CREATIVE CHILDREN: JAPANESE HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS’ NARRATIVES OF LIFE by Margaret Elizabeth Murphy BA in History, University of Pittsburgh, 1988 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Anthropology University of Pittsburgh 2006 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Margaret Elizabeth Murphy It was defended on April 25, 2005 and approved by Dr. Nicole Constable, Professor, Department of Anthropology Dr. Kathleen Dewalt, Professor, Department of Anthropology Dr. Akiko Hashimoto, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology Dr. Richard Scaglion, Professor, Department of Anthropology Dissertation Director: Dr. L. Keith Brown, Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology ii Copyright © by Margaret Elizabeth Murphy 2006 iii CREATIVE CHILDREN: JAPANESE HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS’ NARRATIVES OF LIFE Margaret Elizabeth Murphy, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2006 Japanese high school girls assert enormous creativity in actively and strategically pursuing educational and personal goals. Girls disregard their teacher’s advice about academics because they rightly perceive that their school’s in-class academics have little or no influence on their chances for success on university and junior college entrance exams. Girls argue that their high school education is tedious because it relies on rote memorization, and boring in-class lectures that bear no explicit relationship to the college entrance exams that determine their futures. Girls pursue educational opportunities outside of their school in the form of cram schools, self-study, one-on-one tutoring, and group study. The school reinforces the girls’ negative views of in-class education by offering after-school cram classes focused upon entrance exam materials, and by allowing seniors in-school time to prepare for university entrance exams. The school’s economic survival is dependent on girls’ successes. Therefore their support of individual initiative is unsurprising. Japanese young people are often portrayed as either obsessed with academics and controlled by their parents, or as defiant rebels, engaged in anti-social behaviors such as teen prostitution. In contrast to these pathologizing depictions, this work argues that within the constraints of a seemingly inflexible educational system, girls eagerly pursue educational opportunities and ideas, are highly motivated and focused on academic objectives and are not perceived as rebellious by their elders. iv Studies of adolescence often rely on adult-centered views and thus stay comfortably within the confines of familiar negative images of the young. In contrast, by relying on the girls’ view of their world this work builds a more complex portrait of Japanese young people. It argues that Japanese adults’ anxieties about rapid socio-economic change often emerge as laments about the young. Relying on ethnographic data collected at a girls’ private school in Tokyo, especially the use of taped diaries, this work provides an in-depth examination of Japanese high school girls’ lives, culture and thinking. This approach allows for the opportunity to learn about the lives of girls from them as they teach us how they creatively pursue educational opportunities and manage their social lives in contemporary Japanese society. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE.................................................................................................................................... xii 1.0 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................ 1 1.1 MARIKO.............................................................................................................. 1 1.2 PROBLEMATIZING THE MEANING OF ADOLESCENCE...................... 5 1.3 JAPANESE CULTURE AND HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS................................. 6 1.4 IMAGES OF JAPANESE HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS ....................................... 7 1.5 YAMA GIRLS’ IDEAS ABOUT THESE IMAGES ...................................... 10 1.6 THE FIELDWORK SITE: YAMA MIDDLE AND SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL............................................................................................................................. 11 1.7 METHODS......................................................................................................... 11 1.8 YOUTH AS METAPHORS OF CHANGE..................................................... 12 1.9 COMING OF AGE WITH CHOICES............................................................ 14 1.10 REVIEW OF CHAPTERS ............................................................................... 16 2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW.......................................................................................... 18 2.1 NEGATIVE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT ADOLESCENCE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF A POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL MOVEMENT .................. 18 2.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES, ADOLESCENCE AND LOCAL CULTURE........................................................................................................................... 22 vi 2.3 “DEFINING” ADOLESCENCE...................................................................... 23 2.4 PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL ADOLESCENCE ............................................... 23 2.5 LITERATURE REVIEW ON ADOLESCENT STRATEGIES ................... 26 2.6 ADOLESCENT STRATEGIES ....................................................................... 26 2.7 ADOLESCENT STRATEGIES AND COPYING.......................................... 27 2.8 MALADAPTIVE ADOLESCENT STRATEGIES........................................ 30 2.9 JAPANESE CHILD DEVELOPMENT .......................................................... 31 2.10 THE UNLINKING OF BIOLOGY AND ADOLESCENCE AND THE POSSIBLE EFFECT ON THE STRATEGIES GIRLS PURSUE ................................ 36 3.0 YAMA GIRLS’ VIEWS OF BEING YOUNG........................................................ 38 3.1 HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS................................................................................... 38 3.2 ENTERING “ADOLESCENCE”: THE HIGH SCHOOL YEARS ............. 39 3.3 THE PLACE OF HANKŌKI IN THE JAPANESE LIFECOURSE............. 40 3.4 BULLYING AT YAMA.................................................................................... 42 3.5 ENTERING HIGH SCHOOL.......................................................................... 44 3.6 BEING A STUDENT, PASSING EXAMS: THE ROAD TO MATURITY 45 3.7 BALANCE IN ADOLESCENCE..................................................................... 46 3.8 PHYSICAL MATURATION IN JAPAN........................................................ 48 4.0 THE RESEARCHER AND THE RESEARCH ...................................................... 50 4.1 PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION................................................................... 51 4.2 NOT BEING AN ADULT................................................................................. 52 4.3 BEING TREATED AS A GIRL AT YAMA.................................................. 54 4.4 ESTABLISHING RELATIONSHIPS IN THE FIELD ................................. 55 vii 4.5 BEING AN AMERICAN .................................................................................. 57 4.6 RELATIONSHIPS WITH TEACHERS ......................................................... 58 4.7 SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS WITH TEACHERS........................ 61 4.8 RELATIONSHIPS WITH GIRLS................................................................... 63 4.9 RUNNING A STUDENT CLUB ...................................................................... 64 4.10 SAMPLING........................................................................................................ 66 4.11 TAPED TEEN DIARIES .................................................................................. 67 4.12 DATA COLLECTION OBSERVATIONS ..................................................... 68 4.13 MEDIA MATERIALS ...................................................................................... 69 4.14 CD TRADING CLUB........................................................................................ 70 5.0 YAMA HIGH SCHOOL ........................................................................................... 72 5.1 FIRST WEEK OF APRIL: OPENING CEREMONY FOR YAMA STUDENTS......................................................................................................................... 73 5.2 THE JAPANESE SCHOOL YEAR................................................................. 74 5.3 EDUCATION AT YAMA................................................................................. 74 5.4 THE PERCEPTION OF A YAMA EDUCATION ........................................ 76 5.5 YAMA’S CURRICULUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS ........................... 76 5.6 THE CURRICULUM........................................................................................ 78 5.7 STUDY PATTERNS, TEST TAKING AND ENTRANCE EXAMS ........... 79 5.8 CYCLES OF ACADEMIC PRESSURES AND RANKINGS....................... 80 5.9 STUDYING FOR EXAMS AND SLEEP PATTERNS.................................. 81 5.10 THE GIRLS’ INTERACTIONS WITH TEACHERS................................... 82 5.11 MONITORING GIRLS AND MIWA’S NARRATIVE................................. 85 viii 5.12 SPORTS DAY AND HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS............................................... 86 5.13 AN INCIDENT................................................................................................... 86 5.14 SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF GIRLS...........................................................