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Samurai masculinity, Japan’s self defence force and the uncanny space–time of Sengoku

Jieitai

East Asian Journal of Popular Culture EAJPC 3.1. (April 2017), pp. 85-98 (preprint)

https://doi.org/10.1386/eapc.3.1.85_1

Fraser McKissack, The University of Auckland

ABSTRACT

The image of contemporary Japanese men fighting alongside samurai warriors is

impossible, but not simply because time-travel does not exist. As I argue in this article, Japan

is tethered to an historical narrative of samurai virtue that can no longer exist. This is a

paradox that threatens to destabilize Japan’s contemporary military spaces and its contested

history of militarism. I explore this paradox through the concept of Japan’s military space–

time, which draws attention to the spatial and temporal dimensions of Japan’s

demilitarization and the tensions that arise when a demilitarized space coexists with a militant

history and the legacy of Japan’s epitomic masculine figure, the samurai. In order for

contemporary Japanese SDF personnel to identify with the samurai they inevitably encounter

the spectre of Japan’s twentieth–century militarism, and thus the samurai returns to the

present as an uncanny embodiment of a repressed masculine self. Through the close analysis

of two Japanese time-travel films, Sengoku Jieitai (Saitō, 1979) and Sengoku Jieitai: 1549

(Tezuka, 2005), I demonstrate how the attempt to reconcile Japan’s contemporary pacifist

identity with its feudal past threatens to rupture the narrative of a cohesive national selfhood.

KEYWORDS : SDF; Samurai; demilitarization; Article 9; masculinity; uncanny; military

space–time

Military spaces in Japan are a paradox. Japan is the only nation in the world to have a

commitment to pacifism and a denunciation of war written into its constitution, and the

limited nature of Japan’s Jieitai, Self Defence Force (SDF), restricts Japan’s global military

presence. However, ongoing disputes over the Senkaku Islands, the continued presence of US

military bases on Japanese soil (particularly in Okinawa) and controversies regarding the

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increased visibility and deployment of the SDF highlight the significance of discussing the

military space of a demilitarized nation. Pragmatic solutions to Japan’s security issues

address the naval power of China, the nuclear threat of North Korea and the implications of

Japan’s security treaty with the United States, which has been left un-amended since the

1960s (Hook 2013: 114). And yet, pragmatic discussions of Japan’s evolving military spaces

are insufficient when dealing with the intangible forces of time and memory that continue to

shape domestic and international responses to Japan’s military presence.

To use the language of Derrida, the discourse surrounding Japan’s security policies

and its contested military spaces is haunted by the memories of Japan’s early twentieth

century (Derrida 1994: 10). By virtue of its post-war constitution, Japan, more than any other

nation, has been tethered to the past. Written into the subtext of Article 9, which was imposed

on Japan during the US-led occupation, is the condemnation of Japan’s wartime atrocities and

an implicit caution that Japan can never again be trusted with a military capable of initiating

conflict; defence spending is curtailed at 1 per cent of the GDP and euphemisms embedded

into the language of the SDF (personnel in the SDF are not referred to as soldiers but as

‘members of a group or unit’) ensure that militarism cannot become sanctioned as it had been

in the early Showa era (Fruhstuck and Ben-Ari 2002: 15). To attempt to remilitarize Japan, or

to question the interpretation of pacifism in Japan, is to challenge the assumptions present in

the subtext of Article 9 and re-establish the continuity of a history that includes wartime

aggression. Time, particularly time associated with Japan’s early twentieth century, is a core

component of Japan’s contemporary physical military spaces: its contested waters, SDF

training grounds, and American bases.

Time is inseparable from the physicality of Japan’s military presence because Japan’s

history of wartime aggression remains in a state of flux – unacknowledged, contested,

rewritten. For this reason, I want to collapse the temporal dimension of Japan’s military space

into the physical space; what I call Japan’s military space–time. The military space–time of a

demilitarized nation addresses the co-presence of Japan’s militant past in the present, not only

as a memory, but as an embedded substrate of the Japanese nation state. In his opening

chapter to Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, Jonathan Boyarin writes that ‘our

reified notions of objective and separate space and time are peculiarly linked to the modern

identification of a nation with a sharply bounded, continuously occupied space controlled by

a single sovereign state’ (Boyarin 1994: 2). It is this sense of spatial and temporal continuity

that is ruptured in Japan’s national narrative because national spaces are trapped in time or

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rendered other because they are occupied by a sovereign state that has become disconnected

from its source of authority, namely the Meiji Restoration and the Democratic principles of

the Taisho period (Weber and Kowert 2007: 118).Research into the role of war memory in

contemporary Japan often situates contested memories within particular places, such as peace

museums (Sakamoto and Allen: 2013), shrines (Kingston 2012) and specific sites that

resonate with experiences of war, such as Hiroshima (Yoneyama 1999). Japan’s military

space–time incorporates these contested memories and spaces of memory into the broader

spaces of the Japanese nation state, and invokes memories that extend to the historical

narratives of samurai warriors, so that Japan’s feudal past along with the atrocities of the

imperial army remain embedded in the demilitarized spaces of the present.

