Selene Rivas - November 22, 2017

In the previous articles, we talked about how normal is defined differently in both space and time; just as Japan and Argentina might have two different ideas of what constitutes as “normal”, so does 18th century and 21st century United States. We also talked about normalization, or how things become more (or less) socially accepted over time. Finally, we introduced the concept of “militarism”. In this article, we’ll attempt to define it as concisely as possible, as well as give examples of militarism in Japan.

The following statement is found in page 92 of the 1996 edition of Naval Science 1, a textbook used for High School JROTC courses.

“Our history has shown us that strength has a meaning of its own. Being right is not enough when there are countries that understand only strength. It takes might to preserve the right where nations are concerned. The power of our Navy reflects the power of the way of life it must defend, and that includes all nations that join with us in common need. If we are not a strong people with adequate naval and military forces, other countries with more strength will become the world leaders. This would end our way of life.”

Keep this statement in mind as we discuss the concepts of militarism and militarization.

Attempting to find a wholly agreed upon single definition of militarism and how it is different from militarization is complicated. Often they're used interchangeably, or delineated differently by different authors. This stems from the fact that to define either, a frame of reference is necessary:

¨...a universal definition of militarism is likely to be meaningless. No brief sentence could cover all the different consequences of military thought and action which possibly could be called militarism while effectively excluding those things which should not be given that name. There are important differences in time and place. Militarism in industrialized countries is different from that in traditional societies. Soviet militarism is significantly different from French militarism, etc. In addition, there are of course ideological discussions about the definitions and understanding of militarism at a particular time and at a particular place. “1

Why go through all the trouble of looking to define it, yet again, if, universally, it might prove to be too broad to too narrow? If a concept or idea will be used again and again, definitions save time, simplifying explanations. With that in mind, throughout this series we will use militarism to mean a philosophy, way of thinking, or attitude taken by governments and peoples where “...military capability is the most meaningful and effective instrument for achieving any and all national goals, and that soldiers, weapons and wars are the most necessary and noble tools for national protection and advancement”2 Militarization, on the other hand, is a process, accruing the tools for making war--weapons built, soldiers trained, people roused.

Is the statement which opens this article an example of militarism, or of militarization? There are two aspects to keep in mind: the ideas which it seeks to peddle (“It takes might to preserve the right where nations are concerned”), which place military strength as a goal of utmost importance and are therefore militaristic; and where this information is placed: a high school textbook in a course sponsored by the military. This points towards the process of militarization, the normalization of these ideas through the authority of a textbook, of a classroom setting. It primes the students, if not to enlist, at least to see the increase of military power and its violence as justifiable.

To further understand militarism as both the result of a historical and social process, and the driving force that can determine the future, we will try to examine it in the socio-historical context of pre-World War II Japan. As explained previously, there are boundless amounts of data, analysis, and interpretations which span long tomes and series of articles. For brevity’s sake, this exploration will be simplified to a degree. Our biggest concern is to look at an indisputably large aspect of Japanese society at that time (the belief in military might, above all) and the philosophic, ideological, historical, social and cultural which not only supported it, but that also advanced its growth and justified it.

Fukoku kyôhei, or “Rich Country, Strong Military”, a Japanese national policy from the Meiji Restoration era points to a very obvious centrality of military interests as part of the government’s goals for the nation. The Meiji Restoration was what came about after Japan’s door were forced open by Commodore Perry and his fleet in 1854, when rebels overthrew the feudal system and ended the shogunate, the warrior class government that ran parallel to the emperor’s rule. This restoration was purportedly that of the emperor, returning him to the sole ruling position inside the government. However, what really happened was that the power migrated from the shogunate to the rebels, making them the new ruling class, and the emperor remained a mostly a symbolic figure.

This restoration meant a whole restructuring of Japan’s political, economical, and social systems. The government focused all of its efforts to the Westernization of Japan, that is, the adoption of Western values and practices, hoping to catch up to, and eventually surpass western imperial powers at the time (Britain, Germany, America, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, and Italy)4. The Meiji ruling class (the oligarchy) “...desired to join the Western powers in demands for rights and privileges in other Asian countries. However, the oligarchs realized that the country needed to modernize and strengthen its military before it attempted to assert its demands to the Western powers.”3 By the end of World War I, they had achieved this objective, finding a place as one of the “Big Five” in 1919 Versaille, where the nations that had emerged victorious attempted “...to dictate peace terms and form the League of Nations.”4

Japan achieved this by intense industrialization. As can be seen in the following prints from this time, western fashion and concepts of industry were in vogue at the time.

