the defense white paper. A similar vein runs through all these materials: that children know little to nothing about the military but are keen to learn, and that parents are (to at least some extent) neglectful of their roles as their children’s primary educators, legitimizing the military’s move to speak directly to the children (through Bōeimon).

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While the animated films described above in the first example can be viewed on the Ministry of Defense’s website, some print versions of the manga are also available in recruitment offices across the country, and distributed among visitors to open house events on bases and school children during recruitment personnel’s rare school visits. As such, their reach is limited. Somewhat more widely visible in the physical public sphere are the second example: posters that circulate beyond the center of military strategy and its digital orbit. In summer of 2015, for instance, three striking female figures were sighted on Japanese Self-Defense Forces’ recruitment posters posted on ward boards near police staions and local government buildings. Many young passers-by must have immediately recognized them from the then still-new animation television series titled GATE—Thus Self-Defense Forces Fought in that [Distant] Land (GATE—Jieitai kanochi nite kaku tatakaeri). First was the sweet, blue-haired, 16-year-old human scholar-girl Lelei La Lalena carrying her signature magic staff (left); beside her, the 961-year-old, black-haired and red-eyed demigoddess Rory Mercury waving a battle axe; and the 165-year-old, blonde and blue-eyed elf Tuka Luna Marceau with her back turned to both of them, ready to draw her bow. ⁹

A male and unequivocally ordinary human figure at the center of the poster makes the connection between television and armed forces complete: the 33-year-old Itami Yōji, an SDF service member, and otaku in camouflage uniform, appears to be shouting at an invisible enemy, machine gun in hand. ¹⁰ Compared to the colorful look of the four figures and their dynamic composition, the slogan is characteristically vague. It simply appeals to passersby to, “Protect someone, [and] become yourself” (Dare ka o mamoreru, jibun ni narō). The story of the series runs like this: a portal from another world appears in Ginza, Tokyo, and a legion of soldiers and monsters attack the city. Due to their superior weaponry and tactics, the Self-Defense Forces repel them and force them to open peace negotiations. Thanks to his deep knowledge of and somewhat obsessive relationship with this fantasy realm (rather than to his talents as a combatant), Itami makes his way in this hybrid world, which now includes not only battling Self-Defense Forces but also magic, dragons, and elves. The recruitable audience envisioned in this piece appears to be populated by otaku types not so different from the narcissistic and immature youth of the UK recruitment campaign—albeit nestled within a distinctly Japanese aesthetic and fantasy repertoire described above.

Part and parcel of the Self-Defense Forces’ PR strategists’ vision of how to win over Japan’s children and youth, thus, is to inextricably mix the worlds of service members with that of magical creatures, as well as to intertwine the world of peace and defense (as well as the possibility of combat) with that of maturing individuals’ internal struggles. In short, magical creatures and colorful fictional scenarios soften the realism of 21st-century militarism. These SDF products appear to suggest that the maturation of children can be productively and agentively tied to Japan’s role as peacemaker and peacekeeper, and that this will endear the military to even the faint of heart. Accordingly, the numerous posters and other visual materials that the SDF circulates during open house days on SDF bases and other public events explicitly equate the act of joining the Self-Defense Forces with following one’s heart. ¹¹ While some 21st-century military public relations campaigns continue to use the language of patriotism and sacrifice, the trend in Japan is for such campaigns to pitch self-actualization or, indeed, the “care of the self.” Exacerbating the language of self-realization of 21st-century recruitment rhetoric elsewhere, the SDF promises that, once having joined the Self-Defense Forces, one will “love oneself” (Jibun ga suki ni naru). A video clip with the same “Believe Your Heart” rhetoric and aesthetic has been widely aired on television and is readily accessible online. ¹² The theme reappears on a range of posters, including one on which two cartoon girls, surrounded by free-floating, soft pink cherry blossoms, encourage passersby “to make peace [their] work” (Heiwa o, shigoto ni suru). ¹³

