But they make what is said about the child all the more symptomatic; the child is a figure which serves as an allegory for what these writers think about the people.
                            Michel de Certeau (2000, 131)

    

This is not a comprehensive socio-historical study of youth in Japan.  That task awaits an ambitious scholar willing to expend the last of their vital vigor on the archives chronicling the history of this ghostly figure. For youth, accursed seducer and biological intoxicant, is already eluding us, draining from our bodies, releasing us from its possibility, whirling away from us in some oily haze of social belief, volatile popular idealizations, and physical change. What once held us in its throes now dispossesses us. How can we pass into some other realm of being while never having relinquished our claim against—not time, so boring and already old and sated—but against becoming. The great danger, Michel de Certeau points out, is that in the state of mournful loss adult society makes children the repository of a marginal culture reflecting back adult culture in an altered form. “That is what children are, as refashioned by ethnological studies. Their ‘culture’ is presented as something altered to prevent it from seeming different from that of adults. It was necessary to ‘alter’ it in order to adjust it to the dreams of the adult and to place it under the sign of the ‘Civilized’” (de Certeau 2000, 132). The energetic change and adaptations children profusely manifest is perpetually at risk of incarceration at the margins of our own cultural vantage. Once enlisted into the performance of our own dreams of the future, children constitute a ventriloquism machine out of which the knowledge of anthropologists, educators, parents, sociologists, psychiatrists, religious leaders, and police streams forth, “claim[ing] to know, as an object, the child’s ‘nature,’ and thus posited in advance the ‘instincts’ and ‘needs’ it wished to develop” (Ibid.). The child figure, as I’ll explore further below, is uncanny in this respect because it confronts us with a vision of the future we desire webbed within a network of expert knowledge and disciplinary practices intent on regulating the present chaos and interdicting “failure” as instincts gone feral and needs left fallow.  The child is a historical and cultural production, shaped into legible typologies through universalizing discourses of rights and disciplinary regimes of modernizing states striving to protect their biological future beneath the talismanic sign of the “Civilized.”

Begin this path

1. Margaret Mead and the Anthropology of the Child
2. Failure as Social Production and Socially Productive
3. Japanese Youth and Representation in Araki's photographs and Susumu's "Bad Boys"
4. Kikokushijo, Otherness, Schools, and Finding Kids on Film
5. Family, Schools, and Bad Girls: National Institutions and Their Threat

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