Family, Schools, and Bad Girls: National Institutions and Their Threat
How does the school, and the classroom particularly, serve to distill and infuse cultural concepts, ideologies, and provide frames of meaning for students? If the school as contingent to Japan’s economic miracle and national consolidation is a grand claim with traces of truth in its disciplinary function and regulatory effects, how might other educational sites encounter difference and provide other forms of empathetic connection, spatial memory, solidarity, and still serve to discipline and regulate?
The school is an orthopedic space for bodies being transformed. Within the catalogue of disciplinary institutions detailed by Foucault, the school holds a prominent place. Bounded and measured, the school persists as a site of anthropological query. Beyond the walls of the school, however, exists a complex environment where young people mutate in their purpose, meaning, and relations. Outside of the institution, young people are more likely to be perceived as a threat to social order, a historic feature of modernity. Through the Meiji period and into Japan’s tentative democratic experiment of the Taisho era (1912-26), youth on the streets proved to be a persistent source of anxiety for officials and custodians of moral hegemony. Working class kids of the ‘20s notoriously gathered in the spaces of bourgeois entertainment, including coffee shops and movie theaters while creating “identities by drawing on images of Japanese outlaw heroes, now amplified through the cinema and popular historical novels, as well as the organizational patterns, dress, and argot of street hawkers, actors, construction workers, gamblers, and other groups…” (Ambaras 2006, 143). They borrowed Native American tribal names for their gangs as they watched Western movies and carried improvised brass knuckles “called ‘American sacks,’ made from bicycle chains or scrap metal” (ibid 144). Hierarchies were destabilized and social codes and relations undermined by the unruly force exerted by youth gangs: sometimes college students led gangs of factory workers, in another case a gang of “factory workers and vagrants…targeted Keio College boys; the leader sported a Keio cap and Keio Commercial School pin along with his gang tattoo” (Ibid., 145). Contact across class lines and infiltration into the classroom and factory floor, largely by boys, posed no less a threat to state attempts to harness youthful energies to a national project than the perverting and corrupting dangers swirling around the modern young women of the period.
Bad Girls Never Die
In the new capitalist interiors of offices and spaces of leisure, the modern girl or moga was emerging, “driven by an ‘ideology of hedonism’ ” (Ibid., 149). The moga was the experienced older sister to the female students at elite schools in the Meiji era. Melanie Czarnecki, writing about “the degenerate Meiji schoolgirl” argues that the emerging educational practices for girls produced the very liminal conditions for these young women or “degenerate schoolgirls” (daraku jogakusei ) “to position themselves in public spaces that had previously been off limits” (Czarnecki 2005, 49). The school culture inadvertently produced the conditions for girls to challenge conventional orthodoxy that “their only place was in the home.” Twenty years later, educational opportunities and calls for new workers expanded “girl culture” into the changing public spaces of Japanese society. Exposed to predatory bosses, the flirtations of “modern” boys, and the allure of foreign men, modern girls were both perceived as vulnerable to and trafficking in commodified social play electrified with the erotic. Becoming modern entailed a kind of delinquency specific to young women now encountering men in the workplace and in clubs and cafes, and occasionally taking foreigners to bed. This delinquency recurred as a salacious trope in popular novels of the time, a charged contagion where “the modern girl’s contact with the foreign and concomitant transformation into a vamp…rendered her so erotically attractive to the narrator” (Ambaras 2006,153). Girls as the skin, membrane, affective tissue between the nation—intensely embodied and policed by men—and the outside, recurs as a persistent site of crisis. In the post-war years the crisis manifested itself in the phenomena of the so-called “yellow cab” or young Japanese women taking luxurious holidays partly in pursuit of sexual liaisons with foreign men. Girls, in their doubled state of being both young and women, are a doubled risk, jeopardizing racial purity and betraying the nation’s investment in their reproductive energies. Under such intense scrutiny and approbation, the modern girl from pre-war to post-war is critical to new economies of service and affect yet intensively criticized and policed for the risks she poses to herself as biological agent of the nation. “It is precisely because young Japanese women are marginalized professionally and culturally that they have both the leisure and the inclination to travel or reside abroad, to intensively study foreign languages, and consequently to enjoy ever more intimate relations with the foreign(er)” (Kelsky 1996,185). The girl inherits a position as impure outsider in a patriarchal cosmic order, perceived as “‘inauthentic,’ unreliable, and unqualified to participate in many ritual and institutional practices” (ibid 185). However, as Karen Kelsky points out, amid flows of transnational energy, desire and affect, old orders may be “destabilized,” placing young women into proximity with the very forces critical yet again for the nation’s attempts to position itself at the center of those flows.
