Maritime Self-Defense Force Research Articles

Effect of hyperbaric exposure on cognitive performance: an investigation conducting numerical Stroop tasks during a simulated 440 m sea water saturation diving

BackgroundSaturation diving (SD) is useful and safe in deep diving for long durations. Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) Undersea Medical Center (UMC) maintained safely deep 45 ATA SDHowever, cognitive performance was reportedly impaired by hyperbaric exposure in over 31 atmosphere absolute (ATA) SD. This study investigated the effects of hyperbaric exposure during 45 ATA deep SD on expert divers’ cognitive function using Stroop tasks, a useful method to examine cognitive function, especially in narrow spaces such as SD chambers.MethodsTwo numerical Stroop tasks were utilized to create two magnitude comparisons of a pair of single-digit numerical and physical tasks. Both numerical Stroop tasks were examined twice, at 1 and 45 ATAs, during a simulated 440 m of sea water depth for SD. Participants were 18 male expert JMSDF SD divers (age 36.58 ± 4.89 years).ResultsIn the numerical task, reaction time (RT) was significantly delayed at 45 ATA compared with 1 ATA in the incongruent condition. In the physical task, RT at 45 ATA was significantly delayed under all the conditions (congruent, incongruent, and neutral). The correct rates (CR) in both numerical Stroop tasks significantly decreased at 45 ATA compared with 1 ATA in the incongruent condition.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that divers’ cognition is impaired during 45 ATA deep SD. These results emphasize the importance of monitoring cognition in deep sea SD and highlight the need to educate and train for SD. Further examination combining Stroop tasks with other analyses such as event-related potential (ERP) is expected.

Psychological and traumatic stress and the risk of developing diabetes and psychiatric disorders after a disaster-relief mission: An eight-year longitudinal study of Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force personnel dispatched for the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake disaster-relief mission

The Great East Japan Earthquake caused triple disasters—the earthquake itself, tsunamis, and nuclear leakage. Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) personnel engaged in disaster-relief suffered various degrees of psychological stress, which is associated with psychiatric as well as physical disorders, such as diabetes. This study aimed to assess the effect of mission-related stress on the development of diabetes and psychiatric disorders in these personnel using JMSDF annual physical check-up data from 2010 to 2018 and Impact of Events Scale-Revised (IES-R) and Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K-10) questionnaire data. Cox proportional hazard models were used to assess the hazard ratios (HRs) of developing diabetes and psychiatric disorders in the dispatched (N = 3686) vs. non-dispatched (N = 13,953) groups and high IES-R (score ≥25) vs. low IES-R score and high K-10 (score ≥25) vs. low K-10 score subgroups. We found a significantly higher HR of developing diabetes in the high IES-R score subgroup (2.02; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.08–3.80). However, the HRs were not significant when comparing dispatched vs. non-dispatched groups and high vs. low K-10 score subgroups. Although the HR of developing psychiatric disorders was significantly lower in the dispatched group (0.64; 95% CI, 0.48–0.84), it was significantly higher in the high IES-R (7.95; 95% CI, 3.38–18.74) and high K-10 (8.76; 95% CI, 4.34–17.68) score subgroups. Thus, this study indicates the importance of paying closer attention to the risk of diabetes and psychiatric disorders in individuals with high IES-R or K-10 scores after disaster-relief activities.

Impact of Oral Health Status on Perceived Dental Problems Among Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force Personnel.

Dental problems may have a great impact on military mission effectiveness, as such, evidence-based dental classification guidelines are required for minimizing the occurrence of dental problems. The aim of this study is to elucidate the independent contribution of each oral disease to the perception of dental problems among Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) personnel in order to make the dental classification guidelines more precise for the prediction of future dental problems. Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force personnel who were examined during the annual dental checkup in 2013 answered questions about the experience of dental problems within the last 12 months in 2014. The associations between the items of a dental checkup and the perception of dental problems were examined using multiple logistic regression analysis with a stepwise procedure to calculate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% CIs. The data of a total of 22,441 subjects were included in the analysis. Those who declared to have perceived dental problems within the last 12 months were 5,088 (22.7%). The multiple logistic regression analysis showed that personnel who had decayed teeth had a higher chance of experiencing dental problems than those who had no dental caries. Personnel whose periodontal disease was judged to be more severe in a dental examination had a greater OR for the perception of dental problems. These results may become recommendations for operations in the JMSDF dental classification system.

