 Good afternoon. I'm Jody Krestgaard. I'm a lecturer at the University of Vermont. It is my honor to be the moderator for this panel on the Japan Self-Defense Forces in general. Very delighted to have with us today Consul Aiko Inouye from the Consulate General of Japan in Boston. Consul, if you'd please stand up back there. Thank you very much for attending. Thank you very much. Thank you, ma'am. Two caucuses ago, Dr. Aiko Iwata, Dr. Petka Pincus and myself were delighted to be able to present our research on the operationalization of gender in the JSDF and talk about the new Japanese National Action Plan as it was being formulated. We chose this woodblock print of an American sailor to introduce ourselves for a couple of reasons. First, it seemed completely appropriate, given the fact that Newport was Commodore Perry's hometown and we were here at the Naval War College. Second, it served for us as a reminder, working as a multidisciplinary transnational team on research for an article, that initial impressions from different cultures meet and then meet again, rippled throughout their relationship. And it's important that we properly understand each other as we go forward. Our panel today includes Professor Sabina Frushta, Colonel Amanda Fielding, and Commander Yoko Kawashima. Let me introduce each of them up front. Dr. Frushta gives a professor of modern Japanese cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For Aiko, Becca, and I, when we were doing our research, her research and writing was tremendously important because there is relatively little available in English on gender and Japanese self-defense forces. And her work served as a center point for us around which we could develop a shared understanding of our different perspectives. Dr. Frushta was busy late, having served as the Director East Asia Center at Santa Barbara and serving on the American Advisory Committee for Japanese Studies of the Japan Foundation and the Northeast Asian Council of the Association of Asian Studies, among other organizations in addition to her teaching. Further, Dr. Frushta is a prolific writer and her most recent book, playing board of children and the paradoxes of modern militarism in Japan, just came out this year. As a result of our research, Aiko, Becca, and I concluded that if Japan were to look at the experiences of a Western military that might have the most translatable lessons learned, as the JSDF sought to operationalize gender, it would be Australia. Colonel Amanda Fielding is currently serving as the Gender Advisor to the Australian Defense Forces Chief of Joint Operations. She has a wide range of operational experiences, having served in East Timor, Iraq, and Afghanistan twice, for a second time as the Gender Advisor for the Resolute Support Mission. To document that, we have a group photo of Colonel Fielding and her colleagues in front of the descriptively named Yellow Building, the Resolute Support Headquarters in Dubai. In her other assignments, Colonel Fielding has served as the Commander of the Army School of Coordinates and the Deputy Head of Corps for the Royal Australian Army Board of Corps. The final member of our panel is Commander Doko Kawashima, who is currently serving in her new assignment as the Japanese Gender Advisor to NATO Headquarters in Brussels. Commander Kawashima has been with the Maritime Self-Defense Force since 1998, and she has had extensive experience in the fleet. She served as a Navigation Officer, an Operations Officer, an Executive Officer, and most recently as the Commanding Officer of the JS Sector Yuki. A Hatsuyuki-class destroyer currently serving as a training vessel. She also has significant staff experience in her time ashore, including working in the staff plans and policy division of the Maritime Staff Office. It was only with the greatest reluctance that Commander Kawashima allowed me to use this photo of her commanding the Sector Yuki, but it was simply too cool not to use it. Please join me in giving a warm welcome for our panelists. Good afternoon. I've been thinking about how I fit into the program, and I was thinking about the various categories of military who are here and the various goals of different speakers and organizations. And I thought if there's organizational improvements or social change, if those are the goals of some of us, then perhaps my expertise in ethnography and history of Japan comes closest to the quest to perhaps re-articulate our questions or question our categories. So we'd like to take this particular agenda into my paper today. A brief note on the self-defense forces. The self-defense forces were founded in 1954. In spite of the Constitution's article 9 that reads, and you have it here, I read this out loud, aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order. The Japanese people forever renounced war as the sovereign right of the nation and the threat of use of force as a means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea and air forces as well as other war potential will never be maintained. The right of the literacy of the state will not be recognized. As you can imagine, the self-defense forces' exact role and reach have been debated ever since. Moreover, the integration of women has never before been articulated quite as forcefully as under the current Administration of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. All signs point to this particular moment being a decisive one for both, the direction of Japan's self-defense forces and the role of women among their reigns. So one of the premises for my discussion in particular is that the self-defense forces operate in a very