Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (34 page)

On December 15, 2006, the Japanese Diet passed the revisions. The new version of the Fundamental Law of Education is much longer than the original, including four new sections and a series of goals, one focused on correcting the home (discussed in the following paragraphs) and another intended to most directly repair the affective relationship to the nation among the youth. In the name of making education more “suitable,” this goal, which became known as the patriotic education clause, states that one of the central purposes of education will heretofore be to learn to “cultivate a respect for the tradition and culture [of Japan] and love the country and homeland.” As already mentioned, this suitability was defined in terms of what seemed to be lacking or missing in the citizenry, suggesting an original point in time
in
which morals, will, and devotion to the nation had occurred naturally, rather than having been produced historically through intentional cultural programs in the nation-building period (Fujitani 1993).

According to Miyake, the revisions did not cause significant public concern because of the way in which they left sections of the original language intact, while making calculated additions of new sections and omissions of older language to “completely alter the meaning and intention of the original” (Miyake 2006: 12). The changes in tone and context of the revisions are evident from the new preamble, which omits mention of respecting the individual in favor of the future of the nation, and the first two sections on educational principles and aims, which begin by talking about academic freedom but then temper this freedom with a new set of five targets (
mokuhyo
). These targets place a new emphasis on the feelings, desires, and attitudes of the individual as items for appraisal. Miyake argues that the vague wording of the patriotic clause was also an intentional compromise of the ruling conservative party to appease its less conservative government partners, but it was nevertheless sufficient to provide the context for the inclusion in school curriculum, and in some cases it appeared on report cards as a new category of assessment entitled “developing a heart that loves Japan.”
14

Moreover, in the new section on “education of the home,” the revised law conveys the message that successful children are made by parents, not by the schools, and those students who fail to produce the required forms of devotion to the nation have only themselves and their parents to blame. Parents are newly identified here as the key providers of “the inculcation of independence in everyday habits to the production of the heart.” And while there is mention of parenting classes (
hogosha gakushu
) and pamphlets for proper child rearing offered to teach parents their new responsibilities in this realm, as my interviewees suggested to me, this new responsibility delegated to parents feels “frightening” (
osoroshii
). In the popular realm, this new focus on parental responsibility has been encapsulated in book and magazine titles like
How Not to Raise a Part-Time Worker
[
furiita
], referring to the now legions of permanently underemployed youth entering the workforce after the miracle had ended. Uncertain about how to take on this new responsibility, parents are nonetheless motivated by the specter of failure, which has created a new mass market for privatized solutions through the growth of the cram school industry. A new psychologically informed literature on “raising a global child” is all too often a euphemism for new ways to help your child
become
more competitive in a much more constricted and uncertain job market and national future. With the exception of the leftist teacher’s union
Nikkyoso
and academics like Takahashi, most of the public seemed unaware of the seriousness of these revisions, in some cases admitting to not knowing much about the Fundamental Law of Education and expecting the schools to inform them of the changes if they were serious.
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Exemplary of the conflicting messages of devotion to the nation, while being responsible for oneself, is a series of supplementary textbooks called
Notes to the Heart
(
Kokoro no No-to
), first produced and distributed to all elementary and junior high school students in 2002. The impetus behind the production of these colorfully designed and grade-specific booklets was precisely the (re-)creation of the daily plebiscite of the nation for Japanese students, a means of reminding them of the necessity of forgetting and remembering their affective relationship, albeit with the now important difference: The formerly ritualized
imagined community
of the Japanese nation is
not
that which is remembered and forgotten in the
Notes
. In the materials prepared for grades 1 through 3, the environment is bucolic and the focus is on students’ independent performance of their daily routines at home and in school. The covers are adorned by a scene of two blissful youngsters, hugging their
Notes
to their hearts and floating above an area somewhere outside of the cityscape. By grades 5 and 6, the scenery has changed and the message has become more involved: Two adolescents stand in a forest with doves flying overhead; the scene is again in an uninterrupted countryside, and the messages on the cover proceed from “knowing yourself” to “raising yourself.” Students are asked to reflect on the meaning of “freedom” (
jiyu
), their relations with their peers, and also their relation to their homeland (
furusato
). They are asked to think about how they can best contribute to their society with a “rich heart.” What is additionally remarkable about these “heart notes” is their poignant absence of context and relationship to national history. Reading through them is an experience of being transported to another time and place, outside of the realm of ongoing recession and future uncertainty, to a space, it would appear, of the heart, in which the contradictions of the new affective relationship of less security and more individualization can be linked with former kinds of devotion and sacrifice.

To bypass the onerous textbook approval system in Japan, the
Notes
were given to the students as presents from the government, with instructions to open anytime during the school day. Their use was to have been extended
beyond
the regular class session into what is intended to become a routinized practice (Takahashi 2003: 18–21). As they proceed through the
Notes
, students are instructed to view their attachment to their nation with the will to succeed academically. Moreover, although the
Notes
are given as gifts, it is the student’s responsibility to use them for his or her own self-enhancement and success. Above all else, the
Notes
help the students to see themselves as solely responsible for their own success or failure.

This new responsibility is also articulated in the very form of distribution—the gift—individualized and totalized in its form and content. Routinization of use is not promised here, nor is the kind of standardization of message and purpose common to other government-approved curricular materials. In fact, because of the informal manner of distribution and use, there is no way of tracking how the
Notes
have been used by schoolchildren on a nationwide scale. So, then, why go to the trouble of giving this massive gift, particularly in recessionary times? The answer lies, I believe, in the very informality and ubiquity of this gift to all the schoolchildren of Japan. While free to be opened when and as the students wish, the
Notes
impart a series of highly specific images to the child as student, images of a new form of individual and national development, a development that is predicated on new conditions of national belonging and new requirements of the national subjects-in-the-making. Indeed the extracurricular character of these materials suggests that the students must assume for themselves the responsibility of using them as a resource.