Psychological and physical condition of Japan maritime self-defense force personnel who performed disaster-relief missions after the 2011 great east Japan earthquake

The Great East Japan Earthquake, which occurred on March 11, 2011, was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan. In the present study, we examine personnel from the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force who performed disaster relief in the earthquake's aftermath, focusing on the associated psychological and physical impacts. Overall, 8733 personnel were examined. In both July–August 2011 (M1) and July 2012 (M2), these personnel answered the Impact of Events Scale-Revised, the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale, and the Disaster Relief Questionnaire. We also analyzed the sample's physical examination records for the periods before and after the earthquake, using as controls a sample of peers who were not dispatched to the disaster area (N = 32,270). The psychological examinations showed that, in M1, holding the rank of private/sergeant (odds ratio [OR] = 2.13), performing body-recovery duties (OR = 1.94), and having disaster-affected family members (OR = 2.13) were significant risk factors for high post-traumatic stress response (PTSR). In M2, performing body-recovery duties (OR = 1.45) and having disaster-affected family members (OR = 2.60) were significant risk factors for high PTSR. Also, being woman (OR = 2.18) and having disaster-affected family members (OR = 1.68) were significant risk factors for high general psychological distress. For the physical examinations, the mean alanine transaminase in the dispatched group (31.73 ± 25.21) was significantly higher than that in the non-dispatched group (29.56 ± 21.03). These findings suggest that personnel involved in disaster relief experience psychological impacts in the subacute stage, but that these impacts attenuate one year after the event.

Utility of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy for Acute Acoustic Trauma: 20 years' Experience at the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force Undersea Medical Center.

Introduction Acute acoustic trauma, which is a kind of sensorineural hearing loss, is caused by acoustic overstimulation. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) is reported to be effective against acute acoustic trauma. Objective We aimed to evaluate the efficacy of HBOT against acoustic hearing loss based on our 20 years of experience with such cases. Methods Patients who were treated with HBOT for acute acoustic trauma between April 1997 and August 2017 were evaluated in this study. Thirty-five patients with a mean age of 25.7 ± 9.2 (range: 16–48) years were included. Thirty-nine out of 70 ears (35 patients) were damaged. We investigated the initial level of hearing loss; the extent to which hearing recovered; subjective symptoms, such as tinnitus and aural fullness; and the treatment administered. Results The planned HBOT was completed in 37 of 39 ears. Twenty-six of the 37 ears (70.2%) displayed improved hearing, and 31 of the 37 ears (83.9%) exhibited symptom improvement. Twenty-three (76.7%) and 26 (86.7%) of the 30 ears treated with steroids demonstrated improvements in hearing and subjective symptoms, respectively. Conclusion A combination of HBOT and steroids should be considered as a treatment for acute acoustic trauma in cases involving symptoms such as tinnitus and aural fullness.

Maritime Law Enforcement in Japan

Abstract This paper discusses the roles and functions of the Japan Coast Guard and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in maritime law enforcement. It analyzes practices of Japan’s maritime law enforcement in the prevention and punishment of piracy and armed robbery against ships, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, marine pollution, illegal immigration, and drug trafficking. It also examines cases of collaboration among different agencies at the domestic, regional and international levels.

