Abnormality Through Foreign Contact

The asylum and the reformatory share contiguity with psychiatry as it is historicized within the modern nation-state by Foucault as the “discipline of the scientific protection of society” (Foucault 2003, 230).  Foucault argues psychiatry proposes to defend the border of society by defining and defending childhood and in so doing to organize fixed territories for the deployment of techniques of power-knowledge (Ibid., 304)  This task requires a normalization of childhood, one in which pedagogic practices are called forth as necessary and indispensable allies, united in the task of “protection and order.” This is a pressing concern in the extended period of economic malaise and “dreamless” era endemic to Japan since the collapse of the Bubble.  By the late 90s public discourse was vivid with echoing panics around “collapsing classrooms” and “families” (gakkyu hokai/katei hokkai) and the risky bodies at the edges of Japan’s future: hen na kodomo or “the strange child” (Arai 2003, 370).  Given the relentless concerns over children in Japan and the institutional defense of society through a construction of abnormality in contradistinction to “childhood,” how do we situate the para-school—the educational structures that aid, intervene, and reformulate the social logics of childhood and by extension, Japanese identity, from the periphery?  And perhaps more pressing for the school itself, how does it account for difference and contracted identities it cannot fully contain?

Disappearing At the Threshold

The school grew at incredible rates over the two years I spent there, due to its reputation at placing its students in Japan’s most prestigious schools despite their deficiencies under Japanese testing regimes.  This success was accomplished with a generally open approach to teaching and a strong sense of collegiality among the native-English speaking teachers and the Japanese staff.  The less-than-formal conduct of classes was offset with the enthusiasm teachers expressed and the strong connections they developed with many of their students, both elements that parents frequently praised, recalling similar experiences abroad while noting this lack in their children’s regular schooling.  As the season of entrance examinations approached however, the informality faded as pressure on teachers for their students to pass increased and as it did, their demeanors grew taut with strain that they attempted to shield their students from.  They did this in vain, for the students too began to visibly show the effects of this pressure in their bodies.  Absences, a pause from grammar drills and essay exercises they could not afford, became frequent.  Bowed over thick vocabulary books with boxes of tissues at their elbows and used tissues littering the floor, sick children struggled against the stupor of fever.  At this time a familiar story began to be retold more and more often between the teachers, sparer in its grim details.  A skilled and dedicated student, Hiroyuki, preparing for his high school exams, had emotionally collapsed.  His promise disappeared with him into his room that he refused to leave, embodying a popularly fetishized problem called hikkikomori—young people who withdraw into their private spaces, refusing not only school but also familial interactions.  The story circulated as a caution, but also a site of mourning for the teachers who had worked with him.  The “asylum” the school imagined itself to be, and what Charlie hoped would be a safe haven, seemed to have failed Hiroyuki.  Instead he formed his own quarantine and border, withdrawing his promised potential to an autonomized space of bare survival.  His “abnormality” as a kikokushijo had not fully inoculated him against the native forms of “strangeness” produced within “normal” Japanese children.  His perceived failure to perform as a “real” Japanese child was perversely controverted by a “native” malaise. His sudden removal to the dark space between the social world and a kind of death was perceived by the staff as uniquely endemic to regular children exposed to Japan’s harsh pedagogy. K.A.’s mission was undergirded by affective labors intended to circumvent this risk by nurturing what was invulnerable in their kikokushijo students—their repatriated abnormality.

I never met Hiroyuki, but the story of how his difference failed to protect him from the brutal damage enacted upon Japanese young people in everyday narratives haunted us in the cramped teachers’ area.  He was whispered of, an invocation that created a pause in which his loss was sharp in the stilled conversation. This story I heard so often demarcates the thick, dangerous edges of a dark passage where Hiroyuki excessively, or too precisely, inhabited a narrative of “native” Japanese childhood shocked into solitary fragments by social order before it disappeared from a national future, rerouted into other forms of solitary becoming.

The school operated in the shifting zones between transglobal capitalist circulation with its production of “abnormalities” and regimes of normative social affiliation and expectation.  A series of layered intentions mark the para-school’s flexible contours, capable of finding the margin of profit in sheltering and (re)educating these unusually globalized children who “suffer” from the class demands made upon their parents.  At the same time, the para-school in Tokyo exists as a temporary portal of play and social engagement. As a “safe haven” the school provides what is otherwise unavailable to these young people suddenly isolated within daily worlds overflowing with over-familiar scrutiny and judgments against their strangeness.  In this porous duality the school exercised the soft shock of calculated academic discipline, attempting to shape its students into manageable and desirable Japanese subjects who still retain a valuable difference and thereby maintain the borders of social order before those borders close in a violence of exclusion or confused misrecognition.  To be repatriated is “to change form and condition” with “always new thresholds to cross” (Van Gennep 1960, 189).  What is confusing is the threshold, marked as a momentary crisis—of difference, of youth—that inexplicably holds and becomes a long passageway of a life barely containing difference, difference softened into pliancy through sympathetic shocks.

After listening to them talk so frankly about their parents, their fellow students, their teachers, I ask Naoko and Eko how they feel about their lives back in Tokyo, back in Japan, back in the school systems and among their childhood friends.  Eko leans forward on the table, small fingers tugging at her shirt sleeve. Slowly but with a strained, aggressive determination, she pulls the cloth up, revealing her forearm. It is pocked and nicked with tiny sores. Small scabs are interspersed with raised, swollen patches raked with scratches. Some wounds have opened again and a viscous mix of blood and fluid has partially solidified into yellowish crusts streaked with red. “They don’t get better.” She doesn’t look up at me.

There is an endlessness to the questions we can ask. To the openings and closings of lives under global capitalism and a state struggling to manage youth as its fading bio-political resource.
 
While containing a valuable resource for engaging the world at Japan’s borders and expanding its own territories of knowledge of itself, kikokushijo pose an insoluble form of ambiguous difference biologically constituted as “Japanese” and created in the colonial/capitalist outerzones of national ideology and practice.   Kikokushijo, as familial (and therefore intimately familiar) biological products of a “natural” state of being Japanese—an ethno-political subjectivity, open that great wound in the tissue of race and society, the quality of belonging against a state of difference.  Not so simply legible as an Other arriving distinctly from outside, like a Korean laborer imported for the war industries in 1939, or a Filipina smuggled/coerced as hostesses for corporate warriors in 1993, these children are an Other produced from within.  These young people are perhaps capable of a parallax view, seeing from two locations at once and thus disrupting the homogenous gaze presumed by the “natives” with whom they discover themselves among and assumed to be synonymous with. At the same time they problematize what is generally claimed as a “natural” state of Japanese identity in classic literature on Japanese identity (notably Doi, 1976), a blood relation simultaneous with citizenship in the magical confluence (and condensation) of Japanese ethnic and political histories.  The ethno-cultural indices of being “Japanese” are undone in the (short)circuits of capitalist labor and attendant familial mobility so that out there, in the new space of social reproduction, we see the constitution of selfhood and cultural identity is a relational, radically adaptive set of processes.  The kikokushijo, confounded by her own public claim to a Japaneseness that only occasional intersects with the dominant conception, appears in that mimetic turn to be a “copy that is not a copy” and thus intimately linked to a globalized, urban imaginary while subject to the relentless demands of local conformity and subjectivity.  “When I try, but kinda without thinking, I can be Japanese, but only if I’m with Japanese people, no offense. Its easier not to be.”

Not to be what? I ask Mami, my reliable young informant, as we walk through a spectacular arcade pulsing with commercial life. 

“To be Japanese.  But I know that I am,” she sighs, dramatically.

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