FRÜHSTÜCK AND WALTHALL | CHILD’S PLAY Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org Child’s Play Child’s Play Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan Edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall Suggested citation: Frühstück, Sabine and Walthall, Anne. Child’s Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.40 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Frühstück, Sabine, editor. | Walthall, Anne, editor. Title: Child’s play : multi-sensory histories of children and childhood in Japan / edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017022291| ISBN 9780520296275 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520968844 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Children—Japan—History. | Children—Japan—Social conditions. | Japan—Social conditions. | Education—Japan—History. | Parent and child—Japan—History. Classification: LCC HQ792.J3 C47 2018 | DDC 305.230952—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022291 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents List of Illustrations and Table vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 PART ONE: Premodern Period 1. Nasty Boys or Obedient Children?: Childhood and Relative Autonomy in Medieval Japanese Monasteries 17 Or Porath 2. Growing Up Manly: Male Samurai Childhood in Late Edo-Era Tosa 41 Luke S. Roberts 3. For the Love of Children: Practice, Affect, and Subjectivities in Hirata Atsutane’s Household 60 Anne Walthall PART TWO: Early Twentieth Century 4. Consumer Consumption for Children: Conceptions of Childhood in the Work of Taishō-Period Designers 83 Jinnō Yuki 5. “Children in the Wind”: Reexamining the Golden Age of Childhood Film in Wartime Japan 102 Harald Salomon vi Contents 6. Children and the Founding of Manchukuo: The Young Girl Ambassadors as Promoters of Friendship 121 Koresawa Hiroaki PART THREE: Asia-Pacific War 7. Reversing the Gaze: The Construction of “Adulthood” in the Wartime Diaries of Japanese Children and Youth 141 Aaron William Moore 8. Outdoor Play in Wartime Japan 160 L. Halliday Piel 9. “ . And my heart screams”: Children and the War of Emotions 181 Sabine Frühstück PART FOUR: Contemporary Japan 10. From Grade Schooler to Great Star: Childhood Development and the “Golden Age” in the World of Japanese Soccer 205 Elise Edwards 11. Treatment and Intervention for Children with Developmental Disabilities 225 Junko Teruyama 12. Food, Affect, and Experiments in Care: Constituting a “Household-like” Child Welfare Institution in Japan 243 Kathryn E. Goldfarb 13. Monju-kun: Children’s Culture as Protest 264 Noriko Manabe Contributors 286 Index 291 Illustrations and Table FIGURES 1. Boy dressed in hakama for the celebration of his fifth sai, 15 November 2015 63 2. Young girl feeding a rice cracker to her infant charge, 1912 73 3. Illustration of a Western-style children’s room by Okamoto Kiichi 88 4. Illustration of a children’s room by Kogure Joichi 89 5. Drawing of a children’s room in Kogure Joichi’s residence 90 6. Children’s bed footboard design by Moritani Nobuo 95 7. A children’s book illustration by Takei Takeo 97 8. “The Thief,” drawing by evacuee Noma Seizō 142 9. Drawing of uma keri (kick horse) by Ueda Hiroaki 167 10. Japanese children with injured members of the Imperial Army, 1940 192 11. “Children are in danger!” or “Children are danger!” from the JFA’s “Kids’ Programme” pamphlet 209 12. Conceptual diagram of developmental disabilities 226 13. Remedial education room layout 228 14. Architectural model on display at the opening of Chestnut House, June 2009 244 15. Kitahara Shinobu’s drawing of the archaic meaning of the character sato 250 vii viii Illustrations and Table 16. Images of Monju-kun, from @monjukun, Twitter 272 17. Monju-kun at the TwitNoNukes demonstration, Shibuya, Tokyo, 29 April 2012 279 TABLE 1. Significant childhood events recorded in the Hirata family diary, 1826–56 65 Acknowledgments Earlier versions of the essays published in this volume were presented at a work- shop held at the University of California, Santa Barbara on 27–28 February 2015. Erika Imada and Kimio Itō gave two additional papers that could not be included here but have been published in Japanese.1 We would like to extend special thanks to Machida Kumi who agreed to a panel discussion about her art, much of which features childlike figures. Jennifer Robertson and Dick Hebdige made this compo- nent of the event most interesting.2 We are grateful for the generous