In the weeks following we talked together in class about what had happened. Emi, who had been very reticent, doubtful and sometimes hostile in our interactions over the course of the previous year, began to speak with unexpected openness to me in class after the incident in Shinjuku.  She told me how once she returned to Japan a year and a half ago she began to be sick all the time.  She told me how she hides her grades from her parents.  How she argues with her mom and tells her she wants to leave Japan and go back to Brooklyn.  She told me about how her older sister became enraged at her parents and insisted that they send her back to St. Ann's—the elite private school the sisters had attended while living in NY. So her parents relented and sent her away.  Now Emi rues the absence of her sister only because she has no buffer between herself and her mother's constant surveillance and pressure. Leaving the house offers little relief. School is drab and monotonous and in her regular Japanese juku or cram school the rivalries asphyxiate warm connections. Intense competition is compounded by the posted rankings after every mock test they take. She has no friends there, only strategic, calculated arrangements with some girls to share notes. Perpetually wary and stressed, she scorns the fake enthusiasm of the teachers and their constant reminders about how important it is to get into a good school and how everything depends on their teamwork. “Everybody knows that everyone in the room is the enemy. Your place at a good school could be taken by anyone there. The teachers are just repeating everything our parents say but trying to make it sound like we’re some kind of family. All it does is remind everyone how afraid they are.” Naoko, the other student sitting with us, agrees. “We are always sick with colds and stuff.” Emi nods and pulls out a pack of tissues as if reminded of her constant runny nose. “One girl…” she begins, falters, before she looks worriedly at Naoko for an instant, “…literally went crazy in class. The lady teacher took her out of the class and then some other people came and took her away and she never came back.”

The story ends abruptly. When I ask what they though happened, Emi is terse. “She went crazy.” Crazy is because of crazy. The potentials are already coded into the space and saturate the instrumentalized sociality of the juku. The potentials and risks for disappearance are ever-present. The very becoming in such conditions is one of immanent failure as future. From her sister’s flight back to America to her classmate’s breakdown to the attack at the train station, Emi knows intimately the threats and risks of being young and female in Japan. The rhizomatic lines of precarious life, without beginning or end, unfurl endlessly, inextricable from other forms of becoming within the fraught, globalized haeccity of their Tokyo.

The immanence of violence, of depression, of disappearance are more pronounced, or perhaps materialize more intensively around and on the bodies of girls and women within the matrix of gloablized identities, producing a state of constant uncertainty as the mode and sign of anti-crisis. Their kikokushijo identity with its possibility for other futures and sometimes-privileged exceptionalism does not ameliorate the strain of being a child marked for biopolitical value under expansive capitalist incursions into the fibers of intimate affective, emotional, dreaming life. I argue the difference of being kikokushijo only adds a further component to their gendered identity, albeit unevenly. There is no central causality attributable to either of these subjectivities and indeed, it is crucial to follow Foucault here in his critique of the discourse around masturbating children in 19th century France, the kikokushijo-girl-child-assemblage must not become a “diffuse, general, and polymorphous etiology that enables the whole of the pathological field, including death, to be connected to it” as figure of social risk in need of management (2003, 240). There is an inclination to produce a crisis algorithm of related terms around the contemporary Japanese young person and thus contribute to defining the panic site through analytical articulations of the ethnographic with the discursive. These terms are nested within larger, universalized concerns over the future and what social reproduction might look like under intensified capitalism, economic hardship and uncertainty, environmental change, cultural drifts with new global affinities challenging local primacies.

Young people inhabit a vast and sensitive social field full of charged relations to the local and the global all at once but with intensive fluctuations. They are figures of foreshadowing and fortitude, perhaps especially so in Japan, a site so paradoxically central to future-imaginings and exceptionally Other in its variable social projections against the screens of history and regional power. Complex forms of power encircle and transect the lives of the kikokushijo children at K.A. These powers include but are by no means limited to institutional discipline, cultural management of difference, bodily habituation to behaviors and schedules, and spatial subjection of gendered and aged bodies. The future potential of kikokushijo is critical in relation to an internationalized Japanese population comfortable with a national identity flowing through circuits of global systems of capital and culture. Their propensity for risk is doubled. Whatever afflicts the “normal” child also targets the child coded as abnormal, whether that be molestation by adult men in train stations or the stresses of competitive schooling. The parents of these children face the neo-liberalized conundrum: prepare your child for Japan, preserve their foreignness, and orient them towards a provisional state of exceptional inclusion within the State and its embodied analog, everyday society. Foucault details the demands of parental responsibility leveled against bourgeois families of Europe in the eighteenth century, what he calls a “process of exchange:” “Take good care of your children’s lives and health for us, of their physical strength, obedience, and ability, so that we can put them through the machine of the system of State education, instruction, and training over which you have no control” (Foucault 2003, 257). The terms have changed. For these kids, the privatized space of schools like K.A. serves as the mechanism for modulating the blunt demands of formal education, offering emotional nurture and ensuring cultural survival. The returnee child is repatriated to the nation but is still perceived as a risky resource to be guarded by parents against failures—of not being Japanese enough, of introducing disorder into the script of Japanese belonging.

To rephrase Zygmunt Bauman, kikokushijo, the especially strange child, are the stranger and strange reproduced from within, and are induced to “serve as borderlines for the advancing boundary of order-under-construction” (Bauman 1997, 54). The idea of the stranger and the strange is central to discussions of children in Japan in this moment, as the perceived disengagement of youth from “normal” social expectations is given by the media as the cause for sensationalized youth violence.  This has led to common usage of the phrase hen na kodomo or “strange child” to describe the present condition of youth.  Considering the child as estranged from national interest and strangely disarticulated at its cultural and temporal borders asks us to return to Foucault’s discussion of the “abnormal” within capitalist Europe.

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