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Robert D ELDRIDGE, The Self-Defense Forces and Postwar Politics in Japan, Social Science Japan Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1, Winter 2021, Pages 241–244, https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyaa043
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Extract
I last met the author of The Self-Defense Forces and Postwar Politics in Japan, Sado Akihiro, about seven years ago in Okinawa Prefecture in southwestern Japan. He had brought his undergraduate students to Camp Smedley D. Butler, the headquarters of Marine Corps Installations Pacific, where I was then the Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff, G-7 (Government and External Relations), for a briefing, tour, and an exchange of opinions. Prior to visiting the base in the central part of the main island of Okinawa, he had travelled, if memory serves me correctly, to some of the outer islands further south where the Japanese government was planning on deploying members of the Self-Defense Force (SDF).
As a fellow researcher who similarly likes to be on the ground, I appreciated his ‘genba-shugi’ approach to research—seeing things for himself, interviewing those concerned, and forming his own judgments. It was not his first visit to Okinawa nor his last. For Sado, that trip was likely the ideal intersection of his research interests—the SDF and Okinawa—and his profession—teaching and research. This book, published in March 2017, is the English version of his 2006 book on the SDF entitled Sengo Seiji to Jieitai, published by Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, a small Tokyo-based publisher dating to the late Tokugawa Period which has published most of his books to date. As Sado explains in the Afterword, the book is actually a rewrite of an earlier 2003 work (Sengo Nihon no Bōei to Seiji, or ‘Postwar Japanese Defense and Politics’), which was a much more academic tome. According to Sado, Sengo Nihon no Bōei to Seiji ‘was welcomed both by general readers and critics who contributed numerous favourable reviews to newspapers, magazines, and professional periodicals. Understandably, though, a few readers complained about the poor accessibility of the book due to its high academic nature’ (237). The publisher allowed Sado to revise the contents for a ‘wider readership and to broaden its coverage…to include the most recent developments’ (ibid.). These changes have indeed made the book more accessible and thus easier for the talented translator, Noda Makito, who has rendered numerous works on modern diplomatic history and Japanese politics into English for many audiences.
