Women as helpmates: the Japan Self-Defense Forces and gender

Abstract

ABSTRACT As the Japan Self-Defense Forces becomes ‘closer’ to everyday people, discourses surrounding military masculinities and femininities shift. This paper takes a ‘curious feminist’ approach to the shifting significance of the JSDF and asks the question, ‘What can the changing JSDF tell us about its relationship with women?’ I explore representations of women and men in three JSDF-related publications – a matchmaking website that caters to male soldiers and women civilians, Jieitai Premium Club; a popular manga series drawn by a woman married to a JSDF man, Totsugeki Jiekan Zuma; and the monthly JSDF publication, Mamor – and suggest that despite the ostensible pursuit of gender equality within the JSDF as evidenced in the increased recruitment of women, and the promoting of women to higher ranks, women continue to be imagined as ‘helpmates’, just as they were during Japan’s modernization process. They are discursively constructed as helpmates to men as wives and other female companions, and in being so constructed, become (un/conscious) supporters of the JSDF and thus helpmates to the state.