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When cartoon figures mimic human figures, their exact age tends to be ambiguous and/or mutable. They might have the face of a child and the body of an adult. Alternatively, they might have a child’s face or facial expression but a body that readily morphs—from defenseless child to an armed child, or from a girl to a woman. With these conventions in mind, some SDF public relations campaigns clearly play with or cross over into risqué imagery and rhetoric. On one poster, three cartoon girls, each clad in the uniform of a branch of the Self-Defense Forces, confidently announce that the Self-Defense Forces are “Today’s budding place of employment” (Ima doki no moeru shushokusen). At first, the slogan seems banal. The word choice, however, is likely to resonate at a more complicated level with young viewers steeped in Japanese popular culture, which is densely populated with female bodies that simultaneously signal childlike wonder, sex vixen, and pornified combatant—all within a few seconds of an animated film or a sequence of frames in a manga. Hence, viewer-readers might associate the word “budding” (moeru) in the SDF poster with sprouting innocence, sexualized girlhood, or both. Accordingly, viewer-readers might associate just the characters “moe,” which conveys “longing for,” as reflection of the Self-Defense Forces’ affectionate longing for more recruits. Others might see the poster’s female figures as longing for the power of military might—or, in yet a slightly different reading, as the girls some male readers long for. These latter two interpretations particularly echo with a substantial portion of popular culture in Japan that, displaced into the context of a state institution, strikes a newly affective tone and embraces its sexualized appeal.

Given the trans-medial character of Japan’s popular cultural production today, one does not need to look far for inspirational sources of military PR campaigns—not to mention artistic and corporate interconnections across a military-civilian divide that for decades previous had firmly been upheld. Much popular culture is launched as a series of manga, light novels, video animation, and/or anime and television series (Condry, 2013; Lamarre, 2018). The facial and bodily features of the female main characters in such works typically suggest elementary or middle school age. In one portion of the narrative, they might be dressed in short school uniforms typical of elementary school girls—only to appear half-undressed in another. The main characters in Strike Witches (Sutoraiku Witcheezu, 2010–present), for instance, initially appear to be somewhere between toddler age and 10 at the most. Most have thick, short legs; some have furry animal ears and tails, big eyes, and clueless looks to enhance their childlike cuteness. And though for parts of the story they are dressed in clothes perfectly mainstream for 5- or 6-year-olds, all girl figures appear to be in uniform tops with nothing but tiny panties or bodices below, their legs stuck in rocket boot-like devices whenever they wield their disproportionally large machine-gun-like weapons. Similarly, their prepubescent bodies transform from having no breasts at all to having fully formed ones. In such sequences (in animation) or pictures (in manga), the reader’s and viewer’s gaze is unmistakably directed from below, always looking up at the now cyborgish girl-animal-machine body’s crotch and the naked skin around it—intentionally conflating for the viewer-reader the excitement of the aggressive and possibly deadly action the girl-animal-machine engages in with the perspective of her equally aggressively sexualized body. ¹⁴

A handful of scholars have examined such girl figures and their narratives and visual cultures, proposing critical perspectives with regard to sexuality, gender, pornography, and censorship (Cather, 2012; Napier, 2005). Key to the analysis of how the Japanese military references and uses the “sado-cute”—the ever more sophisticated, colorful, and sexualized simulations of innocence (Hebdige 2008: 40–41)—is that it perpetuates the pornification of childlike female bodies in the name of the state and, more precisely, in the name of the institution within the state that is, in principle at least, charged with mass violence. The Self-Defense Forces are also the successor of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy that, while pursuing an imperialist war in Asia, perpetrated heinous war crimes—including the maintenance of a sexual slavery system that victimized tens if not hundreds of thousands of girls and women (Frühstück, 2015; Ueno et al., 2018).

