Kikokushijo, Otherness, Schools, and Finding Kids on Film
In this study of Japanese young people that ranges across biological and social categories, a scholarly gravity exerts a steady pull, drawing towards a diagnostic center to determine the constitution, shape, character, etc of this exact figure of child. A pressure is exerted on the people-subjects under scrutiny, solidifying them into a hardened mass of Otherness. Like some alien planet, this Otherness casts its disordering, tidal shadow across an otherwise rhythmic social sea. The pull is towards expansive instrumentalization—broad use of kids as a sign of social disease—where the figure of the kikokushijo strictly frames the exact dimensions of institutional and policy shortcomings for society as a whole. It is the symptomatic child as shorthand and palimpsest for broader cultural diagnosis (and production of theory-therapies). An opposite pull reduces the class of child to a series of case studies to be flayed/filleted finely in order to produce cultural specimens of lived experience suitable for performing a biopsy on the class’ specific weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here the child is a microscopic figure, a Foucauldian trace, intrinsically vulnerable because it lacks some fundamental auto-immunity to social disease and thus a figure of pathos.
The child-as-subject bucks within this doubled Otherness as its energies are harnessed to the twin domesticating forces of general social fear and specific individual malaise. Attributing social threat to the many bedeviled vectors of youth resolves public anxiety all too easily with a sacrificial child-figure—the ur form of the folk devil (Cohen, Toivonen). The individualization of the case study, so ubiquitous in social science, psychology, and education methods and literatures, seems to perfume the site of risk with a humanizing incense. Each young person suffers a specific and accumulating set of symptoms, attributable to a dizzying area of causes. The Myth of Juvenile Delinquency, a slim volume on various types of Canadian teen deviancy, while perhaps unremarkable in any canon of literature on youth, is precisely illustrative of this approach. Published in 1979, nine chapters are devoted to individual studies ranging from “malicious damage” to “unmanageability,” resolved finally in the tenth chapter abruptly titled, “Synthesis.” The author attempts to dissipate the murk of judicial and psychological classifications with the simple axiom “that all social activity has meaning. All social actions take place inside society and they constitute a kind of communiqué addressed to the social order” (Leyton 1979, 189). “Juvenile discontent” is particularly disposed towards telegraphing their distress with their “terrorist communiqué arbitrarily defined as delinquency” (Ibid). My intention is not to unfairly pillory this one text. The book sharply critiques class inequality and the stresses of poverty places on the family. However, in its pragmatic purpose to provide expert recommendations for civil reform, it leaves unexamined the concept of the family, the “underclasses,” the state, and basic assumptions about what youthful behaviors are “profitless, nihilistic,” and “bizarre” within eastern Canada at the time of the research (Ibid., 27, 189). The book, with its explicit use of sociological and psychological theories and ethnographic methodology, serves to illustrate a familiar framing of youth, albeit drawn into stark, sinister relief through its manifestation in the dark circuit of juvenile policing and jurisprudence terminating at “the training school.” Wherever kids might be, scattered throughout industrial and post-industrial societies, they can always surely be discovered ensnared as disciplinary object or pedagogical subject in the institution. That is, they frequently only appear once they are ushered, transported, cajoled or driven to the inside where they can be made to make sense. This incarceration/incorporation within society and its institutions, from family to school to workhouse to barracks to shopping mall, functions so profoundly precisely because of the popularized unruly freedom and wanderlust of the child/teenager wild and wily on the outside, on the streets, spatially performing and perfecting their difference as a technique of forming their identity. From the individual case file to the resulting universalizing synthesis: youth are always already inside society and each unique young person is also readily reducible to the whole—an essentialist mass 1) writhing in its capacity for the “bizarre” behavior of the irrational, anti-social delinquent while 2) universally deserving of a life experience in the present quantified as “childhood” (per Jebb’s Declaration of Child Rights), intended to integrate/graft them completely into a particular healthy social identity.
Kids as Student and Delinquent: In School or on the Street
In the anthropology of Japan’s children, it is no wonder that children appear primarily in two modes: as students or as delinquents. As students, they are frequently docile subjects safely ensconced in one of Japan’s central State institutions of capture—the school—with occasional turbulent passages (Rohlen, Fukuzawa, Allison). In these surveys the student population sometimes seems a fleshy, ebullient appendage to Japan’s modern structure, almost appearing as an effect of the pedagogical and socializing power coursing through the uniform buildings and amplified by the uniformed pupils themselves. Education policy and practice were envied abroad and vaunted at home during Japan’s period of high growth. The school is an intense site with its intimate, local connections with the surrounding neighborhood and its enactment of nationally-standardized curriculum, including special attention to providing “life guidance” (LaTendre).