support of the Japan Society for the Promo- tion of Science, the main sponsor of the conference and, with Sabine Frühstück, its co-organizer. Also essential were the support of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, and the Divi- sion of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We are also delighted to acknowledge the generosity and enthusiasm with which the follow- ing academic units at UCSB supported the event: Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, East Asian Center, and the departments of Art, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, History, Sociology, and Anthropology. We couldn’t have done it without our brilliant conference assistant, Dr. Silke Werth, the unwavering sup- port of Japanese language instructors Akiyo Cantrell and Yoko Yamauchi, and the dedicated interpreters, sound and visual technicians, and mini-crisis managers we found in graduate students Cade Bourne, Erika I-Tremblay, Ema Parker, Chris- toph Reichenbächer, Emily B. Simpson, and Kai Wasson. We acknowledge our gratitude to Machida Kumi for allowing us to use her work “Relations” (2006) for the cover of the book. A contribution by the Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts and an Open Access Fund at UCSB, as well as support ix x Acknowledgments from University of California, Irvine, Humanities Commons, home of coedi- tor Anne Walthall, made this publication possible. As always we owe a debt of gratitude to Reed Malcolm for his interest and enthusiasm, Caroline Knapp for her brilliant copyediting, and Zuha Khan for expertly ushering the manuscript through the production process. NOTES 1. Slightly modified versions of both papers have been published in Japanese. Imada’s is included in Sekushuariti no sengo-shi: Henyō suru shinmitsuken kōkyōken, ed. Koyama Shizuko, Akaeda Kanako, and Imada Erika (Kyōto: Kyōto Daigaku Gakujutsu Shuppankai, 2014). Itō’s can be found in Dansei no hibōryoku senden—howaito ribon kyanpēn, ed. Taga Futoshi, Itō Kimio, and Andō Tetsuya (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2015). 2. In 2016, Machida’s work was exhibited at Asia House (London), the National Art Center ( Tokyo), Ohara Museum of Art (Kurashiki), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Introduction In September 2016, the Twitter hashtag “Tsukamotoyochien” attracted a series of comments on the practices of the Tsukamoto kindergarten, where three- to five-year-olds are educated “according to prewar ideals” (Ha 2016). Apparently, the pupils at the kindergarten are taught to recite the Imperial Rescript on Edu- cation (1890) and to bow to the Shōwa emperor’s (r. 1926–1989) photograph in the hallways; they are also routinely taken to military bases—all with the explicit aim of preparing them to “protect their nation against potential threats from other countries.” One tweet pronounced Japan’s democracy to be dying. Another expressed concern that these children were being groomed for direct recruit- ment into the Self-Defense Forces. Many other comments highlighted a new urgency surrounding issues of children’s education and their relationship to the nation-state, all the while commenting on how “sweet,” “innocent,” and “pitiful” these kindergarteners were. Since the early 1980s, Japanese media have teemed with intense debates about bullying at schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and, most recently, forceful moves by the Abe Shinzō administration to introduce a decisively more conserva- tive educational curriculum (Ogi 2013). While the Twitter storm mentioned above was partly informed by Japan’s widely noted right turn, signified in part by the introduction of new security legislation, it also speaks to issues debated in global conversations about the nature of children and how to raise them, the forces and pressures impinging on children, the rights that should be accorded to them, and the responsibilities with which they should be entrusted (Cunningham 1998: 1195; Arai 2016). 1 2 Introduction Emotions often erupt when the topic of children is discussed, particularly when further provocations are added to the mix. Across a range of media, in Japan and around the world, current debates reflect and fuel concerns about whether, for instance, children lend themselves particularly easily to the “politics of distrac- tion” (Arai 2016); children are merely “born to buy” (Schor 2005); or, indeed, whether “babies [have come to] rule the world” (Dubinsky 2012: 7).