The similarities between Strike Witches and a number of SDF public relations posters is not coincidental. The SDF hired Shimada Fumikane for a number of projects, who is the character artist responsible for the look of Strike Witches and of a whole series of other works that tread the fine line between mainstream popular culture and the soft-pornification of weaponized and militarized girl-child-machine figures. In choosing Shimada, the SDF was confident that the aesthetic he is known for would enhance the appeal of the SDF to the kinds of young men that Itami represents on the poster above, and it appears that confidence was justified (Smith, 2014). The appeal of the magical, weaponized, and sexualized girl-child was also brought to bear on a slew of military representations of the Self-Defense Forces’ most important mission of the 21st century thus far: the triple disaster in northeastern Japan of March 2011 (Frühstück, 2017).

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Returning to the center of military PR production, I turn now to a manga that evokes a dramatically different construction of the child. This child is not neatly characterized by age or grade level, but almost exclusively by the specific temperament generally referred as “otaku.” This phenomenon obtained cultural currency in the 1980s. Since then, the strictly negative connotations of “otaku” have softened somewhat but otaku are still seen as immature and unnaturally infatuated with popular cultural products. It is this population of primarily male youth and young men that the Self-Defense Forces targets with public relations efforts that fudge the boundaries between military PR and militaristic popular culture. Enter Understanding Japan’s Military Issues Through Comics: Operation Friends! An Analysis of the Self-Defense Forces and American Armed Forces Operation in the Wake of the Great Earthquake in Eastern Japan (Manga de wakaru Nihon no gunji mondai: Tomodachi sakusen! Higashi Nihon daishinsai Jieitai Amerika-gun sakusen bunseki, 2011). This manga was jointly commissioned by the Self-Defense Forces and the US Forces in Japan (USFJ). Japan’s bilateral security partner and ally—with Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force components—are stationed in Japan pursuant to the US–Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security. (They are, too, the bone of contention for both local populations specifically and the left more generally.) Today they consist of approximately 54,000 military personnel, 42,000 dependents, 8000 Department of Defense civilian employees, and 25,000 Japanese workers. ¹⁵ In an operation that took place from 12 March to 4 May 2011, about 24,000 service members (along with 189 aircraft and 24 navy ships) contributed to the relief effort for the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown triple disaster of March 2011.

Understanding Japan’s Military Issues Through Comics: Operation Friends! sets out to illustrate and describe the group effort of “friends” coming together for an enormous crisis. The cover is adorned by a female figure named Mari-tan and two of her armed forces friends, who remain nameless: a brown-haired girl representing the US Army, and a blue-eyed blonde representing the US Navy. ¹⁶ Herself a member of the USMC, Mari-tan stands daringly on top of a military jeep. Wearing her characteristic short brown uniform dress with thigh-high stockings, she holds a large anchor in one hand with the other fisted in the air. The US Army figure sits on the jeep’s roof in a more rugged outfit—albeit one that shows more skin than Mari-tan’s. Around her neck is a leather choker and a dog tag; a munition belt is secured around her waist. The US Navy girl drives the jeep, so at first we only see her blue eyes and blonde hair. But elsewhere in the manga her hair flows down to her ankles. While her upper body is dressed in a sleeveless uniform jacket, on her bottom half she wears only navy-blue underpants and a garter on one of her bare thighs, mirroring the popular pairing of military might with sexually available females. The US Air Force is represented by a blue-haired girl who wears what loosely resembles an Air Force uniform. The manga includes an additional three girls, all with bobbed brown hair and glasses, who embody the three branches of the Self-Defense Forces. Their outfits are distinctly more modest and childlike; two of them even wear pants with their dress uniform tops. Miss GSDF (Ground Forces) wears full-length white tights under her long-sleeved military dress.

Throughout the manga are photographs of devastation, military installations, and equipment—as well as photos of American service members unpacking trucks, riding motorcycles, working in command centers, saluting, and conversing over a map. Of all the photographs of military personnel in the entire manga, there is only one flesh-and-blood Japanese service member to be found—and even that is just a face in the background (p. 26). The text provides substantial amounts of factual data on the operational and other military dimensions of the March 2011 relief mission, as well as on the US military installations and equipment data in Japan. And yet, the third portion of that triple disaster—the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and the nuclear crisis that dominated the international press after the disaster—is noteworthy only for their absence, in both image and text.

