Defenders of Japan

Reviewed by: Defenders of Japan: The Post-Imperial Armed Forces, 1946–2016: A History by Garren Mulloy Aaron Skabelund (bio) Defenders of Japan: The Post-Imperial Armed Forces, 1946–2016: A History. By Garren Mulloy. Oxford University Press, 2021. xxvi, 416 pages. $45.00. In 2006, near the end of a three-year fellowship at one of Japan's national universities, I was asked to present my research on the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF). I took the liberty of inviting several of my informants—veterans of the force I had interviewed and who had provided me with invaluable introductions and source materials. To my surprise, some department members in the Faculty of Law, which was comprised of legal, political science, and history specialists, objected to these men attending the seminar because of their affiliation with an organization they regarded as an anathema to the postwar peace constitution. In the end, after an apparently heated department meeting, my informants were allowed to participate, but the experience [End Page 458] illustrated a lingering taboo of the study of the JSDF in the Japanese academy. Critics of the force, it seemed, were concerned that the academic study of the military would help to legitimate its existence. Much has changed in the last decade and a half. In Japan and abroad, researchers have paid increasing attention to the JSDF. And wider society, thanks to security threats posed by China and North Korea and the JSDF's response to the triple (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear) disaster that began on March 11, 2011, has come to regard the force as one of most respected and trusted institutions in the country. Garren Mulloy's history of what he calls the "post-imperial armed forces" is a testament to these developments. Mulloy, an international relations specialist based at Daito Bunka University, has drawn from that recent secondary scholarship and earlier work, and complemented it with interviews, to produce what he aims will be "a more rounded view of the defense actors during Japan's long peace." By defense actors, Mulloy means the JSDF and by extension the United States armed forces and Japan's civilian coast guard (pp. 1–2), though he ultimately does not say a lot about the latter two, including the JSDF's training exercises with the U.S. military. What Mulloy does do is examine the "strategy, tactics, and technology" of the JSDF but also the "education and training, civil-military relations, administration, economic and budget factors, [and] social relations and institutional culture" of the force by "utilizing both historical and IR [international relations] methodologies" (pp. 6–7). This is a truly ambitious project representing two decades of collecting almost every secondary source imaginable as well as recent primary sources and organizing them into a comprehensive overview. Despite some weaknesses, Defenders of Japan is a valuable synthesis of postwar security. Not surprisingly, such an ambitious project has a complex argument. Mulloy asserts that the JSDF "developed in an unbalanced, unorthodox, and yet highly capable manner influenced by imperial legacies and postwar social values, well-suited to disaster relief duties, adaptable to overseas operations with parameters, and with niche capabilities in defense and human security roles representative of modern Japan" (p. 9). In the subsequent chapters, the author largely succeeds in providing ample support for this thesis. Mulloy organizes the book into four chapters. The first two cover from the end of the World War II to the close of the cold war and the last two bring the coverage up to 2020. While the first two chapters are more of a synthesis of secondary historical scholarship, the third and fourth chapters contain more original research and sharper analysis and insights. Chapter 1 deals with what Mulloy calls the "Post-war Military Roots" of the JSDF from 1946 to 1954, a period of demilitarization and then rearmament. Mulloy seems intent on myth busting. He argues that Japanese soldiers continued to engage in military activity during demilitarization and [End Page 459] were more of a para-military-like police force than a military as rearmament began after the outbreak of the Korean War and the subsequent formation of the National Police Reserve (NPR), as ordered

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