Japan adapts the new model
In 1984, the Japanese government ordered an inquiry into the declining use of chopsticks among schoolchildren. Preference for knives and forks was growing rapidly among children who wanted to eat faster and also become still more attuned to international patterns. The government hoped to encourage tradition as part of the sense of what a childhood both modern and Japanese should entail. Not a major historical moment, obviously, but an interesting comment on change and counterpressure in one of the most dynamic societies in modern world history.
Japan’s rapid adjustment to unprecedented Western pressure from the 1860s onward was a striking development on the international scene. American and British fleets sailed into Edo Bay in 1853 and 1854, demanding that Japan end its isolation and open to Western trade. Over a decade of struggle followed, amid further Western interference, as Japanese leaders debated how to respond, at times falling into near civil war. But in 1868 the decision was made: massive reform was the answer. All this is familiar as well as important; what must be added now is the extent to which a major redefinition of childhood formed a basic part of the process.
Japanese reformers quickly grasped the essentials of the modern model, as they visited Western Europe and the United States, with schooling at the forefront. They were prepared for this to some extent, for Japan had expanded Confucian and Buddhist schooling rapidly earlier in the nineteenth century, and, after the West, had the world’s highest literacy rate. Upwards of 30,000 private schools had been set up between 1800 and 1868, bringing exposure to primary education for large numbers of commoners. But conversion to mass education, and of course the new commitment of the government to this extension, constituted a major shift nevertheless, and it brought a surprising number of additional changes in its wake. The Japanese case suggests how many ramifications could attach to the modern model, at least when the model was borrowed directly, often eagerly, from the West.
At the same time, Japanese childhood did not become Western. Leaders were at pains to construct a genuine modern model that would nevertheless retain distinctive Japanese values in childhood, either in traditional ways or through new inventions like a particular version of nationalism. Here too, the Japanese case, distinctive in its own right, is an extremely instructive caution against a simplistic application of modernization thinking.
Finally, as early as the 1920s, and certainly after World War II, Japan proved capable of influencing childhood in other parts of the world, particularly through consumer exports. Its speed in taking up new opportunities to sell to children is a fascinating part of its own adjustment story, and would ultimately become a significant element in the globalization of childhood. Again, Japanese-sponsored change complicates any portrayal of the modern world history of childhood in strictly Western terms.
Childhood had been changing in Japan even before full consideration of the modern model. Schooling spread to a large minority of children, though disproportionately to boys, in the early nineteenth century. Private Confucian and Buddhist schools won growing popularity. These developments undoubtedly helped prepare Japan for a fuller conversion to an education-based childhood after the Reform Era began in 1868. In other respects, however, the conditions of agricultural society largely prevailed. Most children worked from a fairly early age. A full concept of childhood as a distinct stage of life was not developed, as evidenced for example by the mixing of children and adults in punishments for crime. Dominant Confucian principles emphasized hierarchy and discipline.
Discussion of school reform heated up in the 1860s. Government-sponsored missions abroad brought back reports on the merits of Western education; many of the emissaries would themselves shape the later Ministry of Education. Particular attention was devoted to the need to introduce more science and to break the Confucian habit of looking toward tradition rather than innovation for sources of knowledge. Considerable caution attached to these discussions, for almost no one advocated complete Westernization: as one leader put it in 1868, “foreign learning must be made to subserve the interests of Japan.”
As the Ministry was formed (in 1871) and then an ambitious new Education Code was introduced the following year, several major changes gained emphasis. First, of course, was the new attention to science, modern foreign languages (particularly English), and other new subjects. Even in families where schooling was already established, this meant that children began learning many things their parents did not know, and ignoring some cherished subjects as well, an interesting development in a society where age hierarchy had long been esteemed. A host of foreign books and advisors were welcomed into the system, particularly during the 1870s. Second, education at all levels was opened to qualified citizens regardless of social rank – “learning is no longer to be considered as belonging to the upper classes.” And third, and most important for Japanese childhood generally, universal primary schooling was mandated, with a goal of opening 54,000 primary schools under government control. Here, surprisingly early in the reform process, and with dramatic scope, came the introduction of the essence of modern childhood, an insistence that schooling become the core obligation of childhood. Reform leaders explicitly argued that “if the ordinary people are poor and illiterate, the wealth and power of the entire country cannot be summoned.” Clearly, larger social goals, not explicit attention to childhood, dominated this change, but such had been the case in the West to some extent earlier, and it did not modify the massive impact of schooling on childhood across the social spectrum.
