Aboard Js Kaga
\nWomen serving on Japan\u2019s biggest warship, the Kaga, are a tight-knit group on the frontline of a push to transform the Japanese navy into a mixed-gender fighting force, where men outnumber them more than 10 to one.<\/p>\n
The Maritime Self Defence Force needs more women because falling birth rates mean it has too few men to crew warships in home waters or on helicopter carriers such as the Kaga, sailing in foreign waters to counter China\u2019s growing regional influence.<\/p>\n
\u201cWomen all over the world are working in a wider number of areas and I think Japan needs to be a part of that,\u201d said petty officer Akiko Ihara, 31, standing beside one of the helicopters she helps to maintain.<\/p>\n
The proportion of women in the Kaga\u2019s 450-strong crew is about 9 percent, a level Japan is targeting for the military overall by 2030 from 6 percent now. That would still fall short of U.S., where 15 percent of people in uniform are women, and Britain with 10 percent.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all work in different teams around the ship but we are all friends,\u201d Ihara added. \u201cWe do sometimes moan a little about our male colleagues.\u201d<\/p>\n
The nine-year veteran says she has encountered no workplace discrimination, and would challenge any man who thinks women are unsuited for military life to work with her.<\/p>\n
More women recruits are making the SDF a more \u201crounded\u201d organisation, said Ayako Yoneda, 29, a firefighter and engineer on the Kaga.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I first joined nine years ago there were few women and it felt like men then didn\u2019t know how to deal with us,\u201d she said. \u201cI think the men now see things more from our perspective.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, the women do face sexual harassment. In July, the navy discharged a male petty officer for kissing and groping three women sailors over several months.<\/p>\n
Japan\u2019s demographic woes are forcing it down a path taken years earlier by its U.S. ally, which lifted a ban on women on warships in 1993.<\/p>\n
The MSDF, which let women crew ships a decade ago, could soon remove the last major barrier to female sailors by ending a ban on submarine duty, defence ministry sources have told Reuters.<\/p>\n
Japan has one of the world\u2019s largest navies, with 45,000 crew on more than 100 vessels, including about 20 submarines, more than 40 destroyers and four helicopter carriers, such as the Kaga.<\/p>\n
The Kaga was on its way to Sri Lanka after drills in the contested South China Sea as part of a two-month deployment in waters stretching from the Western Pacific to the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n
Commissioned in 2017, it is among a new generation of warships designed to accommodate mixed crews, with more toilets and bathrooms than older vessels.<\/p>\n
Signs at the entrance to the women\u2019s segregated sleeping quarters warn men to keep out. The women inside carry electronic pagers that can be contacted via numerical keypads beside the doors.<\/p>\n
Those better facilities and privacy safeguards will draw more women to sign up, the MSDF hopes.<\/p>\n
Japan\u2019s navy struggles more to find recruits than the air force or army, as young people balk at the prospect of being cut off from social media networks on long deployments.<\/p>\n
In 2016, for example, the airforce received 6,900 applications, versus just 3,927 for the MSDF, even though both have about the same number of enlisted personnel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Aboard Js Kaga Women serving on Japan\u2019s biggest warship, the Kaga, are a tight-knit group on the frontline of a push to transform the Japanese navy into a mixed-gender fighting force, where men outnumber them more than 10 to one. The Maritime Self Defence Force needs more women because falling birth rates mean it has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44125,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44126,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44124\/revisions\/44126"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}