Josei Heishi to iu Nanmon: Jendā kara tou Sensō, Guntai no Shakaigaku (The Conundrum of the Female Soldiers: Sociology of War and the Military from a Gender Perspective)

Feminist International Relations (IR) scholar Cynthia Enloe famously wrote that ‘The Personal is International. The International is Personal’ (2014: 343). Satō Fumika’s book on what she calls the ‘conundrum’ of female soldiers takes this maxim to heart in multiple ways. Indeed, the book seems to be a rather personal project, with Satō using the foreword to reflect on the bemused to downright hostile reception her pioneering 2004 work on women in the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) had received in Japanese feminist circles, and the importance that encouragement by international scholars like Enloe had in making her persist in her research. Published almost twenty years after her first monograph, this book can thus be understood as the product of that encouragement, a comprehensive review of decades of Japanese and English-language IR, political science, and sociology research on the gendering of military institutions, combined with Satō’s own critical analysis of the JSDF and its military role model, the United States Armed Forces.

In order to fulfil its goal of providing a multifaceted and nuanced analysis of the role of women in military institutions in general and the JSDF in particular, the book is divided into five thematic sections, each of which contains a few chapters. The first section summarizes previous research on the military and gender, military masculinity, and the relationship between militarism, militarization, and patriarchy. Despite the book’s title, the literature discussed in these chapters is not limited to sociological works but draws on the full range of academic discourse on military and gender, including prominent feminist IR scholars such as Cynthia Cockburn, Helena Carreiras, Paul Higate, and once again Cynthia Enloe. These chapters mostly serve to lay the theoretical groundwork for Satō’s later analysis, but they also contain some important analytical insights of their own. For example, Satō persuasively warns against viewing military institutions as monolithic and closed off from civilian society, arguing for thinking in terms of ‘militarized masculinities’ (gunjiteki danseisei) rather than ‘military masculinities’ (guntai no danseisei) (46–47). With their comprehensive and well-structured tour of gender and military literature, these chapters also make excellent classroom material, especially if the volume is ever translated into English.

In Section 2, Satō then turns her attention specifically to military women, beginning with the general circumstances of women’s participation in the military, including gendered issues such as endemic sexual violence within the institution. She goes on to critically analyse the role of military women as symbols of gender equality and to explore the relationship between the military, war, and feminism, outlining different feminist perspectives on the integration of women in the military. Maintaining her focus on Japan and the United States, Satō herself does not subscribe to the rigidly anti-military feminism prevalent in Japan, nor to American liberal feminism with its eager embrace of women’s military participation. Instead, she again follows Enloe in attempting to chart a critical third way, calling on feminists to move beyond the black-and-white question of ‘are female soldiers right or wrong?’ (josei heishi ze ka hi ka) and instead work toward a broader understanding of what actually happens when women join the military and when militaries use women for public relations or other reasons (81). This recognition of what is ultimately the lived reality of military women is important because, as Satō also points out in this section, refusing to engage with the military or military issues in any way risks abandoning military women and the gendered issues they face within these institutions (74).

Section 3, simply titled ‘Gender in the SDF’ (jieitai ni okeru jendā), forms the analytical core of the book, focusing full attention on gender and women’s participation in the JSDF. The first chapter in this section provides a historical overview of the integration of women into the Japanese armed forces, dating back to the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces. Her focus in this historical overview is largely motivated by showing that increased female participation in the JSDF is neither a feminist success (seika) nor a conspiracy (inbō), but rather the product of internal factors such as a lack of manpower or a need for social acceptance, and external factors such as changing international gender norms (96). This argument is hardly new, having been made by multiple authors, including Satō herself (e.g. Frühstück 2007; Satō 2010). Once again, however, the comprehensive and concise nature of the overview provided makes it a valuable contribution, and one that seems particularly suitable for classroom use.

After the historical overview, Satō then looks at the JSDF as a specifically ‘postmodern’ military, drawing on a concept popularized by Charles Moskos (Moskos et al., 2000). Since the postmodern military is at least nominally committed to values such as gender equality, questions arise about how gender relations and dynamics change under a postmodern military structure. Here she follows the line of Sabine Frühstück (2004) who sees the JSDF not only as thoroughly postmodern, but even at the forefront of global developments toward postmodern militaries (127). Satō discusses various perspectives on changing gender roles within such a postmodern military, from liberal feminist acclamations of women as better (read: more compassionate, less brutal) soldiers (134), to conservative critiques of a weak and effeminate military (135), to critical feminist observations about the lack of fundamental change in the male/female power hierarchy in postmodern militaries (138). Through this lens of the postmodern military, Satō then proceeds to provide a thorough analysis of the role of women in the contemporary JSDF, picking up some of the threads from the first chapter of the section to analyse JSDF advertising alongside other JSDF and government public relations materials. To some extent, the earlier arguments about using women to gain social acceptance in a war-weary Japanese society while at the same time at least partially filling chronic personnel gaps are repeated here. This repetition is a bit awkward, especially when reading the volume front to back, and suggests that perhaps a restructuring of this section to allow Satō’s overview of the gendered history of the JSDF to move directly into her empirical work would have been preferable.