The prints themselves, done with techniques heavily associated with Japanese tradition and yet depicting foreign ideas intermingling with Japanese society, are reminders of the role of the arts in furthering an agenda. Important intellectuals, too, such as Fukuzawa Yukichi (who was offered a seat in the government on several occasions) traveled to these occidental nations and wrote about the customs and ways of life he observed. The philosophy which gained a lot of traction at that time was that of Social Darwinism, which was not out of place for the nineteenth century world and can be summed up by this 1880’s Japanese popular song:

In the West there is England,
In the North, Russia.
My countrymen, be careful!
Outwardly they make treaties,
But you cannot tell
What is at the bottom of their hearts.
There is a Law of Nations, it is true,
But when the moment comes, remember,
The Strong eat up the Weak. 5

Social Darwinism, in fact, is the idea of “survival of the fittest” applied to a social, as opposed to natural, context. It is the idea that those who prevail have done so out of their own strength, and are thus the best or most advanced. It no surprise that this idea could lead towards militarization; if survival, strength, and the thought that competitiveness is the natural state of things are the imperatives in a society, then it makes sense that this society would develop in ways that it fulfilled these imperatives.

In the case of Japan, many of its leaders “...came to believe that their country had a ‘manifest destiny’ to free other Asian countries from western imperialist powers and to lead these countries to collective strength and prosperity.”6 Ultranationalist groups believed in the purity of their race, and out of some supposed sense of brotherhood, wanted to lead other nations in their vicinity to what they considered was a more advanced state of civilization. (More on this can be read on Ruth Benedict’s germinal and very influential work about World War II Japan: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword). They involved themselves and started armed struggles in both Korea and China, and even emerged victorious against Russia in 1904-5, which made them confident in their own strength.

As was demonstrated by the popular song quoted above, just as they were gaining confidence in their military prowess, they feared being invaded by foreign powers as other Asian nations had been. This was not helped by other nations’ attitudes and affronts towards Japan. Prejudice towards Japanese at an international policy level, segregation towards Chinese and Japanese-Americans in the United States, and eventually the prohibition of Japanese immigration only fueled anti-foreigner sentiment in Japan.

Lastly, imperialism and gain or defense sought through military conflict were also motivated by economic reasons. Expanding their territory, the Japanese were also expanding their markets and supply chains. Eventually, the United States deciding to put up an oil embargo in the forties led to the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor.

Seen from the perspective of historical events, the militarization of Japan can be understood as a result of many forces and pressures both from within and without its society. When analyzing Japanese society both at that time and previous to it, one could also find the fertile ground in the glorification of martial values, the Bushi code, the concept of Yamato Damashii, etc. Again, an excellent starting point for understanding Japanese society, how Americans conceive it, and how these conceptions shaped the end of the war, is Ruth Benedict’s book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

Using our previously defined concepts, militarism can be seen in the “rich country, strong military” slogan, as well as the many benefits and justifications that the Japanese oligarchy saw in engaging in armed conflicts. Militarization is the process in which they built up the military strength that eventually propelled them to be included as a world superpower, and be seen by others as a very real threat.

This series will contemplate these concepts not precisely from a historical perspective, but through the analysis of culture, particularly, popular culture. Popular culture is a field in which the intentions of the creators and how they are received and interpreted by vast amounts of people intermingle. As will be explained in the next article, by studying popular culture we’re not merely studying a reflection of the social context it comes from, but a creation of a social reality, of symbols and a common sense which people both inhabit and modify. Although an object of popular culture, such as a movie, TV series, comic strip, etc. seems static, its relationship with society is constantly changing. By studying both the object and people’s interpretations of it we can get a clearer picture of the underlying forces that are at work in a collective context.

The quote we saw in the beginning of the article is, likewise, the result of historical and social processes, but also justifies and drives the actions of those who believe in its veracity. Militarism is both a result and a cause. In pop culture, we see those who drive the narrative towards this conclusion on purpose, as well as how and what society accepts, appropriates, interprets and eventually furthers these ideas. War doesn’t begin when they’re making the guns or training the soldiers, but instead it starts much earlier, when a society generally agrees that armed, legal violence is the only solution to certain conflicts.