This contaminated and thus dangerous/desirable woman denotes a particular delinquency or youth threat, the autonomous subject of the girl and her imbrication within nationalist claims for social and biological reproduction. From over-consuming young women reviled in the mainstream press as “parasite singles” (Bardsley, Hirokawa, Lukács) to the ganguro and yamamba fashions of teenage girls in the popular entertainment and shopping districts of Shibuya and Shinjuku (Kinsella), young women have consistently occupied a risky position in the contentious social struggles to contain female sexuality and identity. In Sharon Kinsella’s survey of Girls’ Studies, a body of literature and analysis published from the mid-1980’s, she notes the male authors’ central concerns with a female mystic primitivism constitutive of an essential difference in girls and their culture. One writer suggests, “Girls…are complicit in their own outsider status and the segregation of girls’ aesthetics and pastimes from the rest of modern culture. Incarcerated in schools and dormitories, girls are other-worldly beings that are implicitly foreigners” (Kinsella 2005, 150). Yamane Kazuma, a freelance scholar, draws a more pointed connection between girls and a seditious outsider identity, describing girls consorting in Roppongi nightclubs with foreigners and on “streets that brimmed with stateless power” (quoted in Kinsella 2005,150). Loose on the streets, texting one another in cryptic gyaru moji (“Gal characters/typed”) (see Miller and Bardsley 2005), and socializing with foreigners, girls appear not simply as cute, wayward waifs adorning the latest social panic/breathless photo spread about Harajuku style. Instead, they seem to actively challenge masculine, state power. In their relation to space (“the streets”), to representational media and language, and to social relations, the girl-figure, composed from a panoply of discordant economic, familial, political, educational, and social forces, constitutes a entrancingly risky imaginary uncannily “outside” of the normative, modernizing, patriarchal centripetal force exerted on the order of bodies and things. Girls are a facilitating function, imbued with powers to mother the nation even as, and precisely because, they are on its periphery. “…young women operated as the mobile place of suture between the contemporary and the originary, the urban and the rural, indicates yet again how female gender often emerges to close the disjunctures in consumerist discourses of authenticity” (Ivy 1995, 35).
Young women and their discursive doubles comprise the very instability we encounter across the span from Japan’s modernizing period in the early 20th century, through the post-war rebuilding and into the slow, postmodern present spangled by natural disasters, environmental damage, economic disparity, political recalcitrance, and social frictions. Fictional characters, journalistic composites and political straw(wo)men mingle freely with accounts of real women and their practices in the passage above and it is in this combination that the shape of an “outside in Japan” emerges, an outside marked by contestations over time, the future, and what it means to be a kid.
Family and Nation
Among the anxieties precipitated by deviant girls and vexing bureaucrats, researchers, and pundits alike, the falling birthrate is the most prominent. But children do not just rise and fall in demographers’ tabulations like seasonal rainfall amounts pointing symptomatically to broader climate patterns far away. They are not “’like the air’ as they were once said to be: ordinary, natural events in the life of the extended family…” (White 2002, 121). The ontology of children is indivisible from other family and individual situations, experiences, obligations, and possibilities. Surrounded by conflicting ideological and practical/policy injunctions, women may find it difficult and undesirable to have children when having children is so often contingent on the economics and gender relations of marriage. “Having children is for most people the reason to get married, but marriage itself may be such a constrained state that it itself represents a barrier to the desire outcome of children” (Ibid., 118). The ideal of marugakae or “total embrace” espoused by corporations towards their employees and idyllically understood to ensure children a loving household of several adult members found its ideological hold diminished in the throes of the Bubble Collapse of the early 1990s. Neo-liberal demands on the nuclear family added constraints to the already-constricting social and economic realities lived by Japanese middle class parents and children at the end of the 21st century. Japanese governmental policy with its attempts to manage modernity through population is epitomized, White argues, by the 1898 Civil Code, as it “demanded a uniformity of family performance unrealistic, unsuitable, and…impossible to maintain either according to the agenda of Confucian nation-building or according to the postwar ideal of a state based on democratic and individualistic family life” (Ibid., 120). To produce children is to reproduce the family and to provide the labor of the nation, both as a reserve army, destined to care for the growing multitude of elderly, but also to work as bodies constituting the nation’s future biopolitical power. The reproduction of the former is endlessly subservient to the demands of the latter.