It was vitally important that these measures involved girls as well as boys, again a striking innovation in a gender-conscious society and a major change in childhood in its own right. Attention to girls’ education followed from the desire to imitate the West, where at least basic education for females was gaining ground rapidly. It also resulted from a belief that, in a modern society, mothers must be educated in order properly to raise their children. In other words, even if the basic interests still involved boys’ training, the need for literate mothers seemed inescapable.
Not surprisingly, actual change proved slower and more hesitant than the early proclamations implied. Only half the required primary schools had opened by 1900, in a society that was still very poor. More interesting still, though hardly surprising amid what was nevertheless an ambitious pace of change, considerable popular resistance emerged. Many peasants believed that schools were nothing more than a channel for military recruitment, and they rebelled, in a few cases quite literally, against this extension of government control over childhood. It would take some time for Japanese peasants to realize, like their counterparts in the West, that there were practical advantages in letting children acquire basic literacy and numeracy skills, including opportunities for upward mobility – as in becoming a teacher. There was also pushback against too much openness for girls, and by the late 1870s greater emphasis on domestic skills, like sewing, helped reaffirm the importance of gender in childhood even amid new levels of schooling.
By 1900, despite various constraints, essentially all Japanese children were attending primary schools (sometimes, crowded ones) and were becoming literate, a massive reorientation in childhood. Japan was also promoting an unusually long school year, of 200 classroom days, a clear indication of the seriousness of this redefinition away from child labor, and remarkable in a society with limited resources. Change extended far less widely into adolescence at this point, however; and a number of children even of primary school age were still sent to work at least part time, forming 15 percent of the factory labor force. Anomalies increased after age 12. To be sure, secondary and university education expanded, with even a few opportunities for women, but the emphasis lay on identifying talented children who could be trained toward the kind of technical expertise that an industrializing society required – in fields (for boys) such as engineering, which ballooned rapidly. For most teenagers, work continued to describe life for several more decades. Indeed, reliance on young workers, particularly women, became central to Japan’s industrialization process. Needing cheap exports to pay for expensive imported equipment and fuels, and lacking significant raw materials for export, Japan rapidly expanded production in silk textiles, taking over world leadership from China. Sweatshops, using manual methods, eagerly recruited young girls from the countryside, often essentially buying them from family members. Resultant conditions, with long hours, no freedom to leave the work site, and low pay, represented change, but not in the direction of a fundamental redefinition of later childhood. By the 1930s, however, the number of children in secondary school was rising rapidly.
For the longer run, the most significant adjustment in the Japanese process of change toward the modern model of childhood involved a successful attempt to infuse schooling with principles that differed from those the Japanese saw in the West, and particularly to emphasize collective loyalties and obedience for children as opposed to the more individualistic approaches in Europe and the United States. (Western authorities themselves tried to limit individualism by stressing national loyalty but they placed more emphasis on individual achievement and less on group affiliation in the classroom.) Conservative counterattack against too much Western influence crystallized in a pronouncement by the Emperor in 1879. An ensuing Memorandum for teachers insisted that “loyalty to the Imperial House, love of country, filial piety toward parents, respect for superiors, faith in friends … constitute the great path of human morality.” Secondary schools, similarly, were urged to regain “the virtues of loyalty, filial piety, honor and duty, which had been cultivated for several centuries.” Attention to science and new knowledge was fine in the technical fields, but it should be balanced by this more traditional moralism. For girls, this approach heightened the emphasis on gender-specific education, toward becoming a “good wife, wise mother,” preached even for upper-class girls in the higher schools – even as opportunities beyond primary training continued to expand. