Japan's armed forces to rethink tattoo ban in bid to attract young recruits amid low birth rate

Japan is inching closer to breaking a long-standing taboo to allow men and women with tattoos to serve in the Self-Defence Forces (SDF), underlining once again the crisis in personnel levels that is afflicting the nation's armed forces.

Despite becoming common in many other countries, tattoos are still considered by many in Japan - particularly older generations - to be a symbol of membership of "yakuza" organised crime groups.

Tattoos began to be used in the early 1700s to mark out people who had committed a crime, ranging from a band on the wrist to a "kanji" character on the forehead.

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The stigma attached to tattoos continued when they became a mark of membership worn by underworld groups, but were shunned in the rest of Japanese society.

While some young people have braved social stigma to get the fashion-inspired tattoos that are common overseas, numbers are still extremely low.

Yet, faced with shortages of skilled personnel, the military is leaving no stone unturned in its search for new recruits.

In a recent address to the Diet, Masahisa Sato, a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and formerly an officer in the Ground Self-Defence Force, said the nation needed to relax regulations that were preventing some people from joining the armed forces.

"Rejecting applicants just because they have tattoos poses a problem in terms of enhancing the human resources base," Kyodo News quoted Sato as saying.

"Various kinds, including fashion tattoos like a small flower or one's own name" should not be mistaken for the sort of full-body tattoos that yakuza gangs tended to favour, Sato added.

Kazuhito Machida, head of the defence ministry's personal and education department, concurred with Sato's comments, saying the government needed to reconsider the rules given the nation's plunging birth rate, with the total number of new babies falling below the 800,000 threshold last year.

Japan's shrinking population and personnel shortfalls coincide with a worsening security situation in northeast Asia, with China becoming increasingly aggressive in the region, North Korea armed with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles and Russia also posing new challenges.

The ministry confirmed in April that just 4,300 new personnel had joined the SDF on fixed-term contracts in the financial year that ended in March, less than half of the ministry's target of 9,245 new recruits across all three arms of the military. The shortfall is the most serious since comparable statistics were first compiled in 2009.

There are around 247,000 personnel in Japan's armed forces, a figure that is just 90 per cent of the military's optimum figure and despite increased efforts to attract new recruits in recent years.

"The single most important reason for the shortages is that there is just not enough awareness among Japanese people about security issues," said Ryo Hinata-Yamaguchi, an assistant professor of international relations at the University of Tokyo.

"You just do not see people walking around in uniform in Japan and that's very different from other countries," he said.

In addition to a lack of awareness of the armed forces as a career and the perception in some quarters that the military was not actually necessary, there was also a belief that the forces did not pay well and there were better opportunities in civilian jobs, Hinata-Yamaguchi said.

"When we had the financial crisis 15 years ago, there were fewer work opportunities and a sense that jobs were less stable, so more people signed up for the SDF then because they saw it as guaranteeing stability," he said.

Other issues likely to be putting people off a career in the services include reports of bullying of recruits, cases of sexual harassment of female personnel and poor housing and facilities on military bases.

With the nation now facing an acute shortage of workers as the number of elderly increases and fewer young people enter the workforce, the military is having to be creative to convince people to join.

The new defence budget unveiled earlier this year includes new provisions for improving base housing and facilities, pay rates are being raised and special attention is being given to female recruits, with improved maternity leave and childcare provisions.

Robert Dujarric, co-director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies at the Tokyo campus of Temple University, said there were signs the Japanese military was becoming more open-minded.

"Tattoos are still rare in Japan but it's likely they are becoming slightly more acceptable because there is a big difference between 'fashionable tattoos' and the designs that yakuza have," he said.

It was also likely that a youthful indiscretion that led to a tattoo was not acceptable in other careers in Japan, but the armed forces' change of heart gave those people an opportunity, he suggested.

Yet with the number of young people getting tattoos still very limited, Hinata-Yamaguchi says relaxing the ban on tattoos is unlikely to solve the problems associated with an understaffed military.

"They are clearly exploring every avenue, but I would be surprised if 2 per cent of young Japanese have tattoos, so lifting the ban is not going to suddenly answer the forces' human resources problems," he said. "They need to come up with a range of ways to get more people to join the organisation and keep them in for longer."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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