Description
How does one cultivate militarism in a country that legally has no military? For the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), this question lies at the core of their existence as “Uneasy Warriors” (Frühstück, 2007), the quasi-military of an officially demilitarised state. However, analysing JSDF portrayals in the military magazine “Mamor”, my research finds no unease. Instead, a rather traditional warrior masculinity is promoted throughout the magazine. Employing visual discourse analysis, I show how in Mamor, popular culture and gender are leveraged to construct and maintain a military-friendly subculture that promotes traditional military values but strips them of their overt political content. Mamor achieves this by commodifying the JSDF, creating a pleasurable version of militarism which reframes military violence as an exciting game and constructs subcultural fantasies of a heroic and beloved JSDF. Subcultural militarism is constructed around a shared “database” of narrative elements from which individuals construct their own, highly personalised narrative of militarism, translocating political narration to content consumers. Rather than facing and resolving conflicts around militarisation, they are bypassed instead. This process ultimately represents an intriguing pattern of adaptation to the societal pressures faced by postmodern militaries navigating tensions between democratic values and cultures of masculinised military violence.