The school is an orthopedic space for bodies being transformed. Within the catalogue of disciplinary institutions detailed by Foucault, the school holds a prominent place. Bounded and measured, the school persists as a site of anthropological query. Beyond the walls of the school, however, exists a complex environment where young people mutate in their purpose, meaning, and relations. Outside of the institution, young people are more likely to be perceived as a threat to social order, a historic feature of modernity. Through the Meiji period and into Japan’s tentative democratic experiment of the Taisho era (1912-26), youth on the streets proved to be a persistent source of anxiety for officials and custodians of moral hegemony. Working class kids of the ‘20s notoriously gathered in the spaces of bourgeois entertainment, including coffee shops and movie theaters while creating “identities by drawing on images of Japanese outlaw heroes, now amplified through the cinema and popular historical novels, as well as the organizational patterns, dress, and argot of street hawkers, actors, construction workers, gamblers, and other groups…” (Ambaras 2006, 143). They borrowed Native American tribal names for their gangs as they watched Western movies and carried improvised brass knuckles “called ‘American sacks,’ made from bicycle chains or scrap metal” (ibid 144). Hierarchies were destabilized and social codes and relations undermined by the unruly force exerted by youth gangs: sometimes college students led gangs of factory workers, in another case a gang of “factory workers and vagrants…targeted Keio College boys; the leader sported a Keio cap and Keio Commercial School pin along with his gang tattoo” (Ibid., 145). Contact across class lines and infiltration into the classroom and factory floor, largely by boys, posed no less a threat to state attempts to harness youthful energies to a national project than the perverting and corrupting dangers swirling around the modern young women of the period.
Bad Girls Never Die
In the new capitalist interiors of offices and spaces of leisure, the modern girl or moga was emerging, “driven by an ‘ideology of hedonism’ ” (Ibid., 149). The moga was the experienced older sister to the female students at elite schools in the Meiji era. Melanie Czarnecki, writing about “the degenerate Meiji schoolgirl” argues that the emerging educational practices for girls produced the very liminal conditions for these young women or “degenerate schoolgirls” (daraku jogakusei ) “to position themselves in public spaces that had previously been off limits” (Czarnecki 2005, 49). The school culture inadvertently produced the conditions for girls to challenge conventional orthodoxy that “their only place was in the home.” Twenty years later, educational opportunities and calls for new workers expanded “girl culture” into the changing public spaces of Japanese society. Exposed to predatory bosses, the flirtations of “modern” boys, and the allure of foreign men, modern girls were both perceived as vulnerable to and trafficking in commodified social play electrified with the erotic. Becoming modern entailed a kind of delinquency specific to young women now encountering men in the workplace and in clubs and cafes, and occasionally taking foreigners to bed. This delinquency recurred as a salacious trope in popular novels of the time, a charged contagion where “the modern girl’s contact with the foreign and concomitant transformation into a vamp…rendered her so erotically attractive to the narrator” (Ambaras 2006,153). Girls as the skin, membrane, affective tissue between the nation—intensely embodied and policed by men—and the outside, recurs as a persistent site of crisis. In the post-war years the crisis manifested itself in the phenomena of the so-called “yellow cab” or young Japanese women taking luxurious holidays partly in pursuit of sexual liaisons with foreign men. Girls, in their doubled state of being both young and women, are a doubled risk, jeopardizing racial purity and betraying the nation’s investment in their reproductive energies. Under such intense scrutiny and approbation, the modern girl from pre-war to post-war is critical to new economies of service and affect yet intensively criticized and policed for the risks she poses to herself as biological agent of the nation. “It is precisely because young Japanese women are marginalized professionally and culturally that they have both the leisure and the inclination to travel or reside abroad, to intensively study foreign languages, and consequently to enjoy ever more intimate relations with the foreign(er)” (Kelsky 1996,185). The girl inherits a position as impure outsider in a patriarchal cosmic order, perceived as “‘inauthentic,’ unreliable, and unqualified to participate in many ritual and institutional practices” (ibid 185). However, as Karen Kelsky points out, amid flows of transnational energy, desire and affect, old orders may be “destabilized,” placing young women into proximity with the very forces critical yet again for the nation’s attempts to position itself at the center of those flows.