Even after the boom years, the Japanese school persists as a primary anthropological site, a consistent institutional touchstone amid decades of economic and geopolitical shifts. The Japanese education system continues to occupy a central position in the imaginary of Western/US anthropology and any survey of the literature passes through the site/object of “the school” as a definitive portal into the culture, a venerated gateway into Japan’s erstwhile soul. Here, one might discover Japan’s homogenous core values on ready display, retrieved, burnished, demonstrated and instilled daily by teachers and students. Lest this sound like threadbare Orientalist simplification, one only has to hear the title of the 1998 ethnographic film about a rural Hokkaido elementary school: “Heart of the Country.” The film is a heartwarming study of the school culture fostered by the wise principal as an unwitting but benevolent protagonist, a capable bridge between Japan’s past and its accelerating future. Through a calm pacing and a camera always comfortably nestled into the corners of lively classrooms, the film evokes a progressive pastoral spirit able to confront a difficult, wartime past and nurture a resourceful, joyous future in the form of the exuberant young kids. The film’s release follows Rohlen and LeTendre’s important edited volume, Teaching and Learning in Japan, appearing as a lively exclamation point to the book’s rich ethnographic content. Japan’s modern emergence as nation-state during the Meiji period is credited in large part to its federal education policy summarized in the Imperial Rescript on Education (教育ニ関スル勅語) signed by the Emperor in 1890. This educational precursor prepared Japan to recover quickly after the disastrous imperial adventure of 1931-1945, a point emphasized in a 1963 governmental White Paper:
The paper continues to make explicit the close and symbiotic relationship between Japan’s national education project and its post-war economic miracle:
We might then say, the school, created by Imperial edict and resilient in Japan’s modern history, contained, preserved, and expressed Japan’s central cultural tenets and served to successfully inculcate Japan’s young with the social ethos and skills that would ensure Japan’s economic ascendancy and cultural continuity. Of course, this tidy summation echoes back the basic tenets of nihonjinron, Japan’s ideology of exceptionalism, but it also articulates the appeal the school held as object of cultural study. American anxieties over Japan’s unfaltering and tireless economic expansion in the 70s and 80s provoked an entire discourse on Japan’s exceptional education. Even as late as 1999 Gerald K. LeTendre, a leading expert on Japan’s education system, was compelled to assemble a scholarly riposte to the overheated adulation and worry about Japan’s magic schools entitled Competitor or Ally?: Japan’s Role in America’s Education Debates. Through the institutional figure of its schools Japan appeared as the indefatigable Other as Americans struggled over the nature of their own crisis in education and by extension, an endless anxiety over the future in which no child would be left behind, all evidence to the contrary. “Heart of the Country” received an award of commendation from the Society of Visual Anthropology in 2000, the same year the fiction film “Battle Royale” was released—a scathing, metaphorical depiction of Japan’s education society or kyoiku shakai and the destructive, violent consequences of its competitive nature.
“Battle Royale” is a furious counterweight to the generally soft critiques leveled by the vast majority of research on Japan’s schools. Rather than the classroom being a nurturing environment, the film shows it to be a place of humiliation, suspicion, betrayal and ultimately brutal murder, first inflicted by and then organized and instigated by the adults. The film and its potential readings are so significant to this project that they require a more detailed examination elsewhere. But while dark forces may be contained and activated within Japan’s schools, the classroom, especially for the youngest students, continues as a luminescent site, beckoning both foreign and native researchers and filmmakers alike to enter into this space where childish openness comingles with institutional nurture.
The students and teacher of an elementary school class in northern Tokyo is the focus of 2003 NHK documentary titled in English “Children Full of Life” but in Japanese Namida to warai no happî kurasu: 4 nen 1 kumi Inochi no jugyô (涙と笑いのハッピークラス～４年１組 命の授業～) or “Happy Class of Tears and Laughter—4th Year 1st class Lesson of Life.” The poetic and perhaps melodramatic titling foreshadows the saccharine strategies the director pursues in representing the 10 year-old students beginning the school year. The camera zooms in often, framing a gleeful or excited expression on a student’s face, followed by an edit showing them high-fiving their older male teacher. He exhorts them to be happy and reminds them that this is their most important purpose in the class. Six minutes into the film, a student who has been absent for four days begins to read a letter aloud to the class as part of a class ritual done every day where three students read from diaries called “class letters.”