All seven characters adorn these photographic displays. One cartoon girl announces, “This was the first time that units of the Ground Self-Defense Force crossed the ocean on an American military vessel” (p. 17). A few pages later, the pantless US Navy girl, her forefinger lifted in instructional mode, proclaims, “We American military also assisted the Self-Defense Forces and began to help all of Japan” (p. 24). On other photographs, Mari-tan salutes on the command bridge of a military vessel (p. 25), or declares from the back of a military plane that “[t]he Marines pride themselves for the high level of their ‘deployment capability’” (p. 27). Eventually, the girls declare no more military relief assistance is needed, and thank the Self-Defense Forces and the American military.

The tone of the text is instructive, not dissimilar from that of the Bōeimon Defense Lecture. The look of the girl figures, by contrast, is such that they would blend seamlessly with those in Strike Witches and many other sexualized girl figures in popular culture. The last page of the manga offers an additional twist: it is a full-page advertisement for another of Hirai Yukio’s works featuring the very same Mari-tan. In one corner of this image, a lonely, disheveled Self-Defense Forces girl, nervously gripping her chained-book backpack, presses together her white-tighted knees. The US Navy girl, by contrast, encouragingly offers her behind to the viewer. And Mari-tan promises that readers will “learn the accurate use of ‘fuck.’” ¹⁷

A regular character in Hirai’s mini manga empire, Magical Marine Pixel☆Mari-tan, or Sergeant Mari-tan, is a 12-year-old girl cum USMC drill instructor. (“Mari” derives from “Marines”; “tan” is a diminutive of “chan.”) Originally a princess from Magical Kingdom of Par(r)is Island, Mari-tan is not a nice girl, nor was she invented as an endearing embodiment of the Marines. Mari-tan is marketed as a figurine (and figure in manga and animation) whose ostensible intent is to teach Japanese readers how to swear like a US Marine, which she does in Mari-tan eigo no doriru: Fuck-hen (Mari-tan’s English Drill: The Fuck Issue). This publication is presented much like conventional language textbooks, combining exercises and explanations for pronunciation and use. It also offers sample sentences; under a “Let’s Speak!” icon it reads, “Let’s try to read this in a loud voice: ‘I like you. Come over to my house and fuck my sister!’” This accompanies the translation in Japanese. A “Word Check!” inset notes the meaning of the word in Japanese as both verb and noun. The “Point!” segment offers additional examples of “fuck” in various contexts. The manga even comes with an accompanying CD, so readers can “learn by ear” (p. 63).

Hirai’s signature style—blending the aesthetics of military might with sexualized preteen girls—is easily recognizable across different publications; just Magical Marine Pixel☆Mari-tan (Mahō no Kaiheitai Pixel☆Maritan) is both published in Arms Magazine and aired on the Hobby Channel. But for all their overt sexism, it must be noted that such publications are only somewhat more blatantly sexist than are the official, formal PR efforts produced by both the USFJ and the SDF. The shared aesthetics between the commercial works (such as Mari-tan) and the armed forces materials demonstrate just how porous the boundaries between the two have become.

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In sum, the military establishment in Japan (and to various degrees militaries across the global North more broadly) is hyperaware of the decreasing inclination of the younger generations to risk their lives in the name of the state. Having learned to recognize the different sensibilities of the first “digital native” generation, that establishment has begun to appeal to the younger set in their own terms. Working under specific conditions and constraints, but still within a popular culture with enormous currency across age groups and national boundaries, the Japanese military envisions, engages, and imposes multiple, contradictory notions of childhood in order to succeed at the increasingly difficult job of recruiting young Japanese into the Self-Defense Forces. They do so by, on one hand, reinforcing an obsolete vision of the family, and of innocent, vulnerable, and utterly formable children. On the other hand, public relations materials of the armed forces of Japan and the USFJ appeal to paradigmatic “child-men,” whose sexual fantasies they assume center on the prepubescent girl figures that populate so much of Japanese popular culture.