specific legal space that makes many of its members wonder what exactly their competence, what exactly their goals, what exactly their restrictions on their various activities on a range of missions are. A second point I would like to make is that the women who join the self-defense forces volunteer from within a society whose gender inequality compares to few others in the global north. And so just to juxtapose three different kinds of data here, the Human Development Index for instance tells us that Japan is one of the highest levels of socioeconomic equality. The Global Peace Index ranks Japan as one of the world's most peaceful countries with regards to such indicators as social unrest, crime, and armed conflict. But when it comes to gender inequality, Japan strongly resembles most of Latin America, Vietnam, or China, all countries with dramatically lower levels of human development. Now when you think about this, of course one question we need to ask is why the women who join the self-defense forces are motivated to join the military in the first place. And I think Ms. Kawashima will go into more detail in terms of data, but I just want to mention that it was in the mid-1990s when the self-defense forces first initiated a campaign to recruit more women. They got very quickly to something between 5 and 6%, and they're currently at something like 7.6%. So we're talking about almost 30 years of some kind of effort of gender integration that has been, and I think that's fair to say, largely unsuccessful. So that actually very much contradicts the very motivation, the very key motivations that young women have to join the self-defense forces because one of their key motivations is to find in the self-defense forces a merit-based career system that they believe, and to a large degree justifiably so, lacks in civil society. So they go into the military in the belief that the military is the one organization in society that actually does advance people according to very objective and transparent measures of achievement. There's a number of other motivators. One is, and this is of course tied to this first motivation, one is social mobility. When we talk about enlisted service members and to a large degree also non-commissioned officers, they imagine that joining the military would get them socially mobile and move them up compared to whatever kinds of professions they might embody in civilian life. For others, joining the self-defense forces is a vehicle for pursuing a career elsewhere. And on the officers level, of course these motivations and the very hierarchy among them changes a little bit across different kinds of career paths, but officers to some degree see, or some of them see joining the self-defense forces is something like plan B to a diplomatic career, if they belong and come from a socioeconomic background that does not allow them to attend a university, a good university and allow them a good education based on their own needs. So recent defense white papers do report significant advances for female uniformed self-defense force personnel, but as I mentioned, the numbers show a rather depressed picture. To facilitate further change, the self-defense force must create an effective gender policy that is based on a complete understanding of the obstacles to integrating women. To do that, and I think that ties back to some of what Professor Brooks said this morning in terms of as long as this conversation is a conversation that takes place among women only, we're not making much, or primarily women, we're not making much progress. And so along those same lines, I'd suggest here that when we think gender integration, when we think women's integration, perhaps in any organization, particularly in the military, we need to take into account what kinds of men and masculinity are at work within that organization, within the military. And so with the self-defense forces I've done interviews with about 200 service members, actually many more women than is justified, but a lot of men as well. And so what I found is that many of them see as the models to which they have an ambivalent relationship. So they're both attracting characteristics as well as characteristics that make them distance themselves and identify themselves as distinct from those are three types of masculinities. And so I think this is important to understand precisely because within the self-defense forces sort of the combat mission or the combat soldier is not the key individual. It's not the vision that young men and women have when they join the military. One of those three types is the salaryman or the white collar worker. And so a lot of young men who join the self-defense forces think primarily in terms of that's what they don't want to be. That's what their work, what they aspire to, what they think the self-defense forces is about. What they imagine their roles will be about is not that white collar worker. It's not somebody who is selfishly pursuing his own goals or the goals of the company that are primarily economic. What they do imagine is very much in contrast to that a role that does good. And so this is sort of out of order. This is the kind of image that a lot of young men have. They're thinking about doing good in the context of community service, in the context of disaster relief both domestically and internationally, and in similar kinds of roles. And so they see the mainstream sort of hegemonic masculinity of the salaryman as a contrasting type of masculinity. Another figure, such figure that plays into how men within self-defense forces identify as members of the military is a historical figure, namely