The international media has discovered Prince Pickles, the official mascot of the JSDF:

TOKYO: Prince Pickles, a perky cartoon character with saucer-round eyes, big dimples and tiny, boot-clad feet, poses in front of tanks, rappels from helicopters and shakes hands with smiling Iraqis.

The cutesy icon hardly calls to mind the Japanese military that conquered and pillaged its way across Asia during World War II, and that is just the way the country’s leaders want it.

As Japan sheds its postwar pacifism and gears up to take a higher military profile in the world, it is enlisting cadres of cute characters and adorable mascots to put a gentle, harmless sheen on its deployments.

“Prince Pickles is our image character because he’s very endearing, which is what Japan’s military stands for,” said Shotaro Yanagi, a Defense Agency official. “He’s our mascot and appears in our pamphlets and stationery.”

Such characters have long been used in Japan to win hearts and minds and to soften the image of authority.

[...]

“This could only happen in a country that is so open to immaturity,” said Rika Kayama, a psychiatrist and author. “Authorities here feel it’s easier and less threatening to use characters to get the public to accept them, rather than explain the facts.”

The animated images mask real moves by Japan’s leaders to bolster nationalist sentiment and flex military muscles abroad. The Defense Agency was upgraded to a full ministry in January. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to expand military operations with Japan’s top ally, the United States.

Geez folks. Prince Pickles is just a cute little mascott. Almost every company or governmental organization in Japan has some sort of cute mascott to represent them. It might seem strange, but it seems pretty natural to me that their armed forces would also have a cutesy cartoon character to represent them. I hardly think that Pickles was created as a clever distraction to go along with some grand scheme to strengthen nationalism and “flex” Japan’s military muscles abroad, as the article almost seems to suggest.

Prince Pickles has been around for a while now, and some of his older comic books are available for download as PDF files on the JSDF homepage. [Link]

[Via Japundit]