Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (33 page)

This focus on creating the people to produce a high-growth economy coincided with the development of modernization theory in the United States as a Cold War technology for heading off the socialist threat posed by China and on the Korean peninsula. Japan was set up as a model for capitalist development—Japan, Inc.—the incorporated nation, seemingly immune to the vicissitudes that had characterized industrial capitalism elsewhere and based on the economic stages of growth of modernization theory. What it also meant, however, was that a nation just emerging from a war of aggression against its neighbors was encouraged to turn away from its past and toward the new modernizing future that awaited it. As Leo Ching (2001) reminds us, this trajectory had dramatic consequences not only for the post-colonial citizens of Taiwan and elsewhere but also for the postwar creation of Japanese national identity.

Following the oil shock and the shift in Japan from high to moderate growth in the late 1970s and 1980s, attempts were made once again to redefine and reorganize education to meet the economic challenges of postindustrialism and the demands of corporations for more flexible workers skilled in informational technologies. In 1984, Prime Minister Nakasone responded to this shift with slogans of building “social awareness” and putting a stronger emphasis on individual responsibility. The Nakasone agenda resonated closely with the changes being made in the United States under Reagan and in the UK under Thatcher as the first stage of “roll back” neoliberalism. This phase of neoliberalism is sometimes called “destructive” because of its stripping away of social protections and programs, as opposed to “roll-out” or so-called creative neoliberalism, which Peck and Tickell famously identified as a different or later stage, in which programs and protections are not so much restored as new forms of control and management, such as the practices and discourses mentioned earlier of self-esteem or the technologies of the heart in Japan, are created (Peck and Tickell 2002). In Japan, the “rollback” phase took the form of calls during the Nakasone era for privatizing
education
to lighten the financial burden on government and to adjust to a more flexible and less homogeneous—less standardized and increasingly less equal—workforce for the period of sustained lower growth of the late 1970s and 1980s. Postwar high economic growth had been built on the strict standardization of education in an effort to create a highly efficient, but also highly homogenous, workforce. This model had proved highly efficient for the post-Fordist structures of work known as Toyotism. However, Nakasone’s program, including a proposed revision to the education law, lacked sufficient popular support at the time.
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However, there were signs that not all was well in the sphere of education. Increasing numbers of students were having trouble leaving their homes in the morning to go to school, others were subjected to unrelenting forms of bullying, still others were taking their frustrations out on school property and teachers directly (
konai boryoku
), and cram schools were rapidly proliferating. Nonetheless, social critique aimed at the economics of growth was drowned out by representations of stability, success, and homogeneity (Field 1993). The apparent prosperity of Japanese society served to obscure questions about the sustainability of economic growth (Hein 1993). Thus, Japan was imagined by foreigners and Japanese alike not only to be a leader in the race to build a new knowledge-economy but also as a place for the rest of the world to “learn from.”
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The 1980s was a moment when the Japanese seemed poised to supersede the West, leading the next revolution in production with their notion of the “information society” and its knowledge economy. Tessa Morris-Suzuki demonstrates how the concept of the information society was developed to address the challenges faced by Japanese industry as the conditions that had made high-growth possible changed. Policy documents of the time promoting the idea of the information society were instrumental in shaping the future they predicted (Morris-Suzuki 1988). Including utopian projections about the end of manual labor, the information society was imagined as the next step in human evolution from an industrial society centered in the production and consumption of goods to a society founded on a new principle of “time-value.” This notion of time-value, proposed by government bureaucrats and popular information gurus, was to inaugurate a transformation in the time required of workers in the production of value. As Morris-Suzuki makes clear, however, the utopian projections and policies of the information society leading up to the bursting of the economic bubble in 1989 should be seen as responses to a series of economic crises following the high-growth era.

The
long economic recession of the 1990s has been narrated predominantly as the sudden and surprising collapse (
houkai
) of a wonder economy. The unanticipated quality of the recession has attracted a broad range of explanations that blame overly traditionalist politics and policies, the apparent reluctance of Japanese bureaucrats to react more quickly and dramatically to the collapse of the financial sector in the early 1990s, and even a supposed breakdown in the realms of social and cultural reproduction. There is of course no denying the very real repercussions of the plummeting property values and stock prices that occurred in the early 1990s following the bursting of a highly inflated real estate market and an artificially low discount or borrowing rate.
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The period of the economic downturn is filled with stories of dramatically changed individual futures, personal mortgages that now exceed property values, and four-hour daily commutes without an end in sight for the many families whose hopes of moving closer to the city have been dashed. There was and is much more at stake than financial futures in the failing economy. As Marilyn Ivy argues, “Since then, the deep recession has pulled out the primary support for Japanese national subjectivity in the postwar period: the economy itself had functioned as the forcefully empowered and proper stand-in for the ‘improper’ and split nation-state itself” (Ivy 2006: 143). In other words, Japanese economic success and the purportedly unique systems of production and reproduction that had seemed so effortlessly to support it had made the very particular relationships of sentiment and sacrifice of the postwar nation seem natural. The collapse of the financial system and all it stood for and all that it shielded from sight ruptured the conditions of possibility for this prior affective relationship of the nation, opening up, as Ivy suggests, unresolved issues about national identity.
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At the level of the everyday, these representations produced a powerful sense of the normative, in which the specificity of class, region, gender, and historical change were absent. At a moment of uncertainty and change such as this, one might have expected tremendous social unrest, protest, and a potential questioning of the production of the normative (from within Japan and without). This was foreclosed in part through the dismissal of Japan (uninteresting now that it was no longer the unflappable, incomparable incorporated nation), on the one hand, and, on the other, a burgeoning literature of collapse published within Japan that began to establish a link between the problem with the nation and something amiss or strange about the reproduction of this nation and its future citizen-subjects.