Ren, the student, recounts the death of his grandmother and her funeral and cremation. “Within an hour she was turned into bone,” he says. The other students are riveted. The camera moves sharply to show us their focused, wide-eyed attention. When Ren finishes, hands fly up around the room and all students with questions stand. But it is not questions, but recitations of their own losses: the deaths of grandparents by cancer, in their sleep. Mifuyu, with straight bangs and awkward braces, begins to slowly tell of her father’s sudden death when she was three. She falters. Tears start to course down her cheeks. She wipes at her eyes as she says she’d wanted to write about his death in class but been afraid of being different. The camera cuts to two boys, each wiping their own eyes as they contend with the painful experiences of their classmates and their own emotions. The classroom has been transformed. Their teacher says, “It was Ren’s letter that gave her the courage.” His willingness to share his own grief has given Mifuyu the means to talk about what she has never spoken of before. The moment, carefully constructed by videographers, editors, and producers, is indeed radical even as the scene closes with the inevitable wash of a schmaltzy guitar. What the documentary strives to show is how much the school is not a school, but a place where Japanese virtues are embodied by staff and student alike, in much the same way “Heart of the Country” functions, though with less critical purchase.
The class is a synecdoche, standing for the whole of the educational apparatus and more ambitiously perhaps, for the future of Japan. In so doing, it also conceals, performing a dramatic conflation of the specific experiences of the class as a kind of essentialist expression of what the school universally endeavors. Certainly Mr. Kanamori, the teacher, is the protagonist here, a stark counter-example to the vicious Kitano-sensei in “Battle Royale.” But if it is possible to suspend the sentimentality (and the nostalgia I suspect this is intended to evoke in Japanese viewers), there remain the specific relations produced within the boundaries of the classroom walls as a micro-component in the historical, bureaucratic, political, and cultural assemblage of the school. The class has its own particular habits and Ren exercises himself within the class letter ritual to express his loss and thus explain his absence in a form of careful, prescribed public oratory. Mifuyu and the other students willingly enter into an empathetic relationship with one another and the class seems to have a profound encounter with one another and the power of memory, both suppressed and shared. All these films show the class to be a culture within and apart from the larger world, which is a convenient structuring device to both directors and researchers. A magical veil is lowered to temporarily alter the relations contained within even as desires and imperatives of the school and the larger society continue to echo.
Orthopedics of the School
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? These are questions you can explore here.
The child-as-subject bucks within this doubled Otherness as its energies are harnessed to the twin domesticating forces of general social fear and specific individual malaise. Attributing social threat to the many bedeviled vectors of youth resolves public anxiety all too easily with a sacrificial child-figure—the ur form of the folk devil (Cohen, Toivonen). The individualization of the case study, so ubiquitous in social science, psychology, and education methods and literatures, seems to perfume the site of risk with a humanizing incense. Each young person suffers a specific and accumulating set of symptoms, attributable to a dizzying area of causes. The Myth of Juvenile Delinquency, a slim volume on various types of Canadian teen deviancy, while perhaps unremarkable in any canon of literature on youth, is precisely illustrative of this approach. Published in 1979, nine chapters are devoted to individual studies ranging from “malicious damage” to “unmanageability,” resolved finally in the tenth chapter abruptly titled, “Synthesis.” The author attempts to dissipate the murk of judicial and psychological classifications with the simple axiom “that all social activity has meaning. All social actions take place inside society and they constitute a kind of communiqué addressed to the social order” (Leyton 1979, 189). “Juvenile discontent” is particularly disposed towards telegraphing their distress with their “terrorist communiqué arbitrarily defined as delinquency” (Ibid). My intention is not to unfairly pillory this one text. The book sharply critiques class inequality and the stresses of poverty places on the family. However, in its pragmatic purpose to provide expert recommendations for civil reform, it leaves unexamined the concept of the family, the “underclasses,” the state, and basic assumptions about what youthful behaviors are “profitless, nihilistic,” and “bizarre” within eastern Canada at the time of the research (Ibid., 27, 189). The book, with its explicit use of sociological and psychological theories and ethnographic methodology, serves to illustrate a familiar framing of youth, albeit drawn into stark, sinister relief through its manifestation in the dark circuit of juvenile policing and jurisprudence terminating at “the training school.” Wherever kids might be, scattered throughout industrial and post-industrial societies, they can always surely be discovered ensnared as disciplinary object or pedagogical subject in the institution. That is, they frequently only appear once they are ushered, transported, cajoled or driven to the inside where they can be made to make sense. This incarceration/incorporation within society and its institutions, from family to school to workhouse to barracks to shopping mall, functions so profoundly precisely because of the popularized unruly freedom and wanderlust of the child/teenager wild and wily on the outside, on the streets, spatially performing and perfecting their difference as a technique of forming their identity. From the individual case file to the resulting universalizing synthesis: youth are always already inside society and each unique young person is also readily reducible to the whole—an essentialist mass 1) writhing in its capacity for the “bizarre” behavior of the irrational, anti-social delinquent while 2) universally deserving of a life experience in the present quantified as “childhood” (per Jebb’s Declaration of Child Rights), intended to integrate/graft them completely into a particular healthy social identity.