Sources

1, 2 Skjelsbaek, K. (1979). Militarism, Its Dimensions and Corollaries: An Attempt at Conceptual Clarification. Journal of Peace Research, 16(3), 213-229. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/423726

3, 4, 5, 6 Gordon, Bill. “Japan's March Toward Militarism.” Japan's March Toward Militarism, Mar. 2000, wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/papers/jhist2.htm.

8 Dower, John W. “Throwing Off Asia.” MIT Visualizing Cultures, Massachussets Institute of https://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/throwing_off_asia_01/toa_essay03.html.

Selene Rivas - November 21, 2017

Last article, we tried to answer the question of “what is normal?” and after a few examples, eventually settled on “normal is what a group of people are used to.” In this article, we’ll look at an example of the ‘normalization’ process, that is, getting used to something to the point where alternatives are forgotten. We’ll conclude by introducing the main topic of this series: how the presence of the United States military in a surprising amount of aspects of American culture has become so normal that it is no longer noticed or questioned.

“Normal” changes, not just from society to society, but also through time. In a single society, what was considered normal before is not necessarily thought of as normal now, and we can't even begin to imagine what things are normal today that won't be normal in the future. How does that happen? And does something becoming "normal" with time necessarily mean that it is "better"?

The process by which a behavior or belief becomes normal is called "normalization". It is a very popular concept in social sciences, made so by Michel Foucault. In his book Discipline and Punish, he studies how this concept changes over time and the forces that motivated this shift. He entwines normalization with disciplinary power.

"...the primary function of modern disciplinary systems: to correct deviant behavior through discipline through imposing precise norms ("normalization") is quite different from the older system of judicial punishment, which merely judges each action as allowed by the law or not allowed by the law or not allowed by the law and does not say that those judged are 'normal' or 'abnormal'."1

In other words, disciplinary systems (like trials, executions, incarcerations) defined "normal" as what was inside the "norms" or laws, and "abnormal" as what was outside of it. This also implies that, as laws are made by people (individuals or groups), it is these same people that decided what is normal or abnormal. These laws don't have to merely be those contemplated in the legal system; accepting social norms and living by them is living "normally" while challenging them is "abnormal".

We'll take skin tanning in Western culture as an example to illustrate the normalization process. Right now, it is normal to see men and women laying around in beaches, directly under the sun's rays. Coming back to school or work after the summer vacation, telling our schoolmates or coworkers "you're so tan!" is almost always meant as positive remark. There was a time when this was not the case.

In the eighteenth century, upper class women sought lighter skin color by using cosmetics and wearing clothing that covered them up from the sun. "At that time tanned skin connoted humble class origins, as most unskilled workers and farmers would be tanned from protracted sun exposure during the workday."2 Lighter skin, along with their clothing and hairstyles, denoted class and wealth. It meant that they didn't have to work and could spend all day indoors.

During the 1920s, however, this started to change: "As the popularity of leisurely outdoor pursuits such as lawn tennis, swimming, golf and sunbathing brought the bodies of the wealthy outside to play, the pale body began to signify confinement to indoor workplaces and lack of discretionary income."3 Where before, being pale meant you had enough money not to work and spend all day indoors, now what showed off your wealth was spending time out of doors. Sunbathing, swimming, and other activities wouldn't be possible if you had to be working inside at a factory. The tan became a sign that you were wealthy enough to have a lot of leisure time.

This trend was made official by "...Coco Chanel's famous pronouncement, 'The 1929 girl must be tanned. A golden tan is the index of chic!'..."4. Bikinis and the Southern California lifestyle began to become popular, and "...it was not long before Hollywood stars and fashion bodies began to show off their bronzed bodies and rave about their tans.."5. The tanning bed became a product around this time.

Do societies move forward? Is all change, progress? Is what is normal now necessarily better than what was better before? The mere idea of “society moving forward” (or evolving) is a very problematic subject. The social sciences spent their first hundred years with this idea that societies in the present were necessarily better than societies in the past, and that the Western society was the best and most advanced society, representing the present and future (modern) of civilization, while other cultures and societies were less advanced, therefore primitive or stuck in the past. This notion was heavily debated and the notion of Social Evolutionism eventually dethroned. Now social theory mostly asserts that societies are relative to each other, neither one better or worse, just a result of their own history and conditions.

