It takes enormous courage for a woman to speak out about a sexual assault against her while disclosing her identity and appearing in public.

The Defense Ministry and the Self-Defense Forces need to do serious soul-searching on their past dismal responses to this problem and conduct a fair and exhaustive investigation this time.

They should also make all-out efforts to root out all forms of harassment from their organizations.

Rina Gonoi, 22, a former Ground SDF member, submitted a petition to the Defense Ministry bearing some 105,000 signatures calling for an investigation by an independent fact-finding committee into her claim that she was sexually abused during training.

She claims she was sexually harassed and assaulted by three male SDF members at a lodging in August 2021. The three men pushed her down and repeatedly pressed their waists against her as they committed various abusive acts against her, according to Gonoi.

She filed a report about the incident but the case against the three men was dropped. After resigning from the SDF in June, she revealed the incident and disclosed her identity online as she launched a signature-collecting campaign.

The Defense Ministry has tasked a prosecutor and other personnel at the Inspector General’s Office of Legal Compliance, a compliance organization under the defense minister, with conducting a large-scale investigation of the GSDF.

While the office is a highly independent organization, it cannot be called a totally impartial third party. The ministry should take steps to ensure a fair and independent probe into the incident in response to Gonoi's petition.

The sexual assault against Gonoi is clearly just the tip of the iceberg.

The number of people who contacted the consultation windows set up by the ministry and SDF about various forms of harassment, including sexual harassment, workplace bullying by people in positions of greater power (power harassment) and unfair treatment and other forms of abuse of women who are pregnant or have given birth (maternity harassment), has been increasing steadily in recent years.

The number has surged from 256 cases in fiscal 2016 to 2,311 in fiscal 2021, a nearly tenfold jump.

There have also been many reports about suicides of SDF personnel due to power harassment.

Harassment is “a violation of basic human rights that undermines mutual trust among SDF members,” Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada said at a Sept. 6 news conference as he announced a set of measures to tackle this deep-rooted problem.

The measures announced include a sweeping investigation into all SDF personnel and the establishment of a panel of experts to conduct a fundamental review of the systems to prevent harassment.

The ministry should take this opportunity to identify all the factors behind the problems that have been left unaddressed and come up with effective measures to eradicate these problems and prevent recurrences.

There were some 19,000 women among the SDF personnel as of the end of March, approximately 8.3 percent of the total. The Defense Ministry has been recruiting a growing number of women while opening up previously male-only job categories to women one after another.

Now, the SDF has female fighter pilots and submarine crew members.

But women still account for a small minority of the SDF personnel and tend to become victims of harassment. Experts point to the SDF’s closed culture, which is strict about superior-subordinate relationships, as a core factor behind the problem.

In 2017, the Defense Ministry launched an initiative to promote larger roles of female SDF personnel with a goal of doubling the ratio of women to the total.

The initiative cited a range of steps to be taken to improve the work environment for women, such as support for female personnel raising children or caring for family members, ensuring a good work-life balance and building housing facilities for women.

It has become increasingly more difficult to secure a sufficient number of SDF personnel due partly to the shrinking number of children in Japan.

Rampant hidden harassment only makes the recruitment difficulty worse by causing many potential candidates, not just women, to think twice about joining the SDF.

The Defense Ministry needs to set out on the investigation and the work to develop anti-harassment systems with the awareness that it cannot secure sufficient manpower unless it deals with the problem in a convincing manner.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 15