Kids as Student and Delinquent: In School or on the Street
In the anthropology of Japan’s children, it is no wonder that children appear primarily in two modes: as students or as delinquents. As students, they are frequently docile subjects safely ensconced in one of Japan’s central State institutions of capture—the school—with occasional turbulent passages (Rohlen, Fukuzawa, Allison). In these surveys the student population sometimes seems a fleshy, ebullient appendage to Japan’s modern structure, almost appearing as an effect of the pedagogical and socializing power coursing through the uniform buildings and amplified by the uniformed pupils themselves. Education policy and practice were envied abroad and vaunted at home during Japan’s period of high growth. The school is an intense site with its intimate, local connections with the surrounding neighborhood and its enactment of nationally-standardized curriculum, including special attention to providing “life guidance” (LaTendre).
Even after the boom years, the Japanese school persists as a primary anthropological site, a consistent institutional touchstone amid decades of economic and geopolitical shifts. The Japanese education system continues to occupy a central position in the imaginary of Western/US anthropology and any survey of the literature passes through the site/object of “the school” as a definitive portal into the culture, a venerated gateway into Japan’s erstwhile soul. Here, one might discover Japan’s homogenous core values on ready display, retrieved, burnished, demonstrated and instilled daily by teachers and students. Lest this sound like threadbare Orientalist simplification, one only has to hear the title of the 1998 ethnographic film about a rural Hokkaido elementary school: “Heart of the Country.” The film is a heartwarming study of the school culture fostered by the wise principal as an unwitting but benevolent protagonist, a capable bridge between Japan’s past and its accelerating future. Through a calm pacing and a camera always comfortably nestled into the corners of lively classrooms, the film evokes a progressive pastoral spirit able to confront a difficult, wartime past and nurture a resourceful, joyous future in the form of the exuberant young kids. The film’s release follows Rohlen and LeTendre’s important edited volume, Teaching and Learning in Japan, appearing as a lively exclamation point to the book’s rich ethnographic content. Japan’s modern emergence as nation-state during the Meiji period is credited in large part to its federal education policy summarized in the Imperial Rescript on Education (教育ニ関スル勅語) signed by the Emperor in 1890. This educational precursor prepared Japan to recover quickly after the disastrous imperial adventure of 1931-1945, a point emphasized in a 1963 governmental White Paper:
Education in early Meiji Era…supported the foundation on which the modern Japanese economic system was created, rather than contributing directly to economic growth. In other words, the diffusion of elementary education raised the quality of the people's skills, modernized their thought, and made it possible for them to participate successfully in modern economic activities. (http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/hakusho/html/hpae196301/hpae196301_2_005.html)
The paper continues to make explicit the close and symbiotic relationship between Japan’s national education project and its post-war economic miracle:
When heavy industry developed further and Japanese economy reached its maturity, the educational system was further expanded and higher education was developed following the spread of secondary education. After World War II, when the Japanese economy entered the stage in which heavy and chemical industries developed, tertiary industry expanded and the national income increased, upper secondary education and higher education took rapid strides under the new educational system.