In
the mid-1990s, the national focus began to a shift strongly to this arena of reproduction. An all-male teachers’ association (
prokyoshi no kai
) met once a month for several decades to debate the changing climate of education and nation and published their discussions on the deteriorating relationship between teacher, parent, and student and the changed position of the school, once considered “holy ground” for its production of a homogeneous and dedicated workforce, whose future, along with the nation it served, had seemed so secure. Under other circumstances, this collection of informal essays entitled
The Child Is Turning Strange
(
Kodomo ga Hen da
) might have been ignored completely (Kawakami 1995). They describe how the Japanese child (much like the nation) had become unknowable and unrecognizable. The strangeness of which they spoke was articulated to me in an interview I had with one of the spokesmen for the group, Kawakami Ryoichi, a junior high history teacher and later the author of the best-selling book
School Collapse
(
Gakkou Houkai
) published in 1999:

In the 1950s and 1960s, human relations were simple. The child of this new era [1990s] doesn’t understand what his teachers are all about. In the 1970s, the radicals had the necessary form [
shisei
]; we need a return to radicalness. The student movement and the inner-school violence [
kōnai bōryoku
] of the 1980s were preferable to the 1990s strange [
hen da
] child. We can’t get through to these children; they’re incomprehensible [
tsujinai
;
wakaranai
], and we don’t have a clue what they’re thinking. (Kawakami Ryoichi, personal communication)

The focus on the strangeness of the child intensified and changed in 1997, following the “Youth A” incident in Kobe. Over a period of approximately ten months, Youth A, a fourteen-year old junior high school student from a middle-class neighborhood, headed down a path of personal and social destructiveness, including vengeful messages about having been robbed of his existence and terrifying descriptions of deriving pleasure from killing. The wounding and killing of several children younger than himself finally ended in the beheading of a sixth-grade acquaintance of his family, placing the decapitated head at the school gate, and sending a jeering note to the police.

Education officials in the city of Kobe were faced with having to explain how this kind of monstrous incident could have been carried out by an “ordinary,” which is to say middle-class, child and of course how they had missed
warning
signs all along. Their search for an explanation resulted ultimately in the emergence of two explanations that significantly changed the nature of the discourse on education and the nation. The first of these took shape within the local community of education officials in Kobe charged with finding a new language with which to explain the Kobe youth’s violent deeds and his indictment of a system that he believed had rendered him “invisible” and against which he had sworn revenge. The choice of terms is notable because of the way in which they direct the focus of the problem within the child and children in Japan more generally. Borrowing from the writings of Kawaii Hayao, a Jungian clinical psychologist, who had recently been appointed as the director of the center for the study of Japanese culture (
Nichibunken
) in the neighboring city of Kyoto, education officials began to speak of the need to address the “interior” (
naimen
) of the child and of a problem with the child’s heart (
kokoro
). One of the key effects that the use of these terms had on the understanding of the event was to remove it from the larger economic, political, and historical context within which it had taken place, and that Youth A himself had referenced in his own writings. The new language also transferred responsibility for the event from the educational system to the family, repudiating the culture of homogeneity and dependency within which this individual (or strange child) was produced. The second explanation emerged out of the first. In the huge media outpouring on this event, linkages began to be made between the strange internal make-up of the young (
kodomo ga hen da
) and the strangeness of the nation arising from the accumulation of the past and converging with a recession that threatened the national future. Individual development that was supposed to have been an effect of the success of national development was now turned on its head. It began to seem that it was the young who were making it impossible for the nation to continue to succeed.

“Raise Yourself!” New Lessons in National Loving and Laboring

A full-scale reform of education, which promised to correct the excesses of postwar education, was launched at the end of the 1990s under the slogans of “the strength to live” (
ikiru chikara
), “education of the heart” (
kokoro no kyouiku
), and “the frontier within” (
Nihon no furonteia wa Nihon no naka de aru
). Couched in a language of improvement, these slogans and the commentary
behind
them evoked all that was wrong with the nation and the youth. Examples and remedies proliferated. Young people were criticized for their lack of endurance, will, toughness, and social skills, including their lack of consideration for others, all which seemed to add up to a lack of devotion and ability to sacrifice for others, especially their nation. The most significant remedy was the conservative government’s proposal to finally alter the Fundamental Law of Education to include a stronger emphasis on the relation between the individual and the nation—a relation that was now increasingly being defined in terms of the formation of the individual heart of the child.

Education reform committees had been established as early as 1998, producing in the interim a language specifying the need to make the Fundamental Law of Education more suitable (
fusawashii
). This suitability was explained in two different senses, which were related by implication more than explanation: the first, the changed environment (
kankyou
) between the nation from the immediate postwar period and the present moment of “globalization”; and second, the decreasing morals and a loss of devotion to study of the young and the weakened strength of the home and community in the project of education. Conspicuously lacking from these anxiety-ridden accusations and high-level discussions were the vastly changing conditions of individual and national security in the context of recessionary life, including mounting household debt, corporate restructuring, bankruptcy, and a frozen job market for the youth throughout the 1990s. As Yuji Genda writes in his insightful discussion of the labor economics of the period, the youth were being blamed for changed attitudes regarding their individual futures and national allegiance. Genda’s argument is that this is not an original cause but rather the effect of the recessionary context of their lives (Genda 2005).