Japan Behind the News
Repelling the Swine Flu Invasion: A New Mission for Japan’s Self-Defense Forces?
Cultural News 2009 June
By Motoaki Kamiura, Military Analyst
Translated by Alan Gleason
The swine flu virus that originated in Mexico is now spreading around the globe. In Japan, island nation that it is, there has always been a tendency to view calamity as something that arrives from “across the ocean.” True to form, the Japanese have instituted the world’s most draconian quarantine practices at their international airports and harbors.
At Narita International Airport outside Tokyo, even the Self-Defense Forces have been enlisted in the effort to prevent the virus from entering the country. Indeed, this is the first time that SDF personnel have ever engaged in disease control operations.
In response to a request from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare to make up for a shortfall of quarantine officers at Narita, the Defense Ministry dispatched ten doctors and twenty nurses from the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) and the National Defense Medical College to the airport. All were specialists trained in infectious diseases and epidemiology. As of mid-May, SDF health officers had also been deployed at Kansai and Chubu International Airports.
Why is this a first-time event for the SDF? Actually, the use of military personnel for quarantine purposes defies a long-standing taboo against the engagement of the SDF in activities associated with disease control. There are historical reasons for this taboo.
During Japan’s occupation of China, which ended in 1945, the elite Kwantung Army’s notorious Unit 731 (under the aegis of the army’s Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department) conducted countless medical experiments on Chinese citizens and intentionally infected thousands with typhoid, plague and other diseases.
Because of this infamous legacy, the postwar SDF’s medical corps has limited its public activities to innocuous tasks like emergency rescues and treatment of the injured and the ill. Meanwhile it has scrupulously avoided publicizing the fact that it also has the capacity to deal with biological and chemical warfare.
The taboo against responding to chemical warfare ended with the sarin gas attacks on Tokyo subways by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995. Now, the government’s unprecedented mobilization against the swine flu invasion has eliminated the remaining taboo against military involvement in operations to combat bacteriological agents.
At least, that is what people connected to the SDF believe. It appears that they have finally exorcised the inconvenient ghosts of Unit 731.
Motoaki Kamiura is a Tokyo-based military analyst. He appears frequently on national television programs.
Alan Gleason is an editor, writer, and Japanese-English translator. He lives in Tokyo.