This contaminated and thus dangerous/desirable woman denotes a particular delinquency or youth threat, the autonomous subject of the girl and her imbrication within nationalist claims for social and biological reproduction. From over-consuming young women reviled in the mainstream press as “parasite singles” (Bardsley, Hirokawa, Lukács) to the ganguro and yamamba fashions of teenage girls in the popular entertainment and shopping districts of Shibuya and Shinjuku (Kinsella), young women have consistently occupied a risky position in the contentious social struggles to contain female sexuality and identity. In Sharon Kinsella’s survey of Girls’ Studies, a body of literature and analysis published from the mid-1980’s, she notes the male authors’ central concerns with a female mystic primitivism constitutive of an essential difference in girls and their culture. One writer suggests, “Girls…are complicit in their own outsider status and the segregation of girls’ aesthetics and pastimes from the rest of modern culture. Incarcerated in schools and dormitories, girls are other-worldly beings that are implicitly foreigners” (Kinsella 2005, 150). Yamane Kazuma, a freelance scholar, draws a more pointed connection between girls and a seditious outsider identity, describing girls consorting in Roppongi nightclubs with foreigners and on “streets that brimmed with stateless power” (quoted in Kinsella 2005,150). Loose on the streets, texting one another in cryptic gyaru moji (“Gal characters/typed”) (see Miller and Bardsley 2005), and socializing with foreigners, girls appear not simply as cute, wayward waifs adorning the latest social panic/breathless photo spread about Harajuku style. Instead, they seem to actively challenge masculine, state power. In their relation to space (“the streets”), to representational media and language, and to social relations, the girl-figure, composed from a panoply of discordant economic, familial, political, educational, and social forces, constitutes a entrancingly risky imaginary uncannily “outside” of the normative, modernizing, patriarchal centripetal force exerted on the order of bodies and things. Girls are a facilitating function, imbued with powers to mother the nation even as, and precisely because, they are on its periphery. “…young women operated as the mobile place of suture between the contemporary and the originary, the urban and the rural, indicates yet again how female gender often emerges to close the disjunctures in consumerist discourses of authenticity” (Ivy 1995, 35).
Young women and their discursive doubles comprise the very instability we encounter across the span from Japan’s modernizing period in the early 20th century, through the post-war rebuilding and into the slow, postmodern present spangled by natural disasters, environmental damage, economic disparity, political recalcitrance, and social frictions. Fictional characters, journalistic composites and political straw(wo)men mingle freely with accounts of real women and their practices in the passage above and it is in this combination that the shape of an “outside in Japan” emerges, an outside marked by contestations over time, the future, and what it means to be a kid.
Family and Nation
Among the anxieties precipitated by deviant girls and vexing bureaucrats, researchers, and pundits alike, the falling birthrate is the most prominent. But children do not just rise and fall in demographers’ tabulations like seasonal rainfall amounts pointing symptomatically to broader climate patterns far away. They are not “’like the air’ as they were once said to be: ordinary, natural events in the life of the extended family…” (White 2002, 121). The ontology of children is indivisible from other family and individual situations, experiences, obligations, and possibilities. Surrounded by conflicting ideological and practical/policy injunctions, women may find it difficult and undesirable to have children when having children is so often contingent on the economics and gender relations of marriage. “Having children is for most people the reason to get married, but marriage itself may be such a constrained state that it itself represents a barrier to the desire outcome of children” (Ibid., 118). The ideal of marugakae or “total embrace” espoused by corporations towards their employees and idyllically understood to ensure children a loving household of several adult members found its ideological hold diminished in the throes of the Bubble Collapse of the early 1990s. Neo-liberal demands on the nuclear family added constraints to the already-constricting social and economic realities lived by Japanese middle class parents and children at the end of the 21st century. Japanese governmental policy with its attempts to manage modernity through population is epitomized, White argues, by the 1898 Civil Code, as it “demanded a uniformity of family performance unrealistic, unsuitable, and…impossible to maintain either according to the agenda of Confucian nation-building or according to the postwar ideal of a state based on democratic and individualistic family life” (Ibid., 120). To produce children is to reproduce the family and to provide the labor of the nation, both as a reserve army, destined to care for the growing multitude of elderly, but also to work as bodies constituting the nation’s future biopolitical power. The reproduction of the former is endlessly subservient to the demands of the latter.
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