Playing with Militarism in/with Arpeggio and Kantai Collection: Effects of shōjo Images in War-related Contents Tourism in Japan

This paper analyzes how war memories are often romanticized and/or popularized through representations of shōjo (girls) in anime. In Arpeggio of Blue Steel: Ars Nova and Kantai Collection, submarines and battleships are personified as girls in World War II scenarios. These contents have been disseminated across multiple media platforms, and fans of the contents visit war-related sites, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) bases, museums, and events produced in cooperation with MSDF. War-related tourism and popular culture are often associated with death and tragedy, but such war-related contents tourism becomes light entertainment, while darker values and meanings are displaced and/or invalidated. This paper examines how war-related contents tourism serves to rewrite war memories, to popularize Japanese militarization and hence displace its meanings and values. Fans treat war-related contents as fashionable by commodifying the Self-Defense Force (SDF) through the images of shōjo, and they relate the SDF to themselves through the popularization and familiarization achieved through anime.

The Allied Bombing Campaign Against the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force in the South China Coast During the Late Pacific War (1943–1945).

The Allied Bombing Campaign Against the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force in the South China Coast During the Late Pacific War (1943–1945).

Renaissance?

Renaissance? James E. Auer (bio) "In the area of military security, 'Japan is back.'" So begins Japan's Security Renaissance, Andrew L. Oros's impressively detailed and nuanced account of Japan's post–Cold War security. It is a welcome, scholarly work. I have admired the author's academic achievements for well over a decade and do not disagree with many, if any, of the facts he lays out. His presentation is so detailed that a number of the findings were beyond my knowledge, and I learned a lot by reading this book. I am a former U.S. naval officer who sailed with the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) from 1963 to 1978 and who analyzed Japan's status as a U.S. military ally from 1979 to 1988 from an American perspective in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. From 1988 to 2014, I was a researcher and instructor of U.S.-Japan relations at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, but I still consider myself more a sailor than a scholar. Since I am also a staunch supporter of the U.S.-Japan alliance, I was very pleased to find my view of the increasing sophistication in Japan's defense policy during the second Abe administration reinforced in the book. While I very much hope Professor Oros is correct that this past decade constitutes a renaissance, I am not yet ready to so characterize the evolution of Japanese defense policy and capability overseen, if not engineered, by Prime Ministers Junichiro Koizumi, Yoshihiko Noda, and Shinzo Abe. Even though it might be true that Japan is (a little more) "back" as a military power, I am reluctant to say that the developments of the past decade, or at least the past four years of the Abe administration, are as or more significant than key events of the previous six decades. I could not agree more with Professor Oros's statement that what he labels Japan's security renaissance is not about Japan becoming more "normal" (p. 10). I also agree that what Japan has done over the last 50 years is "normal for Japan" (p. 10), although I would insert "only" prior to "for." Quality academic scholarship may well trump my biased analysis as an American who believes strongly in the importance of the U.S.-Japan alliance to both countries. But looking back over the last 65-plus years, I see Japan's national security policy and defense capabilities as considerably improving in fits (hindered or overseen by, among others, the Asahi Shimbun and Prime [End Page 185] Ministers Takeo Miki, Toshiki Kaifu, Yukio Hatoyama, and Naoto Kan) and starts (thanks to Diet member Hitoshi Ashida, who later became prime minister, and by Prime Ministers Nobusuke Kishi, Yasuhiro Nakasone, Junichiro Koizumi, Yoshihiko Noda, and Shinzo Abe). The quality of the three Japan Self-Defense Forces, especially the JMSDF with which I am most familiar, is slowly but steadily improving, despite restrictions on defense spending. Although Chinese provocations have emboldened Prime Minister Abe to increase defense spending slightly in the last four years, the Japanese defense operations and defense budget increases of the 1980s were in my mind the most significant to date. As far as national security policy itself is concerned, the impressive developments of the last four years under Abe have strong precedents going back as far as the adoption of Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. Professor Oros might not agree, but I believe that Article 9 is not abnormally restrictive, even though a significant number of Japanese believe that it is. Perhaps few of them realize that General Douglas MacArthur's 1946 directive to his government section that Japan would have no armed forces for any purpose "including self-defense," which he claimed was suggested to him by then Prime Minster Kijuro Shidehara, was modified by Hitoshi Ashida in the House of Representatives before the constitution was adopted to include a loophole for self-defense. MacArthur's legal adviser told him that if the revised wording were allowed to stand, Japan would be able to legally justify armed forces for self-defense. MacArthur not only allowed the revised...