The science-fiction pretence of Japan’s military space–time forms the central conceit

of two Japanese science-fiction films. Sengoku Jieitai (Saitō, 1979), and its 2005 remake,

Sengoku Jieitai: 1549 (Tezuka, 2005) are relatively low-budget science fiction films in which

members of an SDF ground squadron accidentally time-travel to the Sengoku period. It is a

convenient plot device to enable the spectacle of contemporary military technology engaging

with feudal soldiers, and yet both films must necessarily navigate the complexities of a

pacifist nation at war with its own violent history. In the narrative of Japan as post-war victim

its legacy of imperialism has been erased from the national memory leaving in its place a

temporal discontinuity, which dislocates contemporary SDF members from their immediate

forebears – the proud soldiers serving Emperor Hirohito. By being transported back in time

the bodies of the SDF members become entangled in the reorientation of Japan’s military

space–time. Because military space is conventionally a masculine space, the process of

reorienting the SDF body is explicitly conveyed in both films through the confrontation with

the masculinity of the samurai.

The body, and in many ways the spirit, of the samurai offers a lineage of masculine

virtues that still influence constructions of Japanese masculinity, from the salaryman to

personnel of the SDF. While militant language is eschewed in the vocabulary of the SDF

(Fruhstuck and Ben-Ari 2002: 15), and heroism in the SDF is associated with pacifist values

(Fruhstuck 2007: 73) there remains a tentative link between the SDF and samurai that both

Sengoku Jieitai films attempt to exploit. A recent attempt to frame the SDF as samurai was

made by General Tamogami Toshio. In 2004 Tamogami stated that the SDF ‘maintains the

ancient bushido spirit of our country’ (Benesch 2014: 237). However, the connection between

the SDF and the samurai is problematic, and Tamogami was sacked as Chief of Staff of the

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Air Self Defence Force in 2008 for his militant opinions (Benesch).How can a pacifist

defence force associate with the masculine ideals of Japan’s warrior elite, particularly after

these ideals had been skewed to legitimize atrocities committed during the Pacific War? This

is the root conflict that defines what I describe as the uncanny samurai. For the SDF members

in both films the samurai is a familiar figure rendered uncanny because of their inability to

share the common ability to kill as soldiers.

I attribute uncanny features to the reappearance of the samurai, but in many ways the

samurai figures function as emissaries to familiar lands that have themselves become sites of

the uncanny. Freud explains that ‘the uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but

something familiar and old – established in the mind that has been estranged only by the

process of repression […] as something which ought to have been kept concealed but which

has nevertheless come to light’ (1974: 240). In the post-war period Japan had become

estranged from its history of colonialism to such an extent that Imperial Japan had become a

foreign land. While Japanese civilians may have welcomed the change, it was a harrowing

shift for returning soldiers. Kawamura Minato writes of Japanese war veterans returning to ‘a

place in which they had never lived’ (cited in Lippit 2010: 289). For veterans, peacetime

Japan had become an unhomely space, uncanny in its rapid transformation from militarism to

pacifism, from war ravaged cities to a thriving industrial power. They had left their homeland

with the intent to defend it with their lives. They had returned to discover that their homeland

had disappeared in time.

WE WERE SAMURAI

In the 1970s, both the United States and Japan were confronted with variations of a

disheartening realization: America, the most powerful industrialized nation in the world, was

unable to win a war against a developing nation in South East Asia. Japan, the second most

powerful nation in the world in the 1970s with 1 per cent of its GDP spent on its defence

force, was no longer able to rely on the security umbrella of its powerful ally. The Vietnam

War threatened to entrap Japan in America’s Cold War conflicts, a fear reflected in the

numerous anti-war protests throughout Japan, and yet the withdrawal of American troops

during Nixon’s presidency encouraged the need for an active Japanese security policy

(Izumikawa 2010: 143). Izumikawa notes that Japan’s response to the Vietnam War was seen

as a significant turning point in Japan’s security policy by academics (Izumikawa). As I will

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demonstrate, Japan’s response to the Vietnam War was also a turning point for the

revitalization of a militant masculinity in Japan’s military space–time.