We might then say, the school, created by Imperial edict and resilient in Japan’s modern history, contained, preserved, and expressed Japan’s central cultural tenets and served to successfully inculcate Japan’s young with the social ethos and skills that would ensure Japan’s economic ascendancy and cultural continuity. Of course, this tidy summation echoes back the basic tenets of nihonjinron, Japan’s ideology of exceptionalism, but it also articulates the appeal the school held as object of cultural study. American anxieties over Japan’s unfaltering and tireless economic expansion in the 70s and 80s provoked an entire discourse on Japan’s exceptional education. Even as late as 1999 Gerald K. LeTendre, a leading expert on Japan’s education system, was compelled to assemble a scholarly riposte to the overheated adulation and worry about Japan’s magic schools entitled Competitor or Ally?: Japan’s Role in America’s Education Debates. Through the institutional figure of its schools Japan appeared as the indefatigable Other as Americans struggled over the nature of their own crisis in education and by extension, an endless anxiety over the future in which no child would be left behind, all evidence to the contrary. “Heart of the Country” received an award of commendation from the Society of Visual Anthropology in 2000, the same year the fiction film “Battle Royale” was released—a scathing, metaphorical depiction of Japan’s education society or kyoiku shakai and the destructive, violent consequences of its competitive nature.
“Battle Royale” is a furious counterweight to the generally soft critiques leveled by the vast majority of research on Japan’s schools. Rather than the classroom being a nurturing environment, the film shows it to be a place of humiliation, suspicion, betrayal and ultimately brutal murder, first inflicted by and then organized and instigated by the adults. The film and its potential readings are so significant to this project that they require a more detailed examination elsewhere. But while dark forces may be contained and activated within Japan’s schools, the classroom, especially for the youngest students, continues as a luminescent site, beckoning both foreign and native researchers and filmmakers alike to enter into this space where childish openness comingles with institutional nurture.
The students and teacher of an elementary school class in northern Tokyo is the focus of 2003 NHK documentary titled in English “Children Full of Life” but in Japanese Namida to warai no happî kurasu: 4 nen 1 kumi Inochi no jugyô (涙と笑いのハッピークラス～４年１組 命の授業～) or “Happy Class of Tears and Laughter—4th Year 1st class Lesson of Life.” The poetic and perhaps melodramatic titling foreshadows the saccharine strategies the director pursues in representing the 10 year-old students beginning the school year. The camera zooms in often, framing a gleeful or excited expression on a student’s face, followed by an edit showing them high-fiving their older male teacher. He exhorts them to be happy and reminds them that this is their most important purpose in the class. Six minutes into the film, a student who has been absent for four days begins to read a letter aloud to the class as part of a class ritual done every day where three students read from diaries called “class letters.”
Ren, the student, recounts the death of his grandmother and her funeral and cremation. “Within an hour she was turned into bone,” he says. The other students are riveted. The camera moves sharply to show us their focused, wide-eyed attention. When Ren finishes, hands fly up around the room and all students with questions stand. But it is not questions, but recitations of their own losses: the deaths of grandparents by cancer, in their sleep. Mifuyu, with straight bangs and awkward braces, begins to slowly tell of her father’s sudden death when she was three. She falters. Tears start to course down her cheeks. She wipes at her eyes as she says she’d wanted to write about his death in class but been afraid of being different. The camera cuts to two boys, each wiping their own eyes as they contend with the painful experiences of their classmates and their own emotions. The classroom has been transformed. Their teacher says, “It was Ren’s letter that gave her the courage.” His willingness to share his own grief has given Mifuyu the means to talk about what she has never spoken of before. The moment, carefully constructed by videographers, editors, and producers, is indeed radical even as the scene closes with the inevitable wash of a schmaltzy guitar. What the documentary strives to show is how much the school is not a school, but a place where Japanese virtues are embodied by staff and student alike, in much the same way “Heart of the Country” functions, though with less critical purchase.
The class is a synecdoche, standing for the whole of the educational apparatus and more ambitiously perhaps, for the future of Japan. In so doing, it also conceals, performing a dramatic conflation of the specific experiences of the class as a kind of essentialist expression of what the school universally endeavors. Certainly Mr. Kanamori, the teacher, is the protagonist here, a stark counter-example to the vicious Kitano-sensei in “Battle Royale.” But if it is possible to suspend the sentimentality (and the nostalgia I suspect this is intended to evoke in Japanese viewers), there remain the specific relations produced within the boundaries of the classroom walls as a micro-component in the historical, bureaucratic, political, and cultural assemblage of the school. The class has its own particular habits and Ren exercises himself within the class letter ritual to express his loss and thus explain his absence in a form of careful, prescribed public oratory. Mifuyu and the other students willingly enter into an empathetic relationship with one another and the class seems to have a profound encounter with one another and the power of memory, both suppressed and shared. All these films show the class to be a culture within and apart from the larger world, which is a convenient structuring device to both directors and researchers. A magical veil is lowered to temporarily alter the relations contained within even as desires and imperatives of the school and the larger society continue to echo.
Orthopedics of the School
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? These are questions you can explore here.
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