Japan’s military steps up to provide services during crisis

This time, said Satoshi Morimoto, a national security expert at Takushoku University, the military “is doing everything that local governments are supposed to be doing. Local governments’ disaster plans were based on the assumption that everyone [in the town offices] would survive. But this time, most died in many places. And the local governments are depending on SDF.”

Masateru Muguruma was one of 19,000 SDF members who spent time in Kobe. Now, as the colonel in charge of logistics for the 9th Division, he organizes relief efforts in this town of 23,000, where five of every eight homes was knocked down or damaged. Even the other devastated coastal areas — Kesennuma, Ofunato — still have a skeletal infrastructure, Muguruma said. In Rikuzentakata, “everything is wiped out. We are here to help with survival.”

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( Eugene Hoshiko / AP ) - Members of the Self-Defense Forces, praying for their countrymen, have taken on risky tasks but have also lent a comforting ear to survivors.

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Forty SDF soldiers spend their days at Yonesaki Elementary School, now a shelter for 800. They hand out towels to bathers, clean the towels at a military-issued washing machine, then fold the towels into crate baskets. They cook meals. Often, they listen to evacuees tell stories about missing family members.

Before March 11, Muguruma had been stationed in Aomori, at the northern tip of Japan’s main Honshu island. Three weeks into this disaster mission, he sees no resolution in sight. “We were prepared for this,” he said, “but I cannot say how long we’ll be here.” And he added: “There is a limit to what we can do.”

The SDF, established in 1954, has developed a reputation for its advanced equipment and its willingness to aid in international peacekeeping. But Japan’s 2011 crisis ranks, easily, as the most complex, protracted mission in SDF history.

Last year, for example, Japan sent 49 members of its military, along with six helicopters, to Pakistan for 1¹ / ₂ months after floods displaced millions. Japan also conducted a mission in Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake, and it launched a disaster-relief effort in Miyazaki prefecture to assist with foot-and-mouth disease.

In his 2011 new year’s address, Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said those efforts helped the SDF “fully demonstrate its capability.”

Only now, though, has the sentiment reached the public. “The cynicism has been dispelled, clearly,” said Sheila Smith, a Japan expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The SDF — they’re something to be proud of, and just that sentiment alone is something to acknowledge as important.”

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.