Child's Play

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Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues have propelled Japan into the center of a set of global conversations about the nature of children and how to raise them. Engaging both the history of children and childhood and the history of emotions, contributors to this volume track Japanese childhood through a number of historical scenarios. Such explorations—some from Japan’s early-modern past—are revealed through letters, diaries, memoirs, family and household records, and religious polemics about promising, rambunctious, sickly, happy, and dutiful youngsters.

Sabine Frühstück is Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her publications include Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan and Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army.
 
Anne Walthall is Professor Emerita of Japanese History at the University of California, Irvine. Her publications include The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration, and Japan: A Cultural, Social, and Political History.

List of Illustrations and Table
Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE: Premodern Period
1. Nasty Boys or Obedient Children?: Childhood and Relative Autonomy in Medieval Japanese Monasteries
Or Porath
2. Growing Up Manly: Male Samurai Childhood in Late Edo-Era Tosa
Luke S. Roberts
3. For the Love of Children: Practice, Affect, and Subjectivities in Hirata Atsutane’s Household
Anne Walthall

PART TWO: Early Twentieth Century
4. Consumer Consumption for Children: Conceptions of Childhood in the Work of Taisho-Period Designers
Jinno Yuki
5. “Children in the Wind”: Reexamining the Golden Age of Childhood Film in Wartime Japan
Harald Salomon
6. Children and the Founding of Manchukuo: The Young Girl Ambassadors as Promoters of Friendship
Koresawa Hiroaki

PART THREE: Asia-Pacific War
7. Reversing the Gaze: The Construction of “Adulthood” in the Wartime Diaries of Japanese Children and Youth
Aaron William Moore
8. Outdoor Play in Wartime Japan
L. Halliday Piel
9. “ . . . And my heart screams”: Children and the War of Emotions
Sabine Fru¨hstu¨ck

PART FOUR: Contemporary Japan
10. From Grade Schooler to Great Star: Childhood Development and the “Golden Age” in the World of Japanese Soccer
Elise Edwards
11. Treatment and Intervention for Children with Developmental Disabilities
Junko Teruyama
12. Food, Affect, and Experiments in Care: Constituting a “Household-like” Child Welfare Institution in Japan
Kathryn E. Goldfarb
13. Monju-kun: Children’s Culture as Protest
Noriko Manabe

Contributors
Index