The Shōnen A case involved the brutal decapitation of an elementary school student with a handsaw and bludgeoning of another in a Kobe neighborhood by a junior high school aged boy known subsequently at “Youth A.” The crimes are symbolically central to Andrea Arai’s critical analysis of the discourse of youth panics and the anxious public perception that “youth are turning strange” (kodoma ga hen da). The perpetrator, understood as a regular child from a regular family, presented a shocking, inconceivable version of Japanese children, one capable becoming monstrous within the ordinary domestic space and unleashing monstrous acts upon society. The incident “has functioned as a shifting point in the discourse on the child, child rearing, and the locations (the home and the school) charged with the child’s care and social training” (Arai 2001, 847). Specific references to Shōnen A have waned but accounts of youth violence continue to pepper the news. As I write this, Japanese news services are reporting the arrest of an 18 year-old boy for the August, 2013 murder of 15 year-old Hiromi Terawa in the town of Asahi. Laws regarding youth crime were made harsher in 2007 in response to public fears of rising youth crime. Statistically, however, youth crime rates have been little change since their peak in 1983. Fear is up, but murder is down—universally. Detachment and alienation may fuel the fear but ironically be contributing to the decline in actual killing: “Some commentators have suggested that in an increasingly impersonal society, fewer people actually appear to care enough about others to kill them” (Blair 2010). This disconnection is manifest as a series of reforms around youth in education, welfare, and the law have been enacted. “Connected intricately to these changes is a discourse of inwardness, one that focuses on the individual psyche, and its connection with the larger collective psyche of the nation” (Arai 2001, 857). The discursive production of youth-as-threat concomitant with panic sites over “risky” or “aberrant” social behaviors involving sexuality, technology, or isolation only serves to conceal through “crisis” what Donzelot calls “the emergence of new techniques of regulation” (1979 8).

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