Episode 452 - The Waves are High but the Day is Clear, Part 1
Added 2022-09-02 17:17:18 +0000 UTCThis episode has its genesis in work I did for my dissertation, way back in the day. I'd initially considered doing some research on the SDF, both because it's a very understudied topic in English and because (frankly) the Japanese government hands out most of the funding for Japanese history research and for some reason they have never been too keen on funding work on the prewar military after about 1920. Ultimately, I decided I did want to focus on the prewar era (which in retrospect proved a real challenge for exactly the reasons you'd imagine) but I never quite let go of the idea that the SDF is not really taken seriously. I'm a big believer in the idea that, in a democracy, civilians have an obligation to at least know a bit about the military simply because they are asked to vote on military issues, and that holds true even if your military is a "self-defense force" on paper.
The focus on the Maritime SDF, meanwhile, comes from exactly what I said in the episode: going forward, it's the service branch you're likely to hear the most about given the current geopolitical situation in East Asia. This proved to be a real challenge for me simply because naval affairs comes with a lot of jargon and terminology that can make life very challenging if you don't know it--but hopefully the next two episodes should prove an interesting distillation for interested non-experts.