Dental caries experience, rather than toothbrushing, influences the incidence of dental caries in young Japanese adults.

To elucidate the association between the incidence of dental caries and toothbrushing frequency after adjusting for dental caries experience at baseline in a Japanese population. The 92 recruits of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in Kure, Japan, in 2011 were followed up for 3 years. They underwent oral examination at the annual checkups and answered questions about toothbrushing frequency. The multiple logistic regression analysis was used to analyze the incidence of dental caries and to identify independent effects of toothbrushing frequency and dental caries experience at baseline. Furthermore, the relative importance of the incidence of dental caries was investigated among other independent variables using the partial adjusted R² score. Logistic regression analysis showed that toothbrushing frequency alone did not influence the increment in decayed, missing, and filled teeth (DMFT). However, DMFT at baseline alone was associated with the increment in DMFT (crude odds ratio, OR, 1.20, 95% confidence interval, CI, 1.08,1.33). In the fully adjusted model, only DMFT at baseline was associated with the increment in DMFT (adjusted OR 1.23, 95%CI 1.09,1.38). After three years, the incidence of dental caries in young adult Japanese males was influenced by DMFT at baseline, rather than toothbrushing frequency.

Japan’s Coast Guard and Maritime Self-Defense Force in the East China Sea: Can a Black-and-White System Adapt to a Gray-Zone Reality?

Japan’s Coast Guard and Maritime Self-Defense Force in the East China Sea:Can a Black-and-White System Adapt to a Gray-Zone Reality? Céline Pajon (bio) KEYWORDS JAPAN, MARITIME SECURITY, COAST GUARD, EAST CHINA SEA [End Page 111] EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This essay examines the need for growing coordination between the Japan Coast Guard (JCG) and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) to better cope with gray-zone situations. MAIN ARGUMENT Coping with gray-zone situations is particularly challenging for Japan because its security posture is based on a binary system that complicates coordination between civilian and military agencies. In Japan, gray-zone situations generally refer to the challenges raised by China’s maritime activities around the disputed Senkaku Islands, creating situations that are neither peacetime nor wartime contingencies. Dealing with such situations requires careful and close management of law-enforcement contingencies that might escalate into military conflicts. Japan’s unique security system has so far prevented the adoption of a legal framework to regulate the coordination between the civilian JCG, which is primarily responsible for securing national waters, and the military JMSDF, which intervenes if a situation worsens. Despite some progress, legal and technical issues still prevent optimal cooperation between the two agencies, thus undermining Japan’s ability to respond to current challenges in the East China Sea. POLICY IMPLICATIONS • Because Japan has a binary security system that strictly divides civilian and military corps and activities, the country will struggle to adapt its institutions to China’s “salami slicing” strategy. • Ensuring a well-integrated response to gray-zone situations would ideally require a legal framework defining more precisely these situations and articulating the respective roles of the JMSDF and JCG. If such a framework is not possible, other steps should be taken, such as expanding technical interoperability between the JMSDF and JCG; developing a common, integrated maritime domain awareness; and increasing training and exercises on more realistic scenarios. • To improve its current security posture, Japan must implement a “whole of government” approach that ensures optimal coordination between civilian and military agencies rather than revising Article 9 of the constitution. [End Page 112] On August 6, 2016, an armada of 230 Chinese fishing boats, accompanied by 7 China Coast Guard (CCG) vessels, was spotted near Japanese waters around the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.1 This could have been the starting point of a nightmare scenario for Japan in which the disputed islands are taken by armed Chinese fishermen backed by big CCG ships and eventually military vessels, leaving no chance for the Japan Coast Guard (JCG) to adequately reply. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) would then need to step in, with the risk of the situation escalating into a military conflict. Coping with “gray zone” situations, such as the above scenario, has been Japan’s core security challenge in recent years. Defined in the National Defense Program Guidelines of December 2013 as “neither pure peacetime nor contingencies over territory, sovereignty and maritime economic interests,” gray-zone situations mainly refer to the challenges raised by China’s “reactive assertiveness” around the disputed Senkaku Islands (known as the Diaoyu Islands in Chinese).2 Beijing is challenging Japan’s sovereign control by regularly sending vessels from law-enforcement agencies into its territorial waters and contiguous zone.3 Civilian or paramilitary forces are therefore used to change facts on the ground while pushing the targeted country to eventually take the initiative of using force to stop these activities. These incursions, which do not amount to an armed attack, are blurring the line between crime and defense, between law enforcement and military activities. Gray-zone situations have been identified by Tokyo since 2010 and have informed the transformation of Japan’s defense posture.4 Japan is organizing a “dynamic joint defense force” and redeploying troops onto the Ryukyu Islands, located in the southwest of the archipelago, closer to the [End Page 113] Senkaku Islands.5 Importantly, official documents call for more cooperation and coordination between the JMSDF, on the one hand, and the JCG and police forces, on the other.6 Indeed, the JCG is the primary agency responsible for patrolling and safeguarding Japanese waters: it...