A crisis of masculine dislocation seemed to be affecting Japanese men who had been

systematically denied the chance to be warriors after World War II due to Japan’s forced

demilitarization under Article 9; a sentiment implicit in Yukio Mishima’s failed coup in 1970.

After its traumatic defeat in the Pacific War and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, Japan was perpetually trapped in a post-war epoch of defeat because it was robbed

of its ability to determine its own future (Ivy 2008: 171). Japan’s contradictory stance as a

global power denied the freedom to exist as a normal state incited the ire of those who

imagined a return to the majesty of Imperial Japan, and aroused reasonable fears for the

security of Japan when America reduced its presence in Asia after their defeat in Vietnam

(Guinasso and Ha 1980: 249). Japan’s primary security concerns during the 1970s had been

self-defence and the legitimization of its SDF, a position that was reinforced in the

Guidelines for US–Japan Defense Cooperation, which reinforced the notion ‘that Japan could

use its military only for the purpose of territorial defense’ (Smith 1999: 81). However, as

Sheila Smith suggests, the boundaries of Japan’s regional defence were beginning to widen at

this time with the inclusion of sea-lanes, and Japan began to take a more prominent role in

joint-defence strategies with the United States (1999).

Sengoku Jieitai stars Sonny Chiba as Lieutenant Yoshiaki Iba, the leader of a small

SDF squadron accidentally transported through a time-slip into Japan’s Sengoku period

during a routine training exercise, whereupon they become entangled in a battle between two

fictional warlords. In the post-war period Japan was beset with ‘the sense of time without

movement toward the future, a time without contingency’ as a nation constitutively

prohibited from being able to rectify its defeat in the Pacific War with victory in future

conflicts (Ivy 2008: 171).The time travelling narrative of the film is thus symptomatic of

Japan’s sense of being futureless. To be able to liberate Japan from the debilitating

demilitarization of the twentieth century the film allows Japanese men to remilitarize with the

soldiers of a golden age of manhood. Released from the emasculating restrictions of Article 9,

Iba and his soldiers take the opportunity to unite with their samurai predecessors so as to

enact the warrior masculinity that had been denied to them in the Showa Era (Fruhstuck 2007:

54).

Japan’s present goes to war with its Sengoku past so that the previously pacifist SDF

troops can fulfil masculine fantasies denied to them in the Showa Period. Not only does this

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internal conflict resonate with the turmoil of the Sengoku Period (often referred to as Japan’s

Warring States Period), but it also reflects the tensions that existed in 1970s Japan between

the Pacifist Left who feared a return to Japanese militarism and those on the Right who

desired a more active role for Japan’s SDF in global affairs (Friedman and Lebard1991: 330).

In the narrative of the film, the SDF become an aggressive force to prevent Japan’s mistakes

in the twentieth century. Sengoku Jieitai allows the SDF to engage in the ‘futurity of war’ in

order to liberate Japan from its post-war stasis without disrupting Japan’s tenuous peace in

the present (Ivy 2008: 171). By declaring war on its own past, the film avoids the need to

tread delicately around issues of post-war victimization and instead internalizes the need for

Japanese men to find victory (and their innate warrior masculinity) in battle.

The confrontation with the uncanny samurai involves the unhomely sensation of

being displaced in a familiar setting. Leslie Poles Hartley famously wrote that ‘the past is a

foreign country: they do things differently there’ (2002: 1), which becomes an axiomatic

phrase within the narrative of Sengoku Jieitai. The SDF realize that they are foreigners in

their own land, partly because they have been temporally displaced, but also because they are

tasked with an impossible mission: the SDF soldiers must embody the spectre of Japan’s

samurai history that haunts the contemporary nation so that they might liberate the pacifist

present from its samurai past (Masschelein 2011: 137). This paradox necessitates the death of

the displaced SDF, who become victims of the ‘ontological condition of the human being:

man does not belong in the world, even if he may experience a familiarity with it’

(Masschelein 2011: 140). In the case of Sengoku Jieitai it is the Japanese soldier who does

not belong in the world, because the SDF member’s familiarity with the world is exactly what

threatens his existence.