After this, however, the empirical work on the representation of women in the JSDF goes beyond previous arguments about softening and shows how the integration of women in the JSDF was linked to a broader political attempt to improve Japan’s image in the West during the Abe administration. Satō very convincingly shows how, despite statements about gender equality and seeming acceptance of the recruitment of women, the structures within the JSDF remained thoroughly unequal and male-dominated, resulting in a kind of feigned equality. She points out some of the more absurd results of claiming gender equality without achieving it, such as when Japan sent JSDF ‘gender advisors’ to Ethiopia, even though Japan’s own gender inequality persisted and the two nations were only one place apart on the Global Gender Gap Index at the time (153–54). Satō is thus highly critical of what she sees as the selective appropriation of feminist ideas to ultimately construct a neoliberal interventionism that redefines military violence as caring or saving and ultimately perpetuates the binary of powerful protectors and powerless protected that feminists have long identified as the root of military violence (e.g. Stiehm 1982). In her assessment, the integration of women into the modern JSDF largely serves to portray Japan as a modern, progressive nation and the JSDF as an ‘altruistic’ (ritateki) force, without fundamentally changing military gender relations.

In the penultimate section, Section 4, Satō then turns her attention to the United States, looking at the histories of black, female, and LBGTQ integration into the US military, as well as critically analysing her own experiences at two US conferences on women in the military in an almost autoethnographic manner. As one might expect from the thorough work done in previous chapters, the history of the difficult, incomplete, and contentious integration of the three groups into the US armed forces is written in a concise and clear manner, leading Satō to criticize the instrumentalization of the ideals of ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ in the American context to ultimately serve military recruitment needs and consolidate the US military’s privileged position in American society. Despite analysing the United States, her analytical focus remains on Japan, with the question ‘to what extent does this apply to Japan?’ constantly in the background and at points directly addressed (e.g. on page 200). In this context, it is a bit disappointing that despite her thorough analysis of LGBTQ integration into the US military, Satō does not apply a similar queer lens to the JSDF. Arguably, the complete absence of any visible attempt to frame the JSDF as LGBTQ-inclusive, or even to acknowledge the possible existence of LGBTQ personnel, marks a significant opening for critical analysis, something that Satō unfortunately does not provide in this volume, and which remains a major gap in the scholarship on the JSDF in general. Her ethnographic coverage of the conferences, while limited in scope, provides a different perspective on thinking about women and the military in the American context, particularly by featuring a number of practitioners, either military women or academics directly involved in military decision-making. Since these are also the people most likely to have contact with their Japanese counterparts, Satō’s focus on these conferences fits into her analytical framework.

Section 5, the last section of the book, begins with a chapter devoted entirely to a discussion of Mary Louise Roberts’ ‘What Soldiers Do?’ (2013) for which Satō was the Japanese translator. After summarizing the book’s argument about American soldiers’ sexual relationships with women in France after the Normandy landings, she relates Roberts’ work to the Japanese discourse on ‘comfort women’, and in the book’s final substantive chapter, moves into a broader discussion of the connections between sexuality, sexual violence, and war. This section raises important points about the attribution of agency to women who have experienced sexual violence and how this perception of agency is tied to how legitimate their experiences are perceived, something that Satō convincingly links to broader social master narratives about war, leading her to call for feminist counter-narratives that recognize women’s agency as well as the structures of coercion under which they live (243). However, while this section makes a strong and critically important argument, it feels strangely disconnected from the rest of the book. In particular, the connection to the ‘conundrum of female soldiers’ as the books analytical core remains unclear, so that the last two chapters almost read like a completely different book. Drawing some more explicit connections with the experiences of women in the military (and thus the rest of the book) would have been a welcome addition.

In sum, ‘The Conundrum of the Female Soldiers’ should not be understood as a book that provides groundbreaking new insights. Instead, the book provides a powerful and comprehensive tour of the wealth of academic writing on gender and the military, and gender in the JSDF in particular, synthesizing it with Satō’s own empirical work and strong critical voice to provide a rich and nuanced view of gender in the JSDF and a critical intervention in theoretical and policy debates in feminist security studies more broadly. The book’s conclusion in particular is evidence of this, with Satō calling for the creation of empowering research environments while critiquing how feminist notions of ‘care’ have been instrumentalized by the postmodern JSDF. Importantly, however, Satō calls for a critical feminism that goes beyond the critique of ‘co-optation’ (torikomare) when feminist ideas are diffused into state policy, and instead embraces the ‘ambiguous spaces’ (ryōgiteki na kūkan) created by such a development and uses them to achieve real improvements and iterative change. This argument draws strength from Satō’s consistently critical but non-dogmatic voice throughout the volume, which ultimately marks this book as an important contribution to feminism both as an academic theory and as an egalitarian social project.

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