Description of Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force TH135 Training Helicopter

Description of Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force TH135 Training Helicopter

Post-war Japan as a Sea Power: Imperial Legacy, Wartime Experience and the Making of a Navy by Alessio Patalano

Reviewed by: Post-war Japan as a Sea Power: Imperial Legacy, Wartime Experience and the Making of a Navy by Alessio Patalano James R. Holmes Post-war Japan as a Sea Power: Imperial Legacy, Wartime Experience and the Making of a Navy. By Alessio Patalano. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 272 pages. Hardcover £85.00; softcover £28.99. Japan operates a world-class if modest-sized navy, euphemistically named the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) to conform to the nation's post–World War II constitution, which forswears the use of arms for political purposes. The JMSDF is part of a combined US-Japanese fleet that constitutes the enforcement arm of allied strategy vis-à-vis surging Chinese economic and military might. And yet little has been written in English about this close partner to the US Navy, a shortfall that is doubly striking in light of the profusion of studies on the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), the JMSDF's institutional forebear. Chinese strategist Sun Tzu urged sovereigns and generals to know themselves and their foes to succeed in martial enterprises; he might have counseled them to know their allies as well. That's where Alessio Patalano's book comes in so handy. (One imagines it will be read avidly in China as well.) The compact community of Japan watchers in the West has long depended on a handful of works for insight into the JMSDF's past and present. Best known is James E. Auer's The Postwar Rearmament of Japanese Maritime Forces, 1945–71 (New York: Praeger, 1973), which appeared over forty years ago. Peter J. Woolley brought the story up to the turn of the century with Japan's Navy: Politics and Paradox, 1971–2000 (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000). Post-war Japan as a Sea Power supplies a sorely needed update founded on interviews along with primary-source research in the JMSDF archives. Japan's navy [End Page 354] now confronts a rising China as well as a renegade, nuclear-armed North Korea. On such pressing recent matters, Auer's and Woolley's books are silent for obvious reasons. This is not a narrative history of postwar Japanese sea power per se, and that constitutes one of its strengths. The treatise is thematic in outlook, with chapters reviewing, for example, the imperial navy's ethos and traditions; the JMSDF's interpretation of the imperial experience and its incorporation of that experience into its own service subculture; Japanese maritime policy and strategy; and the navy's pursuit of a balanced fleet. Japan's postwar navy studied the reasons for the IJN's downfall closely and fashioned policy and strategy to avoid committing similar mistakes. Antisubmarine warfare, for example, figured prominently in postwar strategy, doubtless because of painful memories of US submarines sending Japanese merchantmen and warships to the bottom. Logistics was another core takeaway. The imperial navy seized vast territories and sea space from 1941 to 1942, yet little thought was given to how to hold all that area once it had been seized. JMSDF commanders faulted their predecessors for neglecting sea-lane defense—a crucial oversight for any island empire dependent on resource imports. And on and on. Culture is the common denominator among these strands of inquiry. Patalano concentrates in large measure on organizational culture, namely, the habits of mind and deed that are imprinted on the bureaucracy and individual seafarers by an institution's founders and founding legends, and by which the institution acculturates newcomers—chiefly through naval education in any sea service's case. He thus puts the US Navy's part in the JMSDF's founding in perspective. He observes that while American seafarers such as Admiral Arleigh Burke were indeed key figures in the JMSDF's early history, Japan's navy is by no means a simple appendage of its US patron and ally. Nor is it a direct descendant of the World War II navy. Henry Steele Commager once wrote in The Search for a Usable Past (New York: Knopf, 1967) about the American founders' efforts to fabricate a "usable past" binding together thirteen disparate states clustered along the eastern seaboard of North America. A central point for Commager was that the...