The SDF soldiers in Sengoku Jieitai might be haunted by the impossible expectation

to be pacifist samurai warriors, but this sense of self-persecutory pacifism inadvertently

nourished Japan’s problematic role as a victimized nation in the post-war period. Despite

Japan’s history of atrocities in the early twentieth century the most common post-war

narrative shared by Japan’s political left and right centred on a state of victimhood for a

nation subjected to the atomic bomb and precursory disarmament at the hands of an

occupying force (Orr 2001: 3). Those who survived the war avoided complicity by

identifying with a sense of victimization in which the State was to blame for coercing

innocent civilians to join the war effort. However, the post-war State itself was quick to adopt

this victim mentality and apply it to the nation as a whole (Orr 2001: 4). Manufacturing a

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victim mentality for Japan became a means to avoid the repercussions of war responsibility

and legitimized dependence on the security umbrella of the United States. Sengoku Jieitai

reiterates this victim mentality by establishing the SDF soldiers as victims in both the past

and present. When his soldiers lament that they might not ever return to their homes,

Lieutenant Iba berates them: ‘What are you guys going to do when you get back to the Showa

era? What is there for you to do in a time of peace? At a time when we can’t even use our

weapons’. Men of the SDF become victims of Japan’s emasculating pacifism in the present,

which prevents them from reconnecting to their golden age of manhood, made explicit in the

film when the SDF troops are ultimately killed. Their inability to be men in the Showa period

has rendered them incapable of being men in the Sengoku period, since a hegemonic model

of masculinity cannot be founded upon a victim mentality.

The uncanny samurai in this scenario involves contemporary Japanese men

witnessing the disjuncture between their reality of emasculation and the unfamiliar

hypermasculinity of the golden age of manhood. Sabine Fruhstuck argues that ‘military

institutions all over the world invest a great deal of energy in creating the illusion that

military tasks are inherently male and masculine ones’, but this illusion is difficult to

maintain within the pacifist role of the SDF when many of the tasks performed by the SDF

(support, protection and relief) have historically been regarded as feminine (2007: 52).

Further complicating the masculinization of the SDF is the difficulty of constructing the

soldier as a hegemonic masculine figure when this position had already been appropriated by

the salaryman and his identification with the samurai as a corporate warrior (Fruhstuck 2007:

57). In order to reassert their primacy as Japan’s hegemonic warriors, SDF soldiers must

reclaim their direct connection to the warrior manhood of the samurai without invoking the

problematic connection to the militarism of Imperial Japan. It is no mistake then that Sengoku

Jieitai explicitly creates connections between the SDF and the samurai soldiers they meet,

one of whom comments, ‘we are from the same tribe’.

The film offers the specific date of 1549, which was the year firearms were first used

in a major Japanese battle, reducing the degree of alienation between the Sengoku samurai

and the weapons of the SDF. Rather than project a utopian image of the Japanese soldier into

the future, Sengoku Jieitai suggests that the ideal Japanese man exists in the present, all he

needs is the freedom to act as a warrior through an uninterrupted connection to his samurai

past. The SDF’s armoured-tank is referred to as an iron horse, effectively becoming a mount

upon which the samurai of the future will ride into battle, making it clear that the SDF soldier,

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not the salaryman, is the true descendant of Japan’s samurai masculinity. Also emphasized is

the importance of being able to kill and be killed as soldiers. Lieutenant Iba tells his crew that

‘if we’re all going to die anyway, I want to fight’, and it is the opportunity to die a warrior’s

death that ultimately separates the SDF soldier from the passivity of the salaryman. An SDF

soldier’s willingness to sacrifice himself for his country is ‘superior to the salaryman’s

sacrifice for his company’ (Fruhstuck 2007: 60).

Sengoku Jieitai addresses the anxieties of modern Japanese SDF soldiers and their

inability to meaningfully connect to a proud lineage of samurai, which involves the necessary

masculinization of both the SDF and the military itself. Significantly, the SDF was in the

process of integrating women into its ranks after 1974 due to a shortage of male recruits.

Partially due to the nature of being a pacifist organization many of the roles within the SDF

were deemed ‘suitable for women’ and positions began to open up for women who wanted a

more rewarding career in the military than could be found in the white-collar clerical jobs

typically assigned to them in the domestic workforce (Fruhstuck 2007: 89). However, women

who joined the SDF discovered that normalized gender roles, in which soldiers were men and

women were support staff, had become entrenched and discrimination existed despite the

non-normative nature of the SDF as a pacifist army (Fruhstuck 2007: 97). The growing

presence of women had the potential to complicate the anxieties of male soldiers who were

already prevented from establishing their maleness through acts of war, which makes the lack

of women in the film a significant absence.