members of the Imperial Army and Navy. And this is, again, it's not something that is embraced. It's not like when you think about it, I know I'm caricaturing now other militaries, but it's not like in some other militaries, particularly the American, that looks back on great heroes of past wars. That's not a possibility for Japanese soldiers. But the Imperial Army soldiers still sort of a figure that plays into their self-identity in terms of we want to be different and we want to show that we are different from the Imperial Army for a number of reasons. Partly, and something that is often forgotten in such narratives, partly because they lost the war, partly also because there is an understanding of the army in particular, the Imperial Army in particular, of having committed war crimes and so on and so forth. So it's not, there's no positive relationship possible with the past military. But that said, particularly the now older generation of self-defense forces members have grandfathers who have some sort of, either were at the end of the war or even served in the Second World War. So there's some kind of lineage, some kind of necessity of these young men to clarify their relationship to the predecessor of the self-defense forces. And then third, also something that is not unique to Japan, but specific and of importance when we think about what kinds of masculinities are venerated within the self-defense force, what kind of integration within what kind of male and masculinist environment we're talking about is the American soldier. And again, I'm caricaturing, of course I'm aware of different branches and different modes and all of that, but from the perspective of a Japanese member of the self-defense forces, there's an American soldier out there either physically because there are thousands of troops stationed in Japan or because of the American soldiers or some version of his presence in popular culture, an American popular culture that of course is consumed in Japan as well. There's no Japanese popular culture to speak of that is the equivalent of Hollywood that turns out less so in the last couple of years, but turns out movie after movie about what the American military does in various places. Now, the anxiety about how to, in any case, in this fluid context, one gender configuration is not more real or pretentious or more hidden or avert than another, but what I'm suggesting is that each service member needs to sort of figure out where he stands in that particular environment. And so it is the, well, let me go through next. So in any case, the anxiety about how to properly produce and perform militarized masculinity then is by no means unique to the self-defense forces. As the types of valorized soldierhood across military establishments around the world multiply, armed forces in democratic countries the world over, as you all know, have been lowering the admission barriers regarding gender and orientation, particularly women and homosexuals. In addition, in an effort to maintain the legitimacy in a post-Cold War world, these armed forces have also become increasingly inventive about making ever more missions military ones. And so in Dr. Brooks' most recent book that the tales from the Pentagon, she makes this argument about the reflexive, and she's talking about America, of course, the reflexive preference for military solutions to civilian problems. That's a general trend, but I think we need to understand that that's the only kind of mission that the self-ordered version of that is the only kind of mission the self-defense forces have engaged in thus far. And so it's no surprise then that the kinds of motivations, the kinds of ideals that self-defense forces members adhere to and that they are exposed to in public relations material very much has to do with the self-defense force as an organization that helps and that goes in after a disaster, for instance, and does the kind of work that no other organization at the moment at least is able to perform. And so it's no surprise then that you have images like these and the kinds of messages like these that are circulating both out of the public relations apparatus of the self-defense forces and that are then also re-narrated by service members, particularly the younger generation, particularly the generation post 2011, the triple disaster in northeastern Japan, that this is the kind of vision they have when going into the self-defense forces. It's about making peace your own, taking care, and then also these are messages and ideas that are very individualized in recent years because despite all the rhetoric about Japan being a collectivist society, the younger generation is just as invested in their own individuality and subjectivity as young people elsewhere. All of these then complicates the self-understanding of self-defense force and service members, their status within Japanese society, and ironically the role of women. And so my expectation at the very onset or outset of my research was, well, if this is a military that engages exclusively in missions other than war, then shouldn't it be so much easier to integrate women among their ranks? And for lots of reasons, I'm sure my colleagues here will enlighten us today as well, this has not been the case. Add to that the fact that the decreasing birth rate, which was already low, greatly impacts the recruitment pool today. The SDF have endured for decades a recruitment shortage of men that only worsened when Prime Minister Abe in July 2014 claimed Japan's right of collective self-defense. This is an important legal change that by all accounts will allow Japan to participate in war. It's