Tries painting a dark picture of constitutional amendments, raises eyebrows for colorful imagination that resembles naughty anime or video game.
JSDF (Page 2)
Are anime girls on aircraft and recruitment posters enough to moe-tivate you to join the Japanese Self Defence Forces?
In a recent interview, the head of Kochi Chuo High School, Masahisa Chikamori, announced that the school would be starting a Self-Defense Force Course in 2016. This course would provide students with the skills and knowledge needed to join Japan’s armed protective organization, including some combat training.
However, both the Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology admitted they were unaware of this training program when questioned about it.
We’ve seen the Japanese Self-Defense Forces get quite creative with trying to entice new recruits, but never before have we seen them do an all-out official collaboration with an anime.
And Gate is the perfect anime for them to team up with. It’s about the JSDF traveling through a portal to another world, taking down monsters, teaming up with cute girls, and just generally making it look like joining them would be the most amazing thing ever.
You can bet the JSDF is milking it for every last drop they can, starting with posters that are giving us a strange urge to visit our local recruitment center.
Any military force in the world is sure to be filled with young, healthy, fit men and women, which also happens to be the perfect recipe for creating super sexy humans–especially if you happen to have a thing for uniforms. So, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that this month will see the release of two photo books and a pair of DVDs from the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force: One pair dedicated to their sexy men and the other dedicated to their beautiful women.
And unlike the JSDF’s 2014 photo calendar, you can expect to find nothing but real enlisted men and women in these books–including the JSDF’s only professional singer Yukari Miyake.
The 2014 Nobel Peace Prize has an unprecedented nomination: the Ninth Article of the Japanese constitution. The Ninth Article renounces the right to engage in war or to maintain a military. The group advocating the nomination, the “Constitution’s Ninth Article for the Nobel Peace Prize,” is based in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture.
Housewife Naomi Takusu (37) came up with the idea. She started an online petition last May and garnered 1,500 signatures in just five days. She contacted the Nobel Committee, from whose response she learned that candidates can only be nominated through certain channels and must be individuals or groups. She changed her strategy and tried again for 2014.
It would seem that marketing in Japan is a far cry from the complicated psychological manipulation employed by the ad geniuses of Mad Men. Things, it would seem, are a lot simpler than that for advertising and promotions executives at Japanese firms, ever since someone came upon the brilliant idea of using cutesy anime girls to promote damn near everything.
The huge, innocent eyes and adolescent proportions of the common anime girl apparently trigger something deep in the dark recesses of the brain that makes people lose all rational control, buying up “moe”-promoted goods by the truckload and even making potentially life-endangering decisions like joining the Japan Self Defense Forces.
In our modern world, with the sometimes questionable motives of our political leaders and the abundance of often conflicting information available online, it’s perhaps not surprising that countries’ armed forces have a hard time finding new recruits.
While the United States Army opted to take a rather gung-ho approach to recruitment by releasing a free-to-play tactical first-person shooter video game in the form of America’s Army, Japan – who, following its defeat in World War II, is permitted only to have “Self-Defense Forces” that remain on Japanese territory – has its own methods of rallying support and enticing potential new recruits. Its latest recruitment drive, for example, is so fantastically quirky that is positively screams “Japan”.
Say hello to the JSDF “cheerleading shout” app that allows future soldiers, sailors and pilots to take selfies and insert them into Mii-like avatars that dance around when special augment reality (AR) cards are scanned.
The Japan Self-Defense Forces, or JSDF for short, are basically the Japanese military and includes naval, infantry, and aerial branches. Though the Japanese constitution officially forbids the JSDF from acting aggressively and sees them rather as an “extension of the police” than a proper military, the Japanese budget for the JSDF is the fifth largest military budget in the world.
And now they have their own fan club, which was recently announced along with an accompanying website!
In any military, no matter how fancy your drones or how snappy your fighter jets, people are still the driving force. You’ll always need a few more good soldiers, which makes recruitment an essential and very important part of armed services.
The Japan Self-Defense Forces, or JSDF, are no different, and eagle-eyed people can spot posters pretty much anywhere. As you may expect, the JSDF in various prefectures also have Twitter accounts where they can post recruitment information and interact with potential service members.
Recently, the Miyagi area recruiter garnered Internet attention by crafting a tweet based on a scene from the school girl anime, Love Live!
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