Recessionary effects: The crisis of the child and the culture of reform in contemporary Japan.

摘要

This dissertation examines the centering of the child in the discourse of national decline in Japan during the heightened years of the recession from the late 1990s through the beginning of the twenty-first century. It investigates the crisis atmosphere produced through the linking of collapsing schools, the breakdown of discipline in homes and sensational juvenile crime incidents to fears over the collapse of the nation. It engages with the production of this crisis atmosphere surrounding the child and its effects on children, families and local education, national education policy and nationalist discourse. This dissertation argues that the crisis of the child and its relation to recent reforms cannot be adequately understood without considering the unique position of the child in modernity as a privileged figure of temporality and reservoir of value central to the construction of identity both individual and national.; As the recession of the 1990s deepened and national futures no longer seemed to guarantee personal ones, social anxiety about collapsing schools and strange children produced new strains in the relationship between homes and schools. Insecurity in national institutions led to a surge in enrollments at exam preparation schools, further accelerating the ability gap in the schools and relinquishing authority over the child's education in greater amounts to private industry. On the level of national policy, fears of and for the child provided the impetus for major neoliberal reforms. Obscuring attention from negligent government and private sector policies that led up to the recession, recent education and social reforms have helped to fix a new narrative of past failure and future improvements, veiling the hollowing out of a social order and the narrative crisis of the nation. The image of the strange child with its failed education and enculturation has also been central to revisionist positions on the postwar past and their visions of a replenished national future. Sensational juvenile crime incidents and the seeming breakdown of moral training in homes and schools have aided the movement of a new neonationalism, based on images of national history, the war, and the youth, into the mainstream.