Likewise, the past is not necessarily better or worse than the present; while some ideas and practices that are harmful to people are forgotten and replaced, new ones can crop up and take their place. We can see this with society’s changing attitude: as tans, artificial and natural, became popular, medical authorities like the American Medical Association, American Association of Dermatology, American Cancer Society, Skin Cancer Foundation, National Cancer Institute, the Federal Trade Commission's, Food and Drug Administration, Centers of Disease Control and Prevention claim that tanning can cause cancer, particularly when done through tanning beds.6 Despite being a relatively recent development (unlike other known carcinogens like tobacco), the practice of skin tanning wasn’t hampered by these findings: “In the contemporary United States, tanned white skin may connote that its possessor is a healthy, relatively affluent, sociable, physically fit, and attractive person…”.7

In the normalization of skin tanning, we can see two aspects of the process:

1. One of aspect of society changing can affect the whole. In this case, most of the labor force moved from toiling in the fields to doing so inside factories, changing how tanned, white skin was regarded.
2. Celebrities, popular, and powerful people have powerful influence in mirroring, setting, and deciding new norms, often to their own benefit. Coco Chanel only got tanned accidentally when on board a Mediterranean cruise, yet, through her fame as a fashion icon, she managed to turn the accident into a trend that has outlived her.

The normalization process has happened an infinitude of times throughout our history. Times changed, though not by chance, or on their own; the events that shape history are many, and incredibly varied. It would be a mistake to think of the tide of history as part of nature, uncontrollable and inevitable. That would mean ignoring the very real effects of people in history and in their society, as well as the equally real presence of individuals and groups who manipulate and normalize certain conducts for their own benefit.

Keeping that in mind, we can start talking about militarism. Previously, we referred to it as “how the presence of the military in many aspects of our culture has become normal”. This presence does not merely mean the uniformed soldiers, but also includes values, ideals, aesthetics, and just the general sense that having a strong military power is not just necessary, but the best policy for a nation.  Militarization is the effort to build up a military force, whether through arms or people.

It is NNOMY’s belief (substantiated by copious evidence) that militarism in both the United States and Western culture at large and its emphasis on martial values is not coincidental; it is in the interests of some that this is so. Even beyond those interests, militarism is pervasively embedded in Western pop culture, its presence largely unexamined by the casual consumer.

In the next installment, we will give talk more in depth about the definition of militarism, as well as talk about Japanese militarism, and how it was shaped by a wide variety of forces before World War II.

To read more on the history of tanning:

http://www.skincancer.org/prevention/tanning/tale-of-tanning

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/19/history-of-tanning

References

1 Gutting, Gary, "Michel Foucault", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/foucault/>.

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7: Vannini, P. and McCright, A. M. (2004), To Die For: The Semiotic Seductive Power of the Tanned Body. Symbolic Interaction, 27: 309–332. doi:10.1525/si.2004.27.3.309

Selene Rivas - November 20, 2017

"Human beings are consumers of vast quantities of raw materials and fuels. A tremendous amount of waste materials results from this use--individual, societal, industrial, and accidental."1

Is this sentence a fact, or an opinion? When starting a sentence with "human beings are..." or "human nature is...", who determines whether what is being said is fact or fiction? History? One’s own experiences or philosophy? Is there such a thing as normal human behavior anyway?

In the following article, we'll discuss how "normal" beliefs, actions, and practices are not, despite being often assumed to be so, universally defined. They are products of a specific context, and are often used to judge others outside of it.

As a simple example, take eating with a knife and fork: for descendants of most European traditions and cultures, this might seem so normal that after childhood, most don't have to think about how to hold these utensils, coordinate them to scoop food up, or cut a particularly tenacious slab of meat. Eating with a knife and fork is normal. A person who comes from a wholly different cultural tradition, however, might disagree. The inhabitants of many Asian countries are used to handling chopsticks as their primary eating implements. While a person born and raised in the Western side of the globe might struggle to even hold them correctly, people who grew up using them don't need to think about it. Eating with chopsticks is normal.

And yet, each might look at the other and deem their habits "exotic", "unusual", and even "abnormal". Normal is what a group of people within the same context are used to thinking as “the norm”. “The norm” in different place, cultures, and peoples is incredibly extensive, and encompasses a very wide range of things.

Let's take colors as another basic example; it is easy to assume that colors are universal, both the ones we could call "basic" (yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, red, orange, brown, black, gray, white), and the concept of "color" in itself as a stand-alone adjective. However, anthropologists and others who study different cultures have found that neither of these conceptions are universal, nor are they constant through time. For instance: "Before around the year 1500, a word for orange did not exist in the English language."2 When it was introduced, "orange" would have been exotic and strange, unlike the present, where it is so normal in our language that we include it in flashcards and educational materials aimed at toddlers.