If
Notes to the Heart
conveys to the youth the new terrain of self-responsibility in a highly sentimentalized form, a key moment in the now cult film classic
Battle Royale
offers a harsher look at the conditions of recessionary restructuring in hyper-violent terms. Playing the role of an embattled middle school teacher in one of the “collapsing classrooms” of the 1990s, Beat-o Takeshi, famous for his violent portrayals of tragic figures in Japanese society, awakens his students, who have been drugged and abducted to a remote island where they will be forced to play a game of warfare of all against all, in which only one of them can survive as the victor. Reading the horrific rules of the government-mandated survival game, Takeshi’s final message to his students as they are cast out to battle to the end: “Life is a game. Get tough. Battle and survive to become adults of worth.”

The phrase
adults of worth
reveals the new affective conditions of the individual’s relationship to the nation. The filmic world of
Battle Royale
shows us
teachers
that do not instruct, advise, and socialize students but instead condemn them to death; parents who are absent and do not know where their children are or what has become of them; and a state that no longer takes responsibility. What is evoked, only to be revoked, in this final instruction to “battle to become adults of worth” is no less than the tightly enmeshed relationships of the modern nation-state in which individuals were hailed as subjects and whose sacrifice to the nation, through work or military service, was rewarded with guarantees for life. In
Battle Royale
and the teacher’s injunction to kill or eliminate those who are the same, so that the nation might survive, there is a critical inversion of the affective relationship to the nation. This battle-to-the-end intentionally turns on its head the linkages between shared sacrifice and shared sentiment. In this world, only the individual with the strength to live will win. The film forecasts the changed conditions of the affective relationship that the “adult of worth” can (and has no choice but to) enter into.

The scene described in the preceding paragraphs pushes the heart idiom of our earlier discussion yet a step further. Refigured here are not only the children, who are required to learn a new means of fashioning their own subjectivity for the various battles of the futures that they must learn to wage on their own with little guarantee of a secure future, but also the adult, who is also reconfigured as the completion of a set of values and a social compact discursively produced as distinctly Japanese.

The national context surrounding these “adults of worth” is no longer the nation-state as great equalizer, homogenizer, and socializer of the population. The prerecessionary, “learn-from-Japan” past is exactly what is revoked in the idea of the survival game and its officially mandated conclusion of sole survivor. The new “adult of value” is one whose time is not the developmental era of the postwar national past, in which the micro- and macrotechniques of standardization and homogeneity suited the needs and requirements of capitalist modernity in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the language of government policy documents, those overwritten, prescribed, and inculcated habits and virtues of the Japanese miracle are no longer suitable (
fuzawashiikunai
) to the situation in which Japan now finds itself.

The survivors of capitalist globalization are those for whom the former conditions are no longer available, and thus the former limits of work and life do not obtain. These limits have been redefined within the conditions of labor restructuring—the new contract and part-time labor force and educational
reforms that attempt to obscure the new realities of sacrifice by making the devotion to country a matter of the individual heart. As one entrepreneur in the recession battered area around Osaka described for me recently: “Those who will succeed are those who have small feelers or antennae out in every direction to try and detect where the places and new sources of value will be created.” He talked about how this new value is connected intricately to the values that are emerging among the young, “This is a labor reality,” he said, “in which limits had become unknown [
genkai wa doko ni aru no ka
], so very different from before.” He described with a sort of nostalgia the category of
zangyo
(overtime hours); even though this resulted in men who spent more time at work than with their families, some of whom in severe instances died from the effects overwork, at least even this was seen as a kind of limit.

The 2001 report “The Structure of Japan in the 21st Century” defines the new national values of this era of the heart, who will produce them, and how these adaptations will occur (Kawai 2000). Written by the Jungian psychologist Kawai Hayao, this new set of values in terms of the nation were located newly within Japan and the Japanese subject. Japan’s new frontiers of growth, potential, strength, and survival are to found within. The sites of social reproduction would need to change to create this new value, producing subjects to be potentially endless sites for value creation. If within, where is this limit? According to a long-time acquaintance who is a member of the teachers’ union, this new frontier within means that the new Japanese subject is on his or her own; having been stripped of whatever protections (job security, health care, pensions) remaining in the compact between capital and labor from the high-growth era, he or she is left “bare naked” (
maru hadaka
).

The combination of a sense of growing national crisis, a resurgence of patriotism, anxieties about the youth, and calls for devotion to the nation, as individuals struggle to maintain their own jobs, is not unknown in the United States or in other parts of the world. It is a shared experience of capitalist globalization as jobs are outsourced and whole industries are relocated offshore. But the effects of these changes take their specific forms in different places, reflecting prior histories and national formations. Under the name of the new patriotic education and heart notes, young Japanese citizens are being asked to adapt to the end of a system of social protections and relative income equalities. Patriotic education does not mean more direct control by the state but rather more responsibility placed on the individual
for
securing his or her own future at a time when the social safety net for which Japan became famous has been removed, the path from education to work is shifting, income gaps are widening dramatically, and the securing of personal futures is more uncertain. Patriotic education in Japan is as much about strategies of self-strengthening, maintaining position, and navigating the much-changed present, not only of national futures but also personal ones. Individuals must take responsibility for themselves, yet they are no less called on to sacrifice themselves for the nation.