not clear under what circumstances and what context and on whose side, well, I guess on whose side is pretty clear. Japan's low fertility rate, which is why they believe to be the result of young women's resistance through traditional life paths that largely exclude them from serious careers, will only further reduce the number of young men eligible for military service. And Japan's largely anti-integration and naturalization laws only exacerbate its difficulty in attracting and maintaining military forces at the level it considers appropriate. That's it. As I mentioned a number of times today, this isn't an evolving agenda, the women with haste and security agenda. And the practical application of this agenda is certainly progressing over time and we are testing and adjusting as we go. The ADF has had a National Action Plan and a Defense Implementation Plan since 2012. And it was in 2015 that we were approached by the Japanese Self-Defense Force to share with them our experiences in implementing women's peace and security on operations and to share with them our lessons learned from that. And you'll notice that I put up there one of those lessons, which is something that was raised very early in the day, was we talk about WPS in an operational context. We call it integrating a gender perspective in military operations. And that's really important to note because when we were first introducing this into operational planning, the planners did fork at the term women because they were saying to us, well, why would we only consider 50% of the population when we're doing our operational planning? So we used the term gender and emphasised the fact that we're talking about women, men, girls and boys. But nine times out of 10 it still served the women, peace and security agenda because we still discovered when we did our gender analysis, when we did our planning that women were disproportionate victims of conflict and that nine times out of 10 when we did our key leader engagement, when we identified the key influences in our areas of operation, that we did not identify the key women that were there. And we weren't getting the whole picture of the operating environment that we were working in. So we explained to the planners that the roles of men, women, girls and boys impacts on our operating environment. And it's also important for us to understand when we deploy somewhere the impact that our mission can also have on men, women, girls and boys and their roles in that society. So we conducted three workshops with the Japanese Self-Defense Force. One was in October 15 which was focused very much on training and how the ADF was going to introduce gender into training. In February 16 we had a seminar talking about best practice and application on operations. In particular humanitarian assistance and disaster relief as was just mentioned and peacekeeping operations. And then in July last year we had a workshop of which the Japanese Self-Defense Force really wanted us to speak to them about the role of gender advisers on humanitarian assistance disaster relief missions. They wanted us to talk about military guidelines for the protection of civilians and how we were applying that in the gender space and how we're including women, peace and security and gender into our bilateral and multilateral exercises. So that's what I'm going to focus on for the rest of this presentation is those synergies and the consequences of those discussions. I'll try to avoid builds. One of the first things we had to identify is where does gender fit in the operating environment. And this is really important for operational planners to understand. Without a doubt fits in the human space in the human domain and we're talking about the moral and ethical component of operations and deployments. But it equally fits in the maritime space of which I know that Junco will speak about. And it probably has its greatest synergy with land operations where we as militaries are working with and amongst the populations. But it equally has relevance in air in particular when we conduct our targeting boards it's really important that we understand the patterns of movement and the roles of every member of a population to ensure that we cause no further harm in the conduct of our operations. Also considering a gender perspective is highly relevant when we're setting up bases, when we're conducting port visits when we're supporting any kind of operation overseas. So one of the things that we have learnt and certainly I read this in Professor Frustick's paper is that the participation of women in military operations is driven by the needs of the military and not gender equality. So while it's just not about equity it's not just about doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do but it is also about capability. And it was our Australian Chief of Army Lieutenant General Angus Campbell who stated in an article in March where he was focusing on comments on women, peace and security he said it is a practical disadvantage to have a normal combat force it's crucial to put the most effective force into the field the culture where it is routinely forbidden for women to have interaction with males not of their family having women involved in your operations has a very powerful effect. I've put those two pictures up on the slide I'll start with Afghanistan we've spoke about Afghanistan it was talked about in our opening remarks today in a patriarchal society like Afghanistan it is really important when our mission is to integrate women within the security forces there that we understand what the cultural imperatives are one of the key things