The same goes for musical scales. Just as with eating utensils, it is not a surprise that different types of music have come from different cultural traditions and social groups, such as Jazz, the Waltz, Rock and Roll, or Salsa. Beyond these easily discernible differences, though, traditions around the globe have also come up with different musical scales used to create music. For European traditions, the scale goes:

Do, Re, Mi Fa, Sol, La, Ti/Si, Do, or C, D, E, F, G, A, B, [C]

(Audio: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/ChromaticScaleUpDown.ogg )

Musical instruments such as pianos are arranged with these notes in mind.

In the Chinese tradition, though, we find this scale:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qPgTG51YjQ

It sounds as though the Chinese scale was the same as the European one, with some notes missing. This is because both are being compared to the other. The Chinese used it to compose and arrange music, and luthiers created instruments arranged to play these notes. Nothing is missing, nor is it lesser and greater than the European tradition.

The exercise of studying the aspects of different groups of people's lives that they might not even think about or consider noteworthy is nothing new, and in fact has a tradition spanning hundreds if not thousands of years. Studying what people are used to, indeed, is an aspect of studying culture, what they consider normal. The study, classification, and exposition of culture, in its different forms, can be thought of as the major goal in the discipline of anthropology.

This short sample of customs is meant to excite the imagination. What other things are different elsewhere? There is really an astonishing variety in what "normality" is; "normal" is socially-defined, what you're used to doing or seeing, and it doesn't come from nature. Eating with a knife and fork isn't more normal than chopsticks for everybody, nor is it better or worse. It's just different.

Baby bottles, jeans, the banking system, coat hangers, shoes… all of these things we take for granted were not always present in human life, and even now, cultures have yet different ways to solve similar problems or even conceive the world that we can’t even imagine. Studies of different cultures has shown us that "all understandings of reality are cultural constructions"3, anthropology "offers alternative visions of how things could be", by first making us reflect on "the way things are"4.

Once this fact is wholly accepted, it becomes much harder to peg down the elusive (and possibly non-existent) "human nature", or "what human beings always are/or do". Sometimes what is taken to be as such comes from our experiences, our environment, or what we're told. Other times, defining what is "normal" (and, in turn, "human nature") can come from very particular interests who want to elicit specific beliefs or behaviors for their own benefit.

Is "human beings are consumers of vast quantities of raw materials and fuels" an assertion made to justify or support a society built on accelerated consumption, and in turn, wars whose aim is to gain control of more resources? Or is the society shaped this way precisely because that is what human nature is? If we were to find a group of people that historically or at present don't follow the same patterns of excessive consumption implied by the above quote, then it would ring as self-serving for those who consume "vast quantities of raw materials and fuels". By studying cultures, we can question the assertions which have shaped our reality.

This series of articles hopes to elicit questions regarding militarism, pop culture's role in portraying these tendencies as normal, and how these portrayals can be used to effectively militarize a society, particularly for the youth who are still trying to find where they fit inside the world. It doesn't aim to be comprehensive (it would take more than a lifetime to research on this issue if that were the case), but certainly comprehensible, thorough on the subtopics it hopes to approach, concise, and approachable for someone with no previous knowledge on the subject.

Next article, we will share some theories on how "normal" is created throughout history, and finally introduce our main topic: how the military's presence in almost all aspects of the United States’ culture has become normal.

To learn more about different musical scales and colors around the globe:

• Check out this interesting video on color differences in different cultures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg
• Listen to some more examples of different musical scales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHtDerXLNHw

References

1 Hobbs, Cdr. Richard R., MD. NAVAL SCIENCE 1,  Fourth edition (1st year NJROTC). 1996.  Naval Institute Press, Annapolis

2 Nicola Jones / 9 Feb 2017, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa and Chip Colwell, Ruder, K., & Nash, S. E. (2017, February 09). Does the Concept of Color Exist in All Cultures? Retrieved September 12, 2017, from https://www.sapiens.org/language/color-perception/

3, 4 Ferguson, B. (1988). How Can Anthropologists Promote Peace? Anthropology Today, 4(3), 1. doi:10.2307/303263

Series Homepage at http://nnomy.org/index.php/en/resources/blog/researching-militarism-selene-rivas

Selene Rivas is an anthropology student at the Central University of Venezuela and an intern for the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth. Contact her at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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