The time-travelling narrative allows men to empower themselves, which necessitates

male power over women in order to normalize the hegemony of the dominant warrior

masculinity. Within the context of the film, Lieutenant Iba allows his men to systematically

rape a widowed woman, because ‘young men are supposed to sneak into a widow’s place’.

Hearing that he has permission one of the men remarks, ‘I’m going to do something I

couldn’t do in our Showa Era’. In this scene it becomes clear that Article 9 has not only

restricted Japanese soldiers from enacting their masculinity through acts of war, the

demilitarization has directly emasculated them by preventing their sexual domination of

women. Upon sneaking into the widow’s house the men of the SDF encounter Sengoku Era

soldiers with the same plan. If the SDF are allowed to re-embody the masculinity of their

dominant samurai forebears then they can reinforce their power over women, the loss of

which has long caused anxiety amongst those men who cling to masculinity as the dominant

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gender in society. Not only is the past unfamiliar territory for the SDF in Sengoku Jieitai,

apparently a woman’s body is too.

The samurai ethos was romanticized to inspire the conscripted soldiers of Japan’s

Imperial Army. But if he had once been a figure of romantic masculine ideals, the Rape of

Nanking problematized the connection between imperial soldiers and samurai in Japan’s

historical narrative (Hashimoto 2015: 6). The Rape of Nanking is symbolically re-enacted in

Sengoku Jietai as an event that victimizes Japanese women and problematically empowers

Japanese men. In the rewritten war narrative of the film the victims of the Japanese SDF

soldiers are not Chinese or Korean women, but Japanese peasants who are captured and raped

by Yano, a rogue soldier of the SDF who steals a patrol boat loaded with alcohol. While it is

certainly true that Japanese women were forced to become comfort women during the war,

the implication of establishing Japan as the primary victim of military atrocities reinforces the

national narrative of Japan as the victim of a military establishment that betrayed the trust of

individual citizens. It is also significant that Yano acts outside of his mandate as an SDF

soldier, which echoes the arguments of revisionists who refused to acknowledge that comfort

women were part of an official military strategy (Stetz 2007: 225). However, Yano’s actions

are not immediately condemned in the film. An SDF soldier says of Yano and the two men

who go AWOL with him, ‘they’ve got balls’. In a film that repeatedly emphasizes the

inability of SDF soldiers to fulfil masculine functions, the implicit support for Yano’s actions

is extremely troubling, particularly when Yano is punished for disobeying orders rather than

for his crimes against the women, who are jettisoned into the ocean without being explicitly

rescued.

By relocating the SDF into the past Sengoku Jieitai engages with the discourse of war

memory in order to establish the contemporary Japanese soldier as a victim. After its failed

attempt at imperialism and global hegemony, which led to defeat in the Asia Pacific War,

Japan as a proud and powerful nation survived, but as Sharalyn Orbaugh argues, ‘the very act

of surviving on through the present into the future entails a rewriting of memory, newly

necessary at each moment for the constitution of a currently viable identity in the current

context’ (cited in Wiley 2010: 307). Sengoku Jieitai offers the opportunity for an SDF squad

to rewrite history, and although they fail to alter the future of Japan, they are able to rewrite

their own agency and masculinity by temporarily joining the ranks of samurai within the

‘currently’ viable identity of a past context. Identifying with samurai is only temporary,

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however, and the attempt by the SDF members to become permanent fixtures of the military

space–time of Japan is punished with death. SDF as samurai is viable in fantasy only.

The contested military space–time of Sengoku Jieitaiis stabilized by the erasure of the

SDF squad who have transgressed the accepted role of Japanese soldiers as pacifists and

victims. An aggressive Japanese military can exist only in the annals of history, and so it is in

history that the SDF are buried. In the film the audience do not return to the military spaces

of contemporary Japan, because in the logic of time travel those spaces no longer exist; they

can be accessed only by travelling to the foreign lands of the past. However, the film

simultaneously revels in the opportunity to construct a link between the SDF members and

their samurai forebears, a link that has supposedly been missing in the real military spaces of

contemporary Japan. The sight of Sonny Chiba’s modern soldier wielding a samurai sword

celebrates the innate samurai spirit that resides in all Japanese men; all it takes is a desperate

situation and the freedom to act as warriors to unleash it. Unfortunately the unleashed

samurai spirit results in a mimetic re-enactment of past atrocities – the atrocities that had

prohibited Japanese men from imagining themselves as samurai in the first place. It is the

innate warrior spirit of the Japanese man that threatens to destabilize Japan as a demilitarized,

pacifist nation divorced from the military space–time of its past. And it is this fear of the

innate Japanese warrior consciousness that is evident in the subtext of Article 9. Sengoku

Jieitai does not offer a solution to the paradox of Japan’s military space–time. The continuity

between Japan’s militant past and its pacifist present must remain fragmented lest the SDF

attempt to imagine themselves as samurai; this requires distinguishing contemporary Japan’s

physical space from its historical memory and removing the body of the samurai from the

identity of Japanese men.