is that our adversaries our enemy take advantage of our gender biases and this is something that we've certainly been taking advantage of in Afghanistan they took advantage of the fact that we didn't have women in the security forces manning checkpoints they took advantage of the fact that when the special for Afghan special forces were conducting raids they would hide weapons they would hide ammunition they would hide plans amongst the women and children because they knew that they wouldn't be searched so it was an operational imperative to actually train women in the special police forces and when they conduct their raids they have at least two women go with them on those raids and those women are fully trained in those roles and they've discovered that it provided them with an operational enhanced operational effect and a tactical advantage the other picture that you'll see is an operation which I know the US also participates in as does Canada which is called Operation Render Safe and Operation Render Safe is an annual activity where they go to South Pacific nations to dispose of remnants of war particularly from World War II and a lot of these remnants of war are actually encountered by children and often these children so a lot of the education that occurs on this activity is done with families and so when we sent the gender advisors for the first time it took a bit of effort and the commander of the Australian contingent said to me why do I need to take a gender advisor we've got community engagement teams why do we need this when he came back from that activity he said when I go next time I'm going to put it in my post-operational report I want more than one because it was too much work for the one advisor to go meet with the women in the communities because it was better off educating them because they knew it was the better way to get through to the children as well so just a key demonstration how a gender advisor or utilising women that were part of the contingent for that effort enhanced our operational effect one of the key things that the Japanese Self-Defense Force wanted to speak to the ADF about is the first time we deployed a gender advisor on an Australian Defence Force mission was for what we called Operation Fiji Assist which was the HADR operation that we conducted after Tropical Cyclone Winston in Fiji and I don't know how much people here know about Fiji Fiji has quite a high level of sexual gender-based violence amongst the population we learnt many lessons from this operation which I could do an entire speech on on its own but there's a couple of things that I wanted to highlight with you and one of them was that we discovered that the conditions in the aftermath of a natural disaster often reflect those of conflict zone including the fact that it impacts on the local security forces and law enforcement and therefore in the immediate aftermath of the disaster there is a lack of law enforcement and what was reported back to us by the Fijians was that they saw a rapid increase in the amount of violence against the population in the immediate aftermath of that disaster they also at first didn't recognise that at the evacuation holding centres where there was predominantly families they didn't have any female security forces and it also provided an opportunity for those who wanted to take advantage of that situation to abuse those women in particular so it helped them think about different ways of looking at security and how it actually applied to something like disaster relief but of course one of the other many lessons was after meeting with the women we adjusted and we spoke to our DFAT colleagues about what packs humanitarian packs are providing the population so we've got a better understanding of what their actual needs are and of course we talked about peacekeeping operations and I mean since that's where the agenda arose from can you just cover that in any detail after your brief this morning I wanted to show you this slide because one of the other key lessons that we learnt in introducing 1325 and women, persons, security into our operational planning was because we were focusing on gender the planners started saying asking us about all kinds of other areas relating to the population that we were expected to know so while 1325 has eight related resolutions there's several other resolutions that apply as well and I've listed them there on the screen and I think we need to be familiar with children and conflict and those related resolutions to 1612 protection of civilians obviously conflict related and sexual gender based violence and rape and sexual violence being used as a weapon of war the gender architecture in counter-terrorism and this is something we are certainly focusing on with our operations in Iraq as part of the coalition at the moment is that what is the role that women and girls and children play in violent extremism and terrorism one they're being used as human shields and as victims and as sex slaves and to help raise money for the caliphate but at the same time once again our adversaries are taking advantage of our gender biases and utilising women's informants etc sexual exploitation and abuse which we've also talked about and it's something that's incredibly important for us to train our troops on and human trafficking often comes up as well particularly within the Pacific where a lot of maritime patrols encounter all kinds of trafficking including in people so in the implementation and the mainstreaming of the women person security agenda and while we have an operational imperative and we have national direction and policy on integrating a