Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (32 page)

Couched in language that is both old and new, the new requirements to love your country and develop your heart (
kokoro
) strongly resonate with what Barbara Cruikshank has called “a new science of the self that places the hope of liberation in the psychological state of the people” (Cruikshank 1996: 233).
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In the case of the self-esteem movement that Cruikshank examines, the target population was poor urban people of color in the United States. The goal of the program launched first in California was for this group to learn to “align their personal goals with the goals of the reformers” (1996: 232). In the contemporary Japanese context, the objects of this science of the
self—this
learning to be self-sufficient and to align your personal goals with the goals of the reformers and their new forms of governance emerging in the recessionary era—are the subjects of education, whether these be parents in the homes, children and youth in the schools, or teachers and the public at large. Therefore, it is important to note that these shifts are not limited to discourses about the youth but reflect a shift in the relationship between citizen and nation for all Japanese.

Since the beginning of the Japanese modernity project in the mid-nineteenth century, the changing requirements of sentiment and sacrifice have been a key arena for ongoing negotiations over the forms and expressions of nationhood and nationality, especially within the realm of educational policy. These changes and negotiations intensified as a result of the recessionary period. Of particular note in this sense in the 2006 revisions to the Fundamental Law of Education are the new sections on “patriotic education” (
aikokushin kyouiku
) that target the project of “creating youth who will love their country.” These sections address a concern for a loss of the will to sacrifice on the part of the youth even as the form this sacrifice must take has changed: Once it would have meant giving your life to the nation in wartime, and in the era of high growth this might have taken the form of sacrificing one’s health through laboring without limit in Japan’s economic miracle (for example, the “death by overwork” afflicting male salaried workers). In the wake of the recession, this sacrifice now takes the form of relinquishing all those social guarantees such as job security, health care, and old-age pensions that had existed in the compact between Japan and its citizens in the era of high growth. No wonder there is a concern for whether the youth and children of the nation as the next inheritors of this national burden would willingly take up the call to “be what you were and be what you are” (Renan 1996: 52). Not only is this concern for the nation not about a return to the prewar spirit, but it also marks a shift in the production of national sentiment within these seemingly classic forms of return. In other words, not only is the “love” conjured by the patriotic call not the same, but the “heart” (
kokoro
) or the soul that loves is also not the same. The youth are now called on “to create independent hearts” (
jiritsutekina kokoro
) and to “raise themselves” (
jibun de sodatsu
), while also being asked to love and sacrifice for their country. This suggests an entirely new affective relationship to the imagined community of the nation.

However,
this is not a phenomenon that can be explained in terms completely internal to Japan; it encompasses regional and global processes that situate Japan in the world. The crises of individual and national uncertainty that occurred in the late 1990s brought to the fore the ways in which the period of miracle growth (roughly 1955 through 1973) had obscured the tensions of this system that lay under the surface reality of an amazing period of economic prosperity and international recognition of Japan as a successful model of modernization.
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When I first wrote about how these unresolved problems were materializing in social and political reality around the sites of social and national reproduction, home, school, and child, there seemed little to compare it to in the United States or Western context (Arai 2004). This has, as we know, all changed within the last few years. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, the Japanese example or “the Japanese disease,” referring to the Japanese recession of the 1990s, can no longer be viewed as something particularly Japanese.

In Japan, the new technologies of self-reliance and self-development have been written into the system of education through the 2006 revisions to the Fundamental Law of Education and actualized through the creation of specific pedagogies that take the form of
Notes to the Heart
(
kokoro no no-to
), a set of educational materials distributed in the schools that focus on a “revolution within.” Although this emphasis on heart would seem to speak about the interiority of the subject, “There is nothing personal about self-esteem” (Cruikshank 1996: 231). This pedagogy of self-reliance and development has larger goals of social reform.

In the Japanese context, the development of the individual heart is a pedagogy that engages both directly and indirectly with anxieties about national fashioning. These anxieties first took the form of a concern about the “incompleteness,” in sense of an immaturity or temporal inferiority, of Japanese modernity during the prewar and immediate postwar periods.
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These concerns returned in the recessionary period of the 1990s in the claims of neonationalists that the nation had been weakened by the American Occupation of the late 1940s. According to these critics, the stripping of war powers from the Japanese state and the continued reliance on laws such as the 1947 Fundamental Law of Education, which regulated the teaching of nationalism in the schools, has produced weakened and “strange” youth, whose impaired development has robbed the nation of its ability to complete itself. The focus
on
individual development now has been made to speak to these concerns as well; however, the current impetus for national completion has become very much removed from how it was once struggled over and envisioned.

