Skabelund applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inglorious, Illegal Bastards: Japan's Self-Defense Force during the Cold War, and reported the following:
If someone were leafing through Inglorious, Illegal Bastards and happened to pause at page 99, they would find themselves reading about—of all things—dancing. To be precise, they would be reading about cadets at the Self-Defense Force’s National Defense Academy engaging in social dancing in the late 1950s. And about Tsuji Masanobu, a former Imperial Army colonel, architect of the military’s lightning-fast invasion of Southeast Asia in the opening weeks of the Pacific War and the subsequent Sook Ching killings in Malaya and Singapore and the Bataan Death March in the Philippines, and a member of the national Diet. Dissatisfied with the reconstituted postwar armed forces and its service academy, Tsuji crashed an academy holiday dance party in December 1957 near Tokyo Station and demanded: “What the hell are you teaching these cadets?” A few months later he summoned the academy’s president to a Diet hearing and proceeded to grill him and express outrage that future SDF officers were dancing in a “dimly lit” hall with young women whose bodies were “exposed from their hands to their shoulders.” The cadet’s splendid dancing, he alleged, stood in stark contrast to their mediocre military prowess and poor marching skills.Learn more about Inglorious, Illegal Bastards at the Cornell University Press website.
Reading just this page, a reader would have little idea of the book’s overall argument, but they would be fortunate to enjoy one of those you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up, fact-is-better-than-fiction kind of stories that make history so wonderful. The anecdote does illustrate one of the main themes of the book—that the postwar military was seen, as the book’s title suggests, as illegitimate by wider society, both those on the right and the left as well those in the middle. The force—and its personnel who were overwhelmingly men—were regarded as inglorious, the successor of and similar to or not enough like the imperial military; as illegal, a violation of the peace constitution’s prohibition against “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential;” and as bastards, the shameful offspring of an illicit relationship with the Americans who became mercenaries serving on behalf of the US military. To find out if—and how—they were able to overcome that pariah status, a reader would have to go beyond page 99 and if this page does not hook them, I am not sure what will.
The Page 99 Test: Empire of Dogs.
--Marshal Zeringue
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