The body of a contemporary SDF member cannot be the site of a national memory

that does not exist, which calls into question the existence of the SDF member’s body in

space and time. Pulled between the contemporary suppression of masculine values and the

foreign masculinities of the past the SDF in the film are alienated from both past and present.

This feeds into the uncanny nature of contemporary soldiers confronting the military spaces

and bodies inhabited by samurai. Freud’s uncanny space suggests a return of the repressed,

but the uncanny space–time of Japan goes beyond repression. The temporal nature of Japan’s

military space (which threatens continuity with past atrocities) and its embodiment into a

modern Japanese soldier has not only been repressed, it has become impossible, accessible

only through the logic of time-travel in science-fiction fantasies.

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LET’S DO THE TIME-SLIP AGAIN

The 2005 remake of Sengoku Jieitai responds to Japan’s security issues in the post-9/11

period, and while it remains faithful to the spirit of the original film there are significant

deviations in the narrative that suggest unique anxieties regarding the future of Japanese

pacifism in the twenty-first century. Al Qaeda’s dramatic attack on the Twin Towers,

symbolic manifestations of western ideologies and global capitalism, initiated a global War

on Terror centred on America’s ‘overwrought’ response to the terror threat (Mueller and

Stewart 2012: 81).The nature of the terrorist attacks suggested the need for a collective global

response, and while the right of collective defence could be used to justify the military

response of NATO powers, Japan could not invoke such powers (Hughes 2013: 131).

Christopher Hughes explains that Japan circumvented the renunciation of war in Article 9 by

appealing to an active interpretation of Article 9’s preamble ‘stating Japan’s obligation to

work with an international society for the preservation of peace’ (2013: 131).Under such

peaceful pretences the SDF could be employed globally as a pacifist force, providing

logistical support for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Japan’s involvement in the War on Terror

demonstrated the active capacity of a pacifist nation and Japan’s willingness to work for the

protection of the United States. For the first time in its post-war history Japan’s military space

was extending beyond its own borders. For this reason Glenn Hook and Takeda Hiroko

describe Japan’s active role in global security since 2001 as an erosion of Japan’s identity as

a ‘peace state’, and while the SDF and Japan remained pacifist in essence it was evident that

maintaining peace had become an active, global pursuit (2007: 110).

Japan’s global pacifism post-9/11 demonstrated a willingness to actively participate in

international security measures in response to transgressions against the borders of the United

States. In 2005, the year that the remake of Sengoku Jieitai was released, Japan was also

confronted with the expansionist policies of China and anti-Japanese sentiment in South

Korea, which arose out of territorial disputes and vocal public resentment intensified by

lingering memories of Japanese war crimes. Hironori Sasada argues that in response to the

increasing tension between Japan and its East-Asian neighbours, ‘support for stronger

defense policies increased’ (Sasada 2006: 115). Territorial disputes over resource rich islands

only represented the tangible threats to Japan’s military-space – waters defended by a

technologically advanced Navy. Persistent evocations of Japan’s past atrocities made by

Koreans and Chinese made it evident that Japan’s military time was also being challenged.

Active pacifism, and active responses to local security threats in East-Asia, necessitated not

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only a re-imagined military space but also a re-imagined military time made possible in the

military space–time explored in the time travelling of Sengoku Jieitai: 1549.

The active role of the SDF contributes to one of the core differences of Sengoku

Jieitai: 1549. Whereas the original film focused on a single SDF squad and their tragic

encounter with an unhomely past, the remake involves two separate incidents of time-travel.

In the film an SDF squad under the command of Colonel Matoba are accidentally transported

through time during an experiment conducted in 2003, the year of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Shortly after their disappearance, holes in time begin to appear in contemporary Japan. These

holes in time threaten to unravel the very fabric of space–time itself. It is assumed that the

members of the first SDF squad are altering the past and disturbing the temporal continuity

that allows for the existence of Japan and the entire world. An SDF general states that Japan

is under attack from its past, and so a second squadron of SDF members under the command

of colonel Yusuke Kashima are assembled to defend contemporary Japan from its own

history. Two years after the first incident the second squad are sent to the year 1549 to restore

historical continuity. A total of 26 years after the original film was released the SDF are

allowed a much more active role; they are no longer passive onlookers of history but active

agents determining the future of Japan and the world. And yet the legitimization of Japan’s

military future remains tied to its past.

