Organizer and Chair: Sabine Fruhstuck, University of California at Santa Barbara

Discussant: Harry D. Harootunian, New York University

In contrast to the U.S., which during the last three decades has increasingly embraced mass militarization, official Japan has repeatedly emphasized its role as a "peace nation," from the implementation of the 1946 constitution through the first peacekeeping operation at the beginning of the 1990s and the current deployment to Iraq. Japan has done so despite the considerable military presence of roughly 44,000 U.S. and 230,000 Japanese troops in the country. This panel examines how individual civilians and service members negotiate their coexistence by selectively embracing and resisting the current-day militarization of their everyday lives.

Christopher Ames sheds light on the ambivalent perception of U.S. soldiers as both (unwelcome) military men and (welcome) foreigners. Looking at a set of relations between solders and local populations around bases, Tanaka Masakazu investigates the motives and self-presentations of women who pursue U.S. soldiers. Aaron Skabelund analyzes the relationship between the U.S. military and the Japanese military both in terms of its historical trajectory and their representations in the Japanese collective imagination. Sabine Frühstück describes how within the Japanese military different modes of masculinity are deployed in order to negotiate the relationships to its predecessor, to the U.S. military, and to other men in present-day society.

By examining these examples of locals’ encounters with U.S. and Japanese soldiers, the panel collectively aims at a better understanding of the ambiguities and complexities of militarism in present-day Japan.

Christopher Ames, University of Michigan

Although the majority of Okinawa Island residents seek a reduction in U.S. military facilities, bases still take up 20% of the island. Most Okinawans make a distinction between the military institution and the individuals who comprise it, directing their opposition at the former. Thus, despite decades of protests, Okinawans frequently welcome off-duty military members into their schools, businesses, volunteer organizations and homes. Essentially, U.S. military personnel are welcomed as gaijin (foreigners) for their cosmopolitan and economic contributions while being simultaneously unwelcome as gunjin (military members).

This distinction is maintained through the requirement that military members wear civilian clothes off base. One example of such differentiation practices is the volunteer English assistant program run by the board of education and base public affairs offices that places military members in schools. Some anti-base teachers were concerned about the military using the program to mollify anti-base sentiment among students. While students and teachers have largely accepted the volunteers as gaijin, their presence has not led to appreciable changes in opinions about basing because students seem to be drawing on the traditional distinction between the military and its members. This perspective is crystallized in an old Okinawan joke about the U.S. military: "We like you, now please go home."

Masakazu Tanaka, Kyoto University, Japan

In this presentation, I will introduce various relationships between military personnel on U.S. and Japanese bases and local people in order to examine how the militarization of Japan is locally resisted. These relationships include official, educational and sexual ones. At one end of the spectrum of such efforts to build good relations are local municipal governments of towns where U.S. military bases are located which attempt to establish long-term and stable relationships by organizing events such as open house festivals and by making on-base college programs available to local Japanese. These events are designed for the local population to learn about military routines and to closely interact with military personnel.

At the other end of the spectrum, individual young women flock to base gates on weekends in order to date American men. Generally, these women are economically independent and simply enjoy dating American men while some of them particularly like African American men. Fetishizing and commoditizing black men by "buying" them, some of these young women boast that this is what Japanese men who "buy" women in Asia have taught them. In this paper, I examine this and similar phenomena that have emerged at the interface of military bases and local citizens as a way of resisting and taming the militarization of Japan.

Aaron Skabelund, Hokkaido University, Japan

An examination of the Self-Defense Forces highlights the intimate and unequal postwar relationship between Japan and the United States. Just five years after Japanese and American soldiers were killing one another in the final clashes of the Second World War, the two countries' armies were engaged in military maneuvers of a very different kind. Recruits-some of whom were veterans of those earlier battles-were trained by United States military officers, armed with American weaponry, and outfitted in ill-fitting U.S. army fatigues.

The cooperative inequality of the relationship did not end with the Occupation. For the last half-century, the American military has continued to arm and train the SDF in Japan and the United States and station its troops on adjacent bases on Japanese soil. Until the late 1960s, hundreds of U.S. military and civilian officials provided substantial managerial and technical support for the SDF under the auspices of the Military Assistance Advisory Group. Similar patterns were replicated around the world in America's global military empire during the Cold War. Since the late 1970s, the SDF has become an integral part of the U.S. military's global strategy through combined training exercises and planning conducted with American troops.

The SDF's natal and continuing kinship with the U.S. military have troubled Japanese authorities, when they were trying to both limit and expand the force's activities. Furthermore, the SDF's bond with and high visibility of American forces often has obscured the postwar Japanese military from the eyes of the public it was supposed to defend.

Sabine Fruhstuck, University of California at Santa Barbara

Debates about "militarized gender" in armed forces all over the world typically have been based on the assumption that masculinity depends primarily on an Other constructed as feminine (ethnic minorities, homosexuals, women, etc.). In Japan, the connections between and entanglements of manhood and militarism have taken on particularly complicated twists. The organizational identity of the Self-Defense Forces as well as the masculinity of their service members are constantly under reconstruction and in flux due to the shifting configurations of the legacy of the Imperial Army that looms large behind international operations; the proximity to the U.S. Forces Japan and other international military establishments; notions of risk-taking; and the respectability of service members vis-à-vis their civilian male peers. Hence, the habitus that is expected from and accepted among service members has been varied and complex. Several configurations of un/desirable masculinities effectively emphasize the Self-Defense Forces' efforts to achieve a "militarized masculinity" that is geographically located and historically grounded within the geopolitical space of Japan, East Asia and the world.