PLAYING WAR: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan | By Sabine Frühstück | Pacific Affairs

PLAYING WAR: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan | By Sabine Frühstück | Pacific Affairs



BOOK REVIEWS, NORTHEAST ASIA


VOLUME 91 – NO. 3




PLAYING WAR: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan | By Sabine Frühstück


Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017. xi, 276 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-29545-2.

Frühstück’s fascinating book examines Japan’s history of children’s war play and depictions of war and children. It presents a complex but well-documented argument about how modern militarism is supported by particular cultural constructions of childhood and images of children designed to have emotional resonance. The book also shows how the Japanese Self-Defense Force (SDF) uses these images to sway viewers to accept the military’s role as natural, just, and moral, while demonstrating how pacifism similarly relies on depictions of children to sentimentalize peace. The book’s rich array of source material, from exploration of historical game boards to video games to manga versions of Ministry of Defense white papers, impresses in its variety and makes for engrossing reading. The book would be excellent for graduate seminars in a variety of social science disciplines, and would make for provocative discussion reading for advanced undergraduate classes.

The author weaves an “analytical story” (213) of the paradoxes of modern militarism as seen through children’s war play and representations of children and the military from Japan’s feudal period to the present day. Children’s war play engaged from dozens up to thousands of children at different points in Japanese history (30), resulting in injury and death at times, often sparking social debate about whether humans possess an innate “will to war” and how to protect children’s innocence. Children sometimes organized their own war play, while at other times schools and military instructors organized it, offering official legitimation. Increasingly, such war play is virtual, through video games, and often set in outer space or the distant future (94), with little “high-impact violence” shown (96).

Throughout Japan’s modern history, Frühstück demonstrates, childhood has been linked with militarism. In the early Meiji period, samurai were decoupled from warmongers, and children became linked to the new nation-state’s health and power, especially as childhood became seen as a period of development separate from adulthood. Mothers played roles in service to the state as educators and caregivers of children, while the strength of boys’ bodies was seen as important for the nation and requiring discipline. In the years before Japan’s wars of imperialism, observers had an ambivalent view of children’s war play, war toys were banned, and military service was spurned by many. But the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars drew more boys into officially sanctioned war play. Board games taught colonization of territory and helped cultivate children’s enthusiasm for war. Concerns about war games subsided over time and the practice was utterly “normalized and naturalized” (55) by the time of the December 1937 Nanjing Massacre in the Asia-Pacific War.

After Japan’s defeat, militarism was discredited in the postwar era; war stories and play became increasingly stigmatized and dissociated from World War II, particularly “when official pacifism became socially mainstreamed in the 1970s” (94). Yet the pacifist movement resulted in new ways of linking childhood and war, while similarly relying on constructions of childhood innocence and vulnerability. Amidst increasing legal protection for children and films such as Grave of the Fireflies that depicted the horrors of war inflicted upon children, the “emotional capital” of children was mobilized, now for the cause of peace, even if at the “cost of greater questions about citizen war responsibility” (163).

The final chapter of the book describes how the Japanese SDF, in an environment in which it has an increasingly hard time recruiting soldiers, tries to legitimate its military and soften its image to go after the “young, naive, and underprivileged.” Whereas military materials in most parts of the world offer the promise to turn boys into men, Frühstück argues that SDF promotional materials infantilize, sexualize, and even “queer” the military. This results in “crossing, blurring, and redefining the boundaries of war/peace, man/woman, child/cyborg, and sex/violence” (169). Frühstück uncovers many fascinating examples of military promotional materials that decouple the military from the “concept of war making, violence, death, loss, and disaster” (176). These need to be read and visualized in the book to be fully appreciated.

The book acknowledges the difficulty of measuring the precise effects of military public relations campaigns on public opinion (207). SDF recruiters occasionally boosted enrollment due to their campaigns, but one cannot be certain of their effects and the SDF still struggles to meet personnel needs. Frühstück strongly makes the case, though, for the “interchangeability” of “popular cultural militarism” and “military popular culture” (209) by showing a range of cultural artifacts that highlight the same types of sexualized military representations in popular and official publications. So, regardless of how effective they are at conveying their purpose, they are at least familiar or “normal” to a segment of the population.

Frühstück acknowledges that she has been picking and choosing what to include in the book, which has some risks (213). Given the wealth of material included, however, the themes identified are well developed and clearly worth the scholarly effort, which should stimulate new thinking and connections across scholarship in security studies, feminist and gender studies, anthropology, and political science. Frühstück persuasively shows how children’s images, particularly those of the girl child, help naturalize the process of war and dissociate mass violence done in the name of the nation-state. Through linkages of war and childhood, war becomes seen as a natural, universal, and continuous part of human experience, with boys ready to become ever-willing soldiers.

Liv Coleman

The University of Tampa, Tampa, USA                                                                    

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Last Revised: November 29, 2018