gender perspective we have discovered that at the end of the day the centre of gravity using a very military term for the operationalisation of gender is heavily reliant on gender advisers so while it is the responsibility of everyone in the Australian defence forced to apply gender perspective they are heavily reliant on us for our expertise at the moment and we're trying desperately to grow our gender adviser capability because they're not just providing advice to the commanders and staff from the headquarters they're actually doing the inputs to the planning they're conducting the engagement in the field with the key agencies to deconflict and coordinate our efforts to support women and girls so finally I'd just like to talk about education and training so there was a real need for us to train as many gender advisers as we possibly could and so we ran our first gender adviser course in early June this year prior to Exercise Telstra and Sabre which is our major bilateral exercise with the US forces supporting 35,000 troops so training those gender advisers has already demonstrated an operational effect for us training those gender advisers they left and they've produced new conflict related sexual gender based violence reporting systems I had one of our Air Force gender advisers talk to me about how she attended a targeting board and not only did they talk about collateral damage but she explained to all those all those planners that were in that room all the operators about what a collateral effect is and how that can have a longer term effect on the population and the way it operates and so we've seen some great benefits just from training those few specialists we've also built it into our professional military and education training so from the private soldier sailor and woman level right up to the officer rank of major so we do need to focus and Beth Loef and I spoke about this earlier we really do need to focus on our leadership because while I see it being very well mainstreamed from the rank of colonel down because everyone in the ADF gets trained on this what we have learned is that we do need to educate our leaders which is something else that we certainly passed on to the Japanese self defence force in that workshop where we were talking about these issues and then finally collective training is incredibly important conducting exercises to reflect how we do business on operations and we make sure that it is applied to all types of operations but certainly we've seen the greatest synergy at the moment in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief and in peacekeeping operations but equally at high and war fighting it is during those kind of in the height of conflict is where the disadvantage in the population actually get targeted and we often ignore that when we're in the heat of battle when the population is really suffering so this is something that we are trying to get our forces to focus on and I'll finish where I started which is to grow the capability to increase our interoperability we need to work together so as this agenda evolves we really need to conferences like this are perfect where we can share ideas on the best way to take this agenda forward so thank you very much for listening and I've really enjoyed what I've learned so far so thank you Thank you for your fielding Commander Kawashima First of all on behalf of the Minister of the Defense of Japan I really appreciate having passed this conference now I'm working for the Women Peace Security Office in NATO Headquarter but today I will talk as a member of Japan Maritime Self Defense Force Japan Self Defense Force started employment of women in the ground self defense in the latter half of 1960 since then in 14 years 40 years the number of women in the SDF increased currently about 40,000 women 6.1% in response to the current environment of Japan the Ministry of Defense indicated a new direction last April to promote more active role of women in SDF my theme today is the present situation of the SDF concerning women peace and security Contest of the presentation on the screen as you know the security environment in the Asia Pacific region is increasingly tensed nuclear and missile development risks to global commons international theories and so on such changes of the situation make the mission of the SDF more diversified and complicated SDF personnel expected to have more multifaceted abilities and knowledge in Japan as Sabine mentioned the decreasing birth rate and rapidly easing a severe problem also women are getting high education and participate in society actively SDF has difficulty to get young people and to decrease the rate of midway retirement due to the burden to women like child care or nursing care that is one problem speaking about the inside of SDF SDF have gradually opened position on the areas for direct combat areas directly supporting the combat troops and areas with high physically burden since 1993 2 years ago all of the areas in the air self defense posts were open to women SDF set its goal to increase women more than 9% by 2030 when it comes to promotion the past women real or the middle was born in the MSDF Merchant Self Defense post this January I'm entering about myself, I joined MSDF after graduating university and last year I served as a commanding officer of the destroyer type ship 20 years ago some female resources officers said that they need women commanding officers and women pilots but it should be through same education experience and evaluation as men so they wanted us to achieve results although it took a long time women can be commanding officers of ship and air course