Situating Somali Piracy in Japanese Security Policy

This paper examines Tokyo’s engagement with Somali piracy and discusses what it reveals about Japan’s overall security posture. I argue that Japan’s response to Somali piracy highlights the continued salience of domestic political processes and em-bedded anti-militarist norms in moulding Tokyo’s responses to emergent threats, of which piracy is a prime example. This is evidenced by the fact that the Japan Coast Guard (JCG), rather than the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force (JMSDF), is primarily responsible for Japan’s anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden. Additionally, I draw attention to the economic logic underpinning Japan’s approach to security and posit that the defence of sea lanes links maritime security issues to continued economic security to explain why combatting maritime piracy is important to Tokyo.

Japan’s Maritime Security Strategy: The Japan Coast Guard and Maritime Outlaws by Lindsay Black (review)

Reviewed by: Japan’s Maritime Security Strategy: The Japan Coast Guard and Maritime Outlaws by Lindsay Black Christopher W. Hughes (bio) Japan’s Maritime Security Strategy: The Japan Coast Guard and Maritime Outlaws. By Lindsay Black. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014. xii, 221 pages. $110.00. Japan’s evolving security policy has received increasing scholarly coverage in recent years, with much of the literature dominated by contending varieties of realism and constructivism, and generally pointing respectively toward either greater militarization or continuing adherence to norms of antimilitarism. Lindsay Black’s volume makes a useful contribution to this debate, by bringing in what is in the case of Japan an often underutilized theory in the shape of the English School and by looking at the relatively understudied theme of the role of the Japan Coast Guard (JCG) in maritime security. The book makes a range of important arguments to challenge, and ultimately nuance, the existing literature, if never quite succeeding in its aim of really challenging much of the dominant orthodoxy. But it deserves to be read widely for its good use of theory combined with much interesting new empirical information. The central theoretical contention of the volume—expounded in the first three chapters—is that the English School, and its attendant emphasis on institutions and norms to create a functioning society of states, provides insights that can help explain the workings of the international system and Japan’s international behavior within it. While Black accepts the main tenets of the English School, he argues that the theory at times falls into a postcolonial perspective in assuming that the adoption of Western institutions and norms has gone unchallenged in other regions. Instead, he posits that each region interprets and creates its own norms to help create international society. Japan is no exception to this, being sentient to regional norms and seeking to innovate in them in order to help establish regional order. In turn, Black examines the ways in which states that depart from international norms may be labeled as “outlaws” and the strategies by which other states seek to bring them back into the international and regional order through condemnation or engaging via compliance with institutions and norms. The author demonstrates in particular how this process has worked in the case of [End Page 186] North Korea’s alleged transgressions of the international maritime regime, the response to piracy in the Gulf of Aden, and piracy in Southeast Asia. This lengthy theoretical and scene-setting exegesis is then followed by three shorter empirical chapters focusing on JCG involvement in responding to North Korea’s 1999 and 2001 “suspicious ships” incursions, the dispatch of the Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) and elements of the JCG to the Gulf of Aden, and the role of the JCG in U.S.-led efforts post-9/11 in antiterrorism and weapons-of-mass-destruction counterproliferation. Each of these chapters, and especially the first two of the three, provides fascinating detail, never collated before in one volume, to examine Japanese policy. The chapters demonstrate that, contrary to many expectations and much work on the JCG to date, Japan has not necessarily employed its coast guard as a vanguard of remilitarization efforts. Instead, Japanese policymakers, despite these obvious opportunities to utilize the JCG to presage a role of the MSDF, have preferred to maintain Japan’s contribution at the level of the civilian JCG. They have been extremely attentive to regional norms and institutions rather than acceding to, for example, U.S. pressures for a more overt military response. Hence, the volume demonstrates its arguments that rather than just following a logic of remilitarization, or just the logic of constructivism and rigid adherence to antimilitarism, Japan has charted a course in maritime security that enables a contribution to the international order but has been mediated by regional circumstances. The result is to demonstrate considerable concordance with the English School model, which is often seen to offer a way to mediate among realism, constructivism, and other theoretical models. The volume is thus very effective in putting across its key arguments and giving those following realist or constructivist logics some pause for thought about the certainty of their...

