In an article called, “Emotion Pedagogies: What Are They, and Why Do They Matter?” James Wilce and Janina Fenigson described a new, privatized trend in teaching children how to feel properly. These commercial programs, one of which has 32,000 subscribing schools in the United States, promise to guide students towards “a self-managed, self-responsible, neoliberal selfhood” through emotion pedagogy (Wilce and Fenigson 2016, 86). Students must manage emotions correctly if they are to function well in Western corporate environments, the thinking goes. For instance, in one kindergarten class the teacher channeled children's exclamations about how they should act with friends (“Happy!” “Care about each other!”) into categories more conducive to working in white collar teams—”polite” and ”careful” (Brison 2016, 144). In her research on workplace programs for adults in Japan, Cynthia Dunn found that instructors taught students to present a “bright, positive self” (Dunn 2016, 122). Discourses about KVN, in contrast, encourage competitors to create bright, positive others. Instead of regimenting personal feelings for personal success, trainers tell KVNshiki to lift the spirits of the audience in service to the community.

This other-centered, often socially-responsible, vision of emotion in KVN distinguishes it both from emotion pedagogy programs and and the youth psychological training programs Tomas Matza described in his research on state and commercial psychological resources for children in St. Petersburg, Russia (2018). Matza argued that one of these private programs, a camp he called ReGeneration, aimed to mold children into “feeling subjects” by training them to become self- knowing, socially-calculating, future-anxious, and autonomous—independent of the family, in particular, as it represented “a source of bad social reproduction and a brake on self- sufficiency” (2018, 128-129). In one of the children’s activities, a trainer instructed campers to come up with a “formula for self-regulation.” One group drew a scale with self-regulation on one side and distractions on the other. Another group had “self-regulation” mediate between the two poles of mind and desire. A third group wrote an actual formula: “emotions + thoughts = self- control” (2018, 132). Learning to label and manage their emotions set the children up for success, not in their interpersonal relationships, but by means of their interpersonal relationships. ReGeneration urged children to direct not only their thoughts, but their emotions, towards winning, achievement, and competition (2018, 137-138).

Such self-centric rhetoric runs counter to discourses about emotion in KVN, which ask KVNshiki to create emotions, not control them, and which instruct students to put their creative efforts towards improving society, not enriching oneself. Participating in KVN, then, embeds students in an other-centered socialization matrix, encouraging them to think about relationships between art, effort, and emotion in ways more concerned with the collective than the individual. While a lot of KVNshiki do very much want money, success, TV airtime, and careers in show business, emotion discourses in KVN stress connection and goodwill. Cheerfulness, joy, highs, and camaraderie typify discussions about KVN, and—normatively—pursuit of these emotions organizes all other KVN activity.