under the same criteria as men now talking about awareness how to look at working women this is also my personal opinion there is a big difference men in the 40s women in their 50s in Japan men in the 40s don't seem to feel uncomfortable to work with women and they seem to think that women with abilities can be active regardless of gender and they are more generous to take botanical leave for their family one of the reason is the influence of their parents whether they saw their mother working or not and other one is whether the women student exist in the national defense academy maybe I'm a little bit optimistic I expect the concept of WPS in the STF will change drastically in 5 to 10 years as the current 40s become high lung wonders on the other hand about women awareness it seems that women themselves do not have the satisfaction about present open door situation what women care now is which office is suitable to manage child railing and nursing care in short they want to continue their work women retire rate decreased from 9% to 1.5% in the past 30 years but it's still high to 0.6% for men I suppose this may indicate that women are still obliged to make efforts to manage their work life balance I believe that there is a key in this point for increasing the promotion of women with carrier retirement rates and raising women's motivation and satisfaction from now I'd like to talk about women personal empowerment initiative as current efforts of the STF the ministry of defense thinks it should be flexible and diverse in the wake of the changes of society from that context to promote empowerment of women are necessary for securing qualified personnel integrating various perspectives and projecting our core value, equality of both sexes there are two concepts for the policy first indispensable and minimum capabilities as STF personnel to keep ready for emergency physical strength, experience and skills to satisfy these elements may not be easy for the personnel who have children or older parents sometimes second on these foundation all the personnel should make full use of their own abilities and experiences to maintain the best best performance of their organization as a whole based on this concept I'm only put two policies achieve equality I call opportunity and right person in the right place achieve equal opportunity men and women can get the same opportunities regardless of sex sexual orientation right person in the right place personnel assigned to the post according to the ability motivation without discrimination by sex it is not guaranteed to locate the women evenly in all occupations because of the differences of physical strength the proportion of women may be few in some duties that are physically heavily loaded as a result under the two policies there are three challenges first one is opening position for women virtually all positions in the JSDF are open to women due to labor legislation tunneling units in the ground self defense force and part of the NVC weapon defense unit and due to the space limitation submarines are not open yet second one is expansion of the number of women recruitment the ASDF abolished to set number of women enlist in the adoption test from 2016 as a result the number of women who passed the test for officer of the state aviation student etc increased to 223 32% from 95 12% in 2015 this initiative announced that the ground self defense force will increase the rate of enlistment from 170 to 930 and defense academy from the JSDF set the goal to adapt women more than 10% of all the recruits from next fiscal year 2018 the third one is work-life balance initiative mentioned that the need for awareness reform above all organizations effective use of flex time promotion of taking childcare leave in grueling men for working couple in response to the initiative, ground, air markdown self defense force developing its education and carrier management system in philosophy lecture especially for childcare and the mental system to meet each character one of the theme I am interested in about women based security in the JSDF as a Navy officer is expected in Markdown security the greatest Japan earthquake six years ago is still fresh in our mind I'd like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to all the countries including United States and all the organization and people who gave Japan great and world support as Japan has many natural disasters the SDF has carried out many disaster relief activities so far I think that there were the consideration for the weak people including women in such activities although we did not call them as a kind of gender perspective the Markdown self defense force took it into account that women women with babies elder women cared about hygiene issues and try to offer bathing and washing efficiently and to provide space to rest with female crews and doctors however the lessons learned and the result of the SDF activities were not organized as gender perspective to use it in the future in Markdown or during operation I think this is a challenge for the JSDF there was some Markdown operation in which gender perspective is required such as disaster relief counter-pilots refugees and they can provide their vessels and personal and can abroad disaster area in early stage also can conduct long term mission and can offer wide and clean space taking into such as the advantage of the Navy it's clear how to put gender perspective into naval operation I thank you for your kind attention Master of ceremonies, we met our time hack do we have time for a couple questions perhaps I have a lot of free questions Outstanding Yes, so I do a lot