Historical continuity motivates both the antagonist and protagonist in Sengoku Jieitai:

1549, and while their intentions differ, they both seek to connect contemporary SDF

personnel to a narrative of necessary sacrifice. Colonel Matoba becomes the villain of the

film because he wants to alter Japan’s historical trajectory in an attempt to avoid Japan’s loss

in the Pacific War. Matoba is killed so that Japan’s true historical trajectory can be restored.

However, his scheme to alter history contains one significant parallel with Japan’s post-

World War II narrative: Matoba plans to instigate a nuclear explosion in 1549 because he

believes that the destruction of Japan is a necessary condition for its rise to power. Matoba’s

belief in the necessary sacrifice of Japanese citizens echoes the rousing speech of Captain

Usubuchi moments before the defeat of the battleship Yamato in 1945: ‘We will lead the way.

We will die as harbingers of Japan’s new life’ (in Hashimoto 2015: 10). Akiko Hashimoto

questions the popularity of Captain Usubuchi’s speech, ‘that links progress to sacrifice’,

because it avoids condemning the actions of the soldiers and the actions of the State that led

to their deaths (Hashimoto 2015: 10). Matoba is aggressive and murderous throughout the

film, but his scheme still situates Japan as the victim, and the sacrificial soldier as the

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harbinger of a new nation. And with Matoba’s death the narrative trajectory of Japan that is

restored is that which requires Japan to suffer defeat in World War II and the devastation of

two atomic bombs. In Sengoku Jieitai: 1549 the narrative of Japan as victim becomes the

accepted version of history, and it is a narrative that the contemporary SDF personnel must be

willing to sacrifice their lives for.

The co-presence of Japan’s past and present is articulated through the visualization of

Japan’s contemporary remilitarization shaping the military space–time of 1549. When the

second SDF squad are sent through time the landscape of Japan’s past has been transformed

and it becomes apparent that it is no longer uncanny because it connects pacifist soldiers to a

militant history; it is uncanny and unhomely because it bears a disturbing resemblance to the

military spaces occupied by the SDF of twenty-first century Japan. A fortress resembling

Azuchi Castle, the historical home of Oda Nobunaga, features watchtowers armed with M-60

machineguns and a sprawling oil-refinery. It is the wartime landscape of modern Iraq’s

burning oilfields transposed onto Japan’s past. In order to establish an historical continuity

that makes sense of Japan’s involvement in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the battles of Lord

Nobunaga in the Sengoku Period become battles over oil, rather than battles for the

unification of Japan.

The display of military might that foregrounds the spectacle of modern Japanese

soldiers at war with sixteenth-century samurai draws attention to the problematic

remilitarization of the SDF after 9/11 and the potential break from Japan’s post-war, pacifist

identity. In the film, an American-made AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter is sent back in time

with the 2003 squad. It is replaced with a Kawasaki OH-1 Ninja in 2005. The rapidity of

rearmament is startling, which might explain why the Kawasaki attack helicopter is destroyed

almost immediately in the film. Japan can display its defensive capabilities, but the balance of

its military power must be kept in-check. In the narrative of the film Japan’s rearmament is

explicitly connected to the militarization of its past as it becomes apparent that the greatest

threat to Japan’s future is the rogue AH-1 attack helicopter firing missiles at samurai on

horseback. It may seem ludicrous in the film, but Christopher Hughes, writing of Japan’s

security position after 9/11, argues that time is a key factor in contemporary discussions of

Japan’s remilitarization: ‘the concept of remilitarization as a dynamic process over time

assists as an important reminder to search for the possibilities of not just continuity but also

significant change in a society’s military stance’ (2013: 128). Sengoku Jieitai: 1549 visually

articulates the temporal aspect of remilitarization to demonstrate the delicate balance between

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the continuity of pacifist ideals and the need to maintain a connection with a militant past

occupied by the spirit of the Japanese male archetype – the samurai.

