Social panics around children punctuate Japanese cultural time codes of the post-war. Most prominent in the immediate period after the war were the Sun Tribes, the first generation in Japan with no experience of wartime privation and self-sacrifice. They were depicted as decadent, hedonistic and self-centered. They were followed by subsequent, overlapping waves of youth problems intensifying and coagulating in the present moment through the discursive capacities of mass and social media. The production of the child in/as crisis, and the youth cultures proliferating around the child, is cut from the precise pattern laid out in Foucault’s “Repressive Hypothesis.” The sexuality of the child, suggests Foucault, is the dynamo and raison d’être for the professionals arriving at the crisis intersection of medicine and education. They needed the child’s onanism to be repressed, “driven into hiding” and once made a shameful secret, tracked, with its effects accounted for and causes enumerated. As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) note, the repressive hypothesis serves a brutal power, one grounded on suppression, purges, hypocrisy, censorship, and silence. Foucault glides alongside us to show us to our seats: ringside to the spectacle of the confession, where the svelte, concerned agents of the self and society sit earnestly to hear the truths of the body enunciated by the erstwhile victims of repression. So the procedure proceeds thus: a feature of the self must be isolated as a risk, new techniques of knowing are created in conjunction with technologists of this new knowledge. Subjects, once shamed, are now induced to make manifest their secrets once painfully stored in the deep repositories of their exquisite, unique labyrinth experience-memories. Now public, each narrative is assembled into a matrix of discursive truth—a normalizing nomenclature. The panic concludes even as it sediments into a fecund cultural subsoil. The discourse of the child becomes a generative category, plowed and open, such that “the child could be a repository of cultural needs or fears not adequately disposed of elsewhere” (Kincaid 1992, 78). The power exerted now over the diagnosed and increasingly particularized subject no longer requires the subject to speak. The figure of the child only need to connote a relation and disposition to its ascertained, interpenetrated composition of desires and affects in order to raise suspicion and renew the surveillance apparatus below a hacking smog of adult panic about the goddamn kids again. As with most panic sites around young people, the child does not speak but is suspected, replete with connotations and affiliations which throw the child’s biopolitical energies in league with a recidivist category of adult: perverse, uncooperative, fugitive—like Genet’s unruly figure slipping from prison to the streets again.

Of course, if the child is not being socialized properly, then the future,(oh grand, utopic realm of eternal deferment!) is at risk. The repressive hypothesis produces a trauma history and a present of suffering and suspicion, exacerbated as the silent/silenced child is pinioned between lost innocence and failed future inheritance of gilded heteronormative capitalist suburban splendor. And “once connotation establishes itself as the master trope of traumatic historiography, pulling everything into its circuitous orbit around the unverifiable, narrative suffers traumatic occlusions arising from a predisposition to return obsessively to…suspicion” (Savoy 2004, 246). The child, as an already incomplete human without the rights of (heteronormative) ascendancy scored into their sexual desire and affective attachments, is utter confusion and confusing utterances interpreted through the discursive techniques of power, able to transform the Other/outsider of the child’s connoted being into meaning—a master narrative, like a pediatric synesthesia. Suspicion of the child and its magical incompleteness becomes a panic at the child’s perversion of hegemonic state and family teleology as they seem materially, spatially, bodily, and temporally infected by inhuman corruption. The panics underscore “developmental models based on one’s steady progress toward genital maturity and one’s ‘growing up’ to reproductive goals” (Stockton 2004, 281). The panic site generates its utility from what Stanley Cohen terms the “ideological exploitation” of deviance: the hegemonic center is not only reinforced, it enlarges its territory, embracing the weird, queer, dirty child and naming it heir to the realm and colonized subject all at once. Triangulating the deviant child strengthens the contours of the normative center “at times of cultural strain and ambiguity” and decodes the limits “about how much diversity can be tolerated” (Cohen 2002, 162). But the panic and the techniques of experts at diagnosing and bounding the child-figure impacts real young people. Perhaps it is useful to imagine what it is to be young—not just biologically, but young as in, not powerful in the adult senses, diverse as that may be. What must be endured to survive the panic? To elude or evade capture by the knowledge-nets out to hunt you in school hallways and shopping arcades and computers snared with cookies, keystroke loggers, and electronic keyholes? To survive the crises you are accused of provoking, stoking, provocateuring? Van Gennep describes the liminal ritual of some Australian tribes: “the novice is considered dead, and he remains dead for the duration of his novitiate. It lasts for a fairly long time and consists of a physical and mental weakening which is undoubtedly intended to make him lose all recollection of his childhood existence…Where the novice is considered dead, he is resurrected and taught how to live, but differently than in childhood” (Van Gennep 1960, 75). Like Ivy’s uncanny Japanese furusato—nostalgic home that never was come back to haunt with an excess of the real, the child-figure is uncanny, shape-shifting across specific tempo-spatial conjurations. It has been resurrected and reanimated multiply through the biopolitical forces of capitalist (post)modernity, a global zombie-vampire epidemic falling into stupors, anomie, listless retreat, digital posturing and cyber-sexing, wielding an AK-47 in central Africa, leading an army in Burma but never able to “come into their own.” In contrast, society is assailed by a children’s crusade marching under the banner of suspicion, of deviant energies, of queered trajectories. Young people compose a nomadic war machine, stealthily stealing ever-older bodies into their ranks through mutations of culture and their symbolic state of death prolonged to retain access to “childhood existence” even as they evade biological capture.

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