of training with the Japanese mostly young to occur in December and one of the events that we started last year was bilateral talks and it was the Japanese it's equivalent to our serge major or the southwest armies forces that brought this up and he was the one who started it but it was a talk between the female personnel of the Japanese army and the US army and there were several different topics but one moment what we mentioned was the work-life balance and we're going to try to replicate that again this year but I was wondering if there's any specific topics you would like to discuss in that as well other topics besides the work-life balance Can you forgive me, are you asking Commander Kawashima? Yes her and maybe Sabine as well if you have any other insights that you might like I don't I don't really have an agenda in this particular context that you are mentioning but at least from the interviews I did with female service members the life-work balance is key and that's a parallel to society at large it's not specific to the military in fact many women in the military say that the military does a better job than a lot of corporations do in order in terms of allowing men and women to take medical leave or family leave or whatever but another topic I've encountered and again this is ethnographic research not a large data analysis is that women are often not only prevented from certain roles that allow them to have a career that make them pass certain achievement levels in order to advance but they are often also infantilized in the sense that their their superiors don't demand as much of them because they assume that they are not capable of that or that they are only really women and so one shouldn't be so harsh on them, things like that so there is a multifaceted set of conventions that prevent women not aggressively and not in an articulated kind of way but sort of in a level of conventions and norms from advancing I'm sorry but could you repeat your question again? We'll do some bilateral talks with just the females in our organizations so it'll be the Northeast Army it'll be First Core and some of the supporting units it'll be just the females talking about the issues that they face in the military or being a female in the military and so I was wondering if there's anything that you saw from your perspective that would be important to talk about As you know the Japanese work from the morning to late so at first a lot of women want to go home as possible after work and another one is the duty system military has of course duty but sometimes women with babies want to skip or to how do I say exempt sorry exempt the subject duties and also almost all the women in the SDF has a husband in SDF also so they have to coordinate the duty system for the and also I have mentioned in the presentation is a problem about the aging issues so not only the child to care but also some females have the challenges to their parents so what I want to say is we have such system but it's not work well so they just want to not change the system but they want to use effectively the system I think that is a problem for the women children you talked about the fact that your training in education is taking place in the army or military dealing with gender how did you convince them to do it in the American army or military there is too much training to be done as it is right now how can we fit one more thing into it could you give us your success how you made it happen leadership so chief defense chief of joint operations both very strong opponents and we built it into existing training so in our pre-deployment force preparation training into our joint operations courses into our staff college and into our training for soldier rank right up to the officer level that's how we have done it when it came to the gender advisor course it was a different story so cdf chief defense force directed that we needed a course based on the fact that we couldn't meet operational demands so once we had seen a couple of gender advisors on operations and exercises and we do see gender advisors on every exercise that we do we didn't have enough trained asset because we could only get two people per training course on the course which is not enough to grow a capability so the chief of joint operations also said look we really need to get these people trained because it was having an imposter on me and my lieutenant colonel because we were training everyone before they deployed individually training everyone before they deployed but because the rest of defense it's still being mainstreamed at that senior level when we took it to the defense education and training board the one-stars who were sitting on that board would not support it even though it had been directed by the chief so the chief of joint operations said well right you've got a training background Amanda if you look into what resources you need CDF gave us some funds, some reserve funds we hired some reservists and we ran our first course in June because of the success of the course the generals have now got their ears pricked up and said oh we heard it was really successful I think we might take it on now as part of our education training system they also saw the great interest that we've had regionally it's been a really good soft engagement tool with a lot of our regional neighbors and we've had some really good engagements particularly within the Asia-Pacific with other nations to talk about how it can really enhance our operations so yeah it was a challenge but it was all about leadership I've neglected this side of the rule one last question perhaps we're done thank you