Behind the stats

The Mainichi article provides figures for only three of 11 different entry pathways into the Self-Defense Forces, and doesn’t break down the applications by service. The Ministry of Defense has not yet made the figures for 2014 available on its Website, so we must work only with the figures and career tracks Mainichi has given us—non-commissioned officer candidates, aviation school and the National Defense Academy.

A person can enlist in the Self-Defense Forces two ways. The first is a limited-service track that commits recruits to three years—or two for soldiers—with the option of extending their service at the end of their terms. The second is the non-commissioned officer track at the core of Mainichi’s argument.

Non-commissioned officer candidates join the Self-Defense Forces with the intention to stay. These career-track entrants make up 60 to 70 percent of the military’s total manpower. They will become sergeants and petty officers around the same time as their limited service track colleagues prepare to head back into civilian life.

This is the group that saw 10 percent fewer applications this year.

You can track the same figures in the Mainichi article back over through the course of six years thanks to a chart in the annual defense white paper breaking down applications by entry route. Do that for the years available—from fiscal year 2009—and this year suddenly seems less special.

Yes, there were 3,433 fewer career-track applicants this year, but this is nothing compared to the 33-percent drop in interest between 2011 and 2012.

2011 could be anomalous. That year’s recruitment drive began as the Self-Defense Forces were searching for missing people from Japan’s deadliest disaster since World War II—the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Applications hit an all-time high that year following the military’s sudden boost in respectability and public trust.

But even if you ignore the spike in 2011, the number of applicants in 2012 was still 13,784 short of the total for 2010.

With this context, it’s hard to consider this year’s drop significant. It amounts to just 73 fewer people applying from each of Japan’s 47 prefectures. If there’s any real trend here, it dates back to 2011 at the latest and predates the government’s reinterpretation of the constitutional ban on collective self-defense.

If the fall in applications has anything to do with the perceived greater possibility that Japan will go to war, it also doesn’t seem to be bothering the other potential recruits whom Mainichi lists.

Tracking applications to fill the Self-Defense Forces’ aviation schools and National Defense Academy back to 2009, we can see that the variation is nothing more than noise.

Pilots would be a major part of any act of collective self-defense, but applications for military aviation schools is slightly higher than the mean applications for the past six years. Despite the five-percent drop since last year, there were as many aviation student applications from high school students this year as in 2011—and more than in 2009 and 2010.

The wannabe future leaders of the Japanese military are even less perturbed. The small 25-person drop in applicants to the National Defense Academy still leaves a larger group of applicants than in any year before 2012. Applications to the academy are significantly above average for the past six years.

This is enough to dismiss Mainichi’s assertion that worries about collective self-defense are having a significant impact on military recruiting in the three entry tracks the article discusses.

But we can go farther than that. Even if worry over Japan going to war is driving down recruitment figures, it’s just one of many pressures that the Self-Defense Forces are dealing with.