The 2006 revisions to the education law must therefore be understood in relation to a history of struggle in Japan over a form of social and national reproduction that was first conceived during the modernity project of the late nineteenth century and recast in the climate of postwar theories of growth and modernization.
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However, today, the conditions of possibility for this set of national and cultural expectations are no longer available. These deeply ingrained views of what the Japanese nation should be, how this nation is to be reproduced, what is necessary for this reproduction, and its mismatch with the current government policies of less support and fewer guarantees for its citizens are all questions that I pursue in the following pages through an ethnographic investigation of the discourses, debates, products, and effects of the pedagogies of “the heart.”
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National concern about the formation of the individual child’s heart both occludes and highlights the paradoxes of intertwined histories of modernity and neoliberal globalization.
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The dissolution of the social contract in Japan during the recessionary period has led to the highly specific focus on the heart as a means to restore the affective relationship to the nation, while at the same time preparing the youth for a national context in which they can and should expect less from the nation-state but, nonetheless, be willing to be and do more. This is a context that I think of as neoliberal (Arai 2005). What concern me here are the specific cultural effects and products of neo-liberalization. As Ann Anagnost outlines in the Introduction to this volume, this includes the emergence of discourses of “freedom” and “responsibility.” As she makes clear, citing Anna Tsing and others, while seeming to gesture to a new individualization, a relaxing of former expectations and disciplinary pedagogies of the state, in fact, these new discourses have a very different lineage from traditional liberalisms of the mid-twentieth century. The relaxing of controls and regulations and the reductions of curricula in the sphere of education are accompanied more generally by a shifting of the burdens for citizenship and success to the individual, but these shifts are transacted through a means that is sociohistorically specific.

My discussion of this new relationship resonates with Inoue (
Chapter 8
in this volume), who raises similar questions about the absence of a discourse of loyalty among the female workers in the Japanese corporation she studied.
Inoue
reveals here a means for the company to ask for new forms of sacrifice from its female employees. The contradiction she finds here is similar to the one represented in the production of an independent or individualized patriotism. The new structures of sentiment and sacrifice are intentionally less equal and less communal but nonetheless figured through the idiom of the “heart” as
nationally Japanese
. The securing of the national future, it appears, no longer guarantees that all will participate in the ongoing prosperity of the national community.

Creating a National Citizenry and Crises of Capitalist Modernity

The 1947 Fundamental Law of Education has been referred to by many as the Heisei Rescript (recalling its adoption into law under the reign of the son of the wartime emperor Showa while also recalling references to the Imperial Rescript of the prewar period). It has been both praised and faulted for its continuities with Japan’s prewar education past—a past that was from the beginning central to the unification, standardization, and consolidation of the heterogeneous peoples who inhabited the discontinuous geographic space of the Japanese archipelago. As Takashi Fujitani (1993) describes in his dramatic study of the early Meiji pageants and ritual performances around the figure of the young emperor in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the inhabitants of Japan had to be instructed to acquire a self-consciousness of the nation, even as they came to know themselves through what we might call “structures of comparison,” or ways that Western modernizing discourses put pressure on non-Western peoples to “civilize and enlighten” themselves during the early nation building and colonial modernity moment of the mid-nineteenth century. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Meiji government shifted away from its initial focus on “civilization and enlightenment” (
bunmei kaika
) to a singular focus on economic growth and military might, encapsulated in the phrase “rich country and strong military” (
fukoku kyōhei
). Among the various laws and decrees of this late-nineteenth-century moment, promulgated to ward off threats to national sovereignty, was the Imperial Rescript on Education. Teruhisa Horio explains the significance of the Rescript as follows: “To today’s eye the Rescript appears as a series of piously vague statements about the duties of loyal Imperial subjects; in the context in which it was written, however, it was a masterful formulation of
the
moral base created to mandate the switch in the people’s loyalties from the family and clan to the Emperor and nation” (1988: 68).
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Subsequent to Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War in 1945, a major reform of education was enacted along with the establishment of a new national constitution. Welcomed in the name of a different modernity, the 1947 Fundamental Law of Education and the so-called peace constitution seemed a refreshing release from wartime history. These two pieces of legislation created the foundations of the postwar order by renouncing war, turning education into an individual right rather than a duty to the state, and shifting the control of education back into the hands of the people and educators (Fujita 2000). With changes in the international balance of power following the end of the war, however, the American Occupation forces, which had been actively involved in the drafting of these laws, began to shift directions. The spirit of democratic reform that had energized postdefeat Japan was overridden by the American urging of Japan back into the militarized fold, a concern over a rising tide of domestic protest, and the sensing on the part of education officials and others that “democratization had gone too far” (Horio 1988: 147). In the late 1950s, as industry was gearing up for rapid economic growth, the government realized it would need to create a new kind of citizen to produce this miracle. Its answer at the time was a series of policy documents known as “The Image of the Desired Japanese” (
kitai sareru ningen zo
).

Seen through the eyes of the government bureaucrats who drafted “The Image of the Desired Japanese,” the 1947 Fundamental Law of Education was an impediment to economic growth because of its focus on the rights of the individual and the prohibition placed on the central government to manage education from above. Faced with powerful popular opposition to any revision of the law, government policies focused on eroding its protections (Horio 1988: 160). However, it would be incorrect to represent the Image of the Desired Japanese as simple “restorationism”—its structure and function were very different from the model of citizenship associated with the imperial system. In its emphasis on “creating people” (
hitozukuri
), the Image of the Desired Japanese aimed to adapt education to the needs of high growth. These reforms included an emphasis on “academic competency” (
noryokushugi
), the addition of a national achievement test, and a sharp acceleration in the difficulty and amount of curriculum. Horio calls this legislation “ideological camouflage” (1988: 159) because of the way in which they “provided an ideologically charged series of representations which legitimized
the values of the welfare state in the stage of monopolistic capitalism by appealing to the idea of “being uniquely Japanese” (1988: 159). By the early 1960s, the “peace and prosperity” slogan of the reforms was in the process of being transformed into a one-track focus on economic growth, within which education played the role of creating a highly skilled and totally absorbed workforce willing to sacrifice their private lives to the needs of industry and nation.
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