Different forces in one: the origin and development of organizational cultures in the Japanese Ground and Maritime Self-Defense Forces, 1950–present

This article explains the processes in which the two SDFs’ organizational cultures were formed by examining the ways in which the two Self Defense Forces (SDFs) were established in the early 1950s and have interacted with their US counterparts since that time. The article argues that the reason that the Ground Self Defense Force (GSDF) has been so cautious about sending troops to overseas operations, whereas the Maritime Self Defense Force (MSDF) has been willing to provide any possible support for the US Navy (USN), is that they have developed different organizational cultures – different collective beliefs and understandings about how to contribute to the national interest that they defined – through their decades-long relations with their US counterparts since the early 1950s. It is especially important to consider what type of Japanese actors were in charge of establishing each of the two SDFs in the early 1950s, what intentions they had when they established the two SDFs, and what kind of relations they had with their US counterparts. It is also important to consider how the USAR and USN responded to the requests from their Japanese counterparts in the 1950s and 1960s.

平成26年6月マリンエンジニアリング見学会報告 - 海上自衛隊 第2術科学校見学

平成26年6月マリンエンジニアリング見学会報告 - 海上自衛隊 第2術科学校見学

Zespół Szkolny Morskich Sił Samoobrony Japonii w Polsce, Gdynia, 6–10 sierpnia 2013 roku

The School Team of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in Poland, Gdynia, August 6th–10th, 2013

Medical Cooperation with Local Dental Associations and Dental Teams of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force : Survey of Dental Treatment Needs Immediately after the Great East Japan Earthquake : At Minamisanriku-cho Motoyoshi-gun and Oshima Kesennuma City Miyagi Prefecture

Medical Cooperation with Local Dental Associations and Dental Teams of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force : Survey of Dental Treatment Needs Immediately after the Great East Japan Earthquake : At Minamisanriku-cho Motoyoshi-gun and Oshima Kesennuma City Miyagi Prefecture

208 振動モニタリングによるヘリコプタの状態監視(セッション6 機械の状態監視)

In recent years, the number of helicopters with vibration monitoring equipment, which is called Health and Usage Monitoring System, has increased around the world. The vibration monitoring is intended for condition based maintenance which is economically advantageous maintenance method. First SH-60K helicopter with vibration monitoring equipment was delivered for Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in 2005. Mahalanobis Taguchi System (MTS) is applied to vibration monitoring method for helicopter's transmission. MTS is a method which evaluates the difference between a target signal and normal signal by Mahalanobis Distance. This paper shows an approach of SH-60K helicopter for vibration monitoring and experimental results intended to evaluate MTS.