Surrounded on all sides by ocean, postwar Japan has long been able to rely upon the United States military for strategic protection. But tense territorial disputes with neighboring countries, the capture and beheading of two Japanese journalists by ISIS in February, and the horror of the terror attacks in Paris have all served to remind the Japanese of the limits of physical isolation and dependence upon others. This, in turn, has fed an ongoing debate over the mission of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Is their role truly one of self-defense, pure and simple? Or does the Japanese constitution allow for preëmptive strikes outside of domestic borders, in the manner of a traditional military? The question won’t be settled anytime soon. But it’s fascinating to watch how Japan’s armed forces have endeared themselves to the Japanese public. The militaries of many nations harness mass media and pop culture for promotional purposes: the United States coöperates with Hollywood; Russia ostentatiously unveils a three-tiered “war center” seemingly modelled on a Bond villain’s lair. Japan is no different. But what makes their military unusual is that the image being projected isn’t one of might or machismo but of cuteness.

On a warm November morning last month, I was in the grandstands for the Japanese Eastern Command’s Parade of the Eastern Army. As the seats around me slowly filled before the performance, I noticed a pair of young men in puffy down jackets on the tarmac below. Peering more closely, I could make out the action figure of a female heroine from an anime_ _series between them. One of the young men took a photograph of the toy and, apparently satisfied with his framing of the mini-skirted cartoon girl against the backdrop of military vehicles, returned the figure to his companion’s satchel and then mounted the stands.

Such a scene would have been unthinkable to an earlier generation. For Japanese of a certain age, the Eastern Command is inextricably linked to a dark day in their country’s history. Exactly forty-five years ago last week, on November 25, 1970, a group led by the novelist and three-time Nobel Prize nominee Yukio Mishima stormed the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command, took the commandant hostage, and forced the assembled garrison to listen to a speech. Mishima’s exhortations to rise against the government and reclaim their nation’s lost military glory fell on deaf ears. The jeers of the unimpressed soldiers sent Mishima back inside, where he committed seppuku—ritual disembowelment by sword. The gruesome final act of the famed writer made headlines throughout the world, but only served to remind Japanese citizens of the insanity of prewar militarism.

I’d have been more surprised by the action-figure-obsessed gentlemen if I hadn’t seen a very similar scene a few weeks earlier, aboard the J.S. Izumo, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s mammoth new helicopter carrier. The Izumo_ was opened to the public as part of Fleet Week, in mid-October, and its gigantic aircraft elevators and sprawling decks were filled with civilian visitors, including myself. In a far corner, against the menacing backdrop of what a placard helpfully informed me was a Raytheon RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile SeaRAM launcher, I spotted a man taking a nearly identical shot of a nearly identical anime-_girl figurine. A quick search of Twitter turns up many photos of toys and cosplayers on the decks of Japan’s fighting ships.

This sense of playfulness around military equipment can be hard to square with the tensions that are running high in the region. China and Korea have been loudly condemning the expansion of the Japanese military, even as their own repeated incursions into disputed waters provoke the situation all the more. But here in Tokyo, at least, there’s remarkably little of the macho chest-thumping one normally associates with a resurgent military—least of all from the J.S.D.F. itself. The Ground Self-Defense Force uses an incongruous mix of doe-eyed anime waifs and camouflaged soldiers for its recruitment posters. And when I toured the guided-missile destroyer Atago_ _during Fleet Week, I encountered a stern-faced young sailor standing guard beside an open hatch decorated with a hand-drawn anime girl dancing on the waves, welcoming visitors to the Third Escort Flotilla.

Things were even cuter over on the Atago’s sister ship, the Kirishima. The crew had fashioned a charming description for a piece of gear with the daunting name of Super Rapid Bloom Offboard Countermeasures Chaff and Decoy Launching System. The gear was comprised of an array of six launcher tubes designed to hurl decoys into the sky to confuse incoming missiles, resembling a calliope in military cosplay. But in spite of—or perhaps precisely because of—the unsettling nature of its mission, the crew’s explanation took the form of a comic. It starred “Chaffy,” the same chaff launcher anthropomorphized into a bunny rabbit, complete with mortar tubes for ears. A prototypical engagement played out across four panels, with the final one delightedly proclaiming, “Now that we tricked those missiles, we can hunt down whoever launched them!” Everything from the incoming warheads to the cloud of chaff featured little smiling faces.

The use of cute iconography around weaponry can unsettle Western viewers, who mistake it for an appeal to children. But it’s important to remember that cuteness is a serious business in Japan, the origin of many of the world’s most adorable characters, from Pikachu to Hello Kitty. This “cult of cute” is such a distinctive characteristic of modern Japanese culture that, even in English, it is often referred to by its name of kawaii. While kawaii is simply one of many visual styles developed in Japanese cartoons and comic books, it has been codified into a sort of cute filter that can be applied to nearly everything, even the military. It is a visual shorthand that uses rounded shapes, exaggerated eyes, and squashed proportions to disarm and even stoke a sense of parental protectiveness in the viewer.

The Japanese entertainment industry has long embraced military themes, ranging from straitlaced historical dramatizations to wild fantasies: the tiny tanks stomped in Godzilla movies, the high-tech robot armies waging battles in outer space. And the J.S.D.F. has used mascots of various designs for decades. But it is only in the twenty-first century that citizens have so thoroughly re-cast the Japanese armed forces in the pop-cultural likeness of kawaii style. The most prominent example is the hugely popular video game and anime franchise “Combined Fleet Girls Collection.” The series reënvisions Second World War battleships as cute young girls clad in revealing uniforms. They live together on a naval base, where teen dramas play out amidst sorties against undersea invaders. In real life, thousands of men lost their lives aboard the ships the girls are patterned on. It’s hard to imagine the Americans giving the Arizona,_ or the Germans the Bismarck, _the same treatment.

But this kawaii imagery is neither conceived of nor perceived as disrespectful. Rather, it’s a testament to the deep ambivalence the Japanese retain about both the history and the changing role of their armed forces. This spring, the hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was forced to issue a public apology after referring to “our military” instead of the standard “our self-defense forces” during a budget-committee meeting. A few months later, he escalated the situation by ending the nation’s long-standing ban on sending Japanese troops overseas. This extraordinarily controversial bill, which was forced through amidst fistfights on the Parliament floor and massive demonstrations throughout the capital, inspired a great deal of concern among citizens and neighboring countries.