Time in Sengoku Jieitai: 1549 is not unidirectional and history does not retreat into

the past. Immediately after the first SDF squad are sent through time a circular patch of grass

takes their place. The grass has travelled from the Sengoku-era battlefields of the past into the

future, and hunched over on the grass is a lone samurai. His arrival marks the continuous co-

presence of past and present that is alluded to but not visualized in the original 1979 film. Of

interest is the co-presence of the past made manifest in the military space of a feudal

battlefield and the body of the samurai. While the SDF are at odds with Japan’s past, the time

travelling samurai is at peace with the twenty-first-century vision of Japan that he had

unknowingly fought for during the Sengoku Period. His presence in the film reaffirms the

legitimacy of Japan’s historical trajectory. He also appeals to the samurai values of

contemporary Japanese men, thus legitimizing the connection between Japan’s militant past

and its pacifist present that the film had been problematizing. In particular, he appeals to the

samurai spirit of a retired SDF colonel so as to reawaken the dormant warrior spirit of a

civilian.

Retired SDF colonel Yusuke Kashima is the reluctant hero of Sengoku Jieitai: 1549, a

restaurant owner who demonstrates that the qualities of the Japanese samurai still reside in

the contemporary Japanese civilian. Kashima initially dismisses his connection to the

unfamiliar past of samurai soldiers. ‘I’m not a samurai, they don’t exist anymore’, he says.

And yet the time-travelling man talking to him in the present is a samurai, physical evidence

of the paradox that defines Japan’s demilitarized military space–time. The samurai warrior no

longer exists in the present, and yet his samurai virtues are reified and reunited with a former

member of the SDF. The 1979 feature confronted members of the SDF with an uncanny

samurai, a warrior that they attempted to identify with despite the unfamiliarity of the

militarized body. In the 2005 remake, the time-travelling samurai represents the return of that

which had been repressed, which involves a return of the military space, the body and the

memory associated with it. Kashima, a Japanese everyman, is asked to re-establish the link

between his pacifist body and the militant body of the samurai, and to do so he must return to

the patch of grass from the Sengoku period so as to realign his militarized body with the

military space of Japan’s past. By giving the SDF an active role in the film, and by having

Kashima accept his nascent samurai spirit, the 2005 film remilitarizes Japan’s military space–

time as a response to the return of that which had been repressed.

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CONCLUSION

The 1979 feature film Sengoku Jieitai and its 2005 remake articulate the anxieties and

frustrations of contemporary Japanese soldiers who are unable to enact the masculine rites of

their samurai forebears. Their commitment to pacifism becomes synonymous with a

commitment to victimhood, and their attempts to re-associate with the samurai result in

uncanny confrontations with a past that has been repressed in the modern memory of the

nation. Neither film offers a solution to the paradox of Japan’s impossible military space–

time. In the 1979 feature the SDF members are killed for transgressing Japan’s commitment

to pacifism. The 2005 feature allows the time-travelling SDF to return to the present in order

to prevent a nuclear explosion in the Sengoku Period. Colonel Kashima is temporarily

reunited with his innate warrior spirit, but the defining moment of his return to the present

day is the disarmament of a nuclear device – his success as an SDF member involves

disarmament, not rearmament. The reunification of the pacifist SDF body with the militant

samurai is fleeting, as is the permeability and flexibility of Japan’s military space–time. Japan

cannot relive the golden days of its militant past. Instead, both films suggest that Japan’s

future depends on a commitment to pacifism and the acknowledgment that Japan’s SDF may

have inherited the virtues of samurai, but these virtues must be applied to peace not war.

The need for Japan to reconcile with its military space–time has become increasingly

prescient. In the 1979 film Japanese men confront their repressed samurai history by accident,

hence their deaths. Try as they might to reconnect with their samurai forebears, the original

film implied that Japanese men cannot, and should not, identify with the militarized bodies of

Japan’s past. The 2005 film necessitates an active response by the SDF because Japan’s past

initiated the war with its present. Unlike the first film, which rendered a return to the past

tragic and futile, the 2005 remake demands that Japan actively realign its historical memory.

This subtle inversion of the justifications for the SDF’s response legitimizes the active role of

the SDF in the present, but on one condition: Japan must settle the continuing contestations of

its recent history and untether the SDF from the burden of Japan’s war-memory and the

narrative of victimhood.

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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Fraser McKissack was awarded his doctorate in 2016 at The University of Auckland. Sunset

Warriors Cowboys, Samurai, and the Crisis of Masculinity explores the post-World War II

crisis of masculinity evident in the cinematic archetypes of the American cowboy and the

Japanese samurai. It is an interdisciplinary project that focuses on the contours of the bilateral

relationship between the United States and Japan. Fraser is also interested in gender and

sexuality in videogames and the sociocultural history of videogame emulation.

Contact:

Media, Film and Television

Faculty of Arts

University of Auckland,

Private Bag 92019

Auckland 1142

New Zealand

E-mail: F_Mckissack@hotmail.com