Meet Japan's female marines who are training for war

Hikari Maruyama, Runa Kurosawa and Sawaka Nakano are part of an elite force: Japan's Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade (ARDB), meant to lead assaults from the sea in a possible future war.

They are also three of about 40 women in their 2,400-person unit.

Living alongside a close-knit group of other female service members aboard the JS Osumi, a Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force tank landing ship deployed for exercises in the East China Sea, they in November supported beach assault drills in Japan's vulnerable southwest island chain.

Although they and their fellow marines are expected to lead the way on the frontlines, their unit - and Japan's military - lag far behind in gender diversity, a problem that risks turning into a crisis as the country's greying population shrinks while threats from China, Russia and North Korea grow.

"Women are crucial to ensuring a stable supply of suitable recruits," Shingo Nashinoki, then-commander of the ARDB force, said on an uninhabited island in the Okinawan chain, where a small all-male ARDB contingent practiced helicopter attacks.

WOMEN WANTED

Although the number of Japanese female soldiers has doubled during the past decade, it is still far behind Tokyo's ally, the United States.

Women make up only 8.7% of the 230,000 strong Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), half the rate of the U.S. military, and only 1.6% of the ARDB, which was activated in 2018. That compares with the almost one in ten U.S. Marines who are women.

"The ARDB has a reputation for being physically, mentally, and technically demanding, and I think that a lot of women worry whether they could handle that," Staff Sergeant Maruyama, 38, a medic, said in the amphibious landing ship's mess hall.

Aboard the Osumi, women are uncommon. Only men participated in a fitness training session on the flight deck. Maruyama and Corporal Kurosawa, 20, instead stretched in the ship's small gym while male colleagues around them lifted weights.