Samurai masculinity, Japan’s self defence force and the uncanny space–time of Sengoku Jieitai

The image of contemporary Japanese men fighting alongside samurai warriors is impossible, but not simply because time-travel does not exist. As I argue in this article, Japan is tethered to an historical narrative of samurai virtue that can no longer exist. This is a paradox that threatens to destabilize Japan’s contemporary military spaces and its contested history of militarism. I explore this paradox through the concept of Japan’s military space–time, which draws attention to the spatial and temporal dimensions of Japan’s demilitarization and the tensions that arise when a demilitarized space coexists with a militant history and the legacy of Japan’s epitomic masculine figure, the samurai. In order for contemporary Japanese SDF personnel to identify with the samurai they inevitably encounter the spectre of Japan’s twentieth–century militarism, and thus the samurai returns to the present as an uncanny embodiment of a repressed masculine self. Through the close analysis of two Japanese time-travel films, Sengoku Jieitai (Saitō, 1979) and Sengoku Jieitai: 1549 (Tezuka, 2005), I demonstrate how the attempt to reconcile Japan’s contemporary pacifist identity with its feudal past threatens to rupture the narrative of a cohesive national selfhood.