Aaron Skabelund - Inglorious, Illegal Bastards: Japans Self-Defense Force during the Cold War

It is a humbling task to reflect on the history of this book, which began about twenty years ago. Over the last two decades, my work has benefited from interactions with countless people, who have generously shared their time, expertise, and experiences. I acknowledge their contributions with immense gratitude.

The research that grew into this book began at Columbia University in early 2001, when I was studying the Police Reserve Force (PRF), a forerunner of the Self-Defense Force (SDF). Greg Pflugfelder at Columbia was the ideal mentor, a polymath with an infectious intellectual curiosity who was both encouraging and critical. He, along with Carol Gluck and Henry D. Smith II, formed a trinity of historians who made Columbia a nearly unrivaled setting to study Japan.

Yet, the origins of this book emerged from experiences and education further back in time. This book is dedicated in part to my parents, who stocked our home with books and an interest and concern for people and the wider world. As the youngest of six brothers, followed by three sisters, and without a television in our home (and of course no internet), I spent many hours devouring the written word at the Springville Public Library, a frequent destination on my red Raleigh bike in the small town in Utah where I grew up. Like many of my students today, I was particularly interested in World War II. Thus, a book that examines some of the legacies of that conflict is not surprising. My curiosity about the past in the present was further stimulated by my undergraduate studies of international relations, history, and Japanese at Brigham Young University, interrupted by nearly two years in the Kansai area of Japan as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; by an internship among salaried white-collar office workers in Tokyo one summer; by work as a coordinator of international relations for Gifu Prefecture as part of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme; and by a masters degree at Stanford University primarily studying with Peter Duus, who had been Gregs advisor. Some of the questions I began to explore in a paper written for Peter about changing notions of fatherhood in postwar Japan led to this book.

I am thankful that I have had the support to work on this book for many years. In 2002, I received funding to commence research in earnest in the form of a fellowship from the US Department of Education. After several months of archival work, publication opportunities related to a paper I had written during my time at Columbia about human-canine relations led me to change topics, and that research ultimately resulted in Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World(2011), also published by Cornell University Press. All the while, I continued my research on the SDF. I am thankful for a variety of grants I received over the years that helped see this book to fruition: a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, a Weatherhead Fellows Program Training Grant, Columbia University; a Twentieth-Century Japan Research Award, Center for Historical Studies and McKeldin Library, University of Maryland; a National Security Education Program David L. Boren Fellowship, Department of Defense; a Research Fellowship, Department of Politics, Graduate School of Law, Hokkaido University; a Fellowship for Foreign Researchers, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science; a Faculty Research Grant, David M. Kennedy Center for International and Area Studies, Brigham Young University; and a Mary Lou Fulton Young Scholar Award, College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences, Brigham Young University.

Funding is vital to research, but the people who help one along the way make it truly enriching. As I began this book, Marianne Scholl, a former Harvard University doctoral student, generously shared many boxes of documents stored in her home in Seattle that she had collected in Japan for a dissertation project that she had not completed. Another early, priceless contact, who shared documents, books, and his personal experiences, was Leonard Humphreys, a US military advisor to and astute observer of the SDF in the 1950s and 1960s. Leonard and his wonderful wife Sally kindly hosted me at their home in Lodi, California, near Stockton where he had recently retired as a historian of Japan at the University of the Pacific. Thanks to his introductions, I also interviewed several other former US military and civilian officials, Raymond Aka, Bob Robens, and Charles Townsend in California and New Jersey, who had interacted with the early SDF as part of the US Military Advisory Assistance Group.

In Japan, I was the beneficiary of more kindness and generosity. My initial year of research funded by the Fulbright was sponsored by Yoshida Yutaka of Hitotsubashi University. I am also indebted to my former employer, Nissho Electronics, which provided me free lodging in its company dorm during my research in Tokyo. I spent the next three years at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, sponsored by Matsuura Masataka and his colleagues in the Faculty of Law. A superb historian, Matsuura-sensei was an invaluable champion of my research, and he and his colleagues asked me to present my work and made key introductions. I am particularly thankful to Yamaguchi Jir for introducing me to Sakuraba Yasuki, the former mayor of Nayoro, who, like the Humphreys, allowed me to stay in his home and patiently answered my questions. Makabe Jin, another historian in the Faculty of Law, offered tremendous support for my research over the years. I was particularly fortunate to have Sat Morio as a colleague at Hokkaido University. Sat, who had joined the PRF in 1950 and served in the SDF until his retirement in 1992, was conducting graduate research about imperial military intelligence, which he later published as a book. He kindly shared his memories of the postwar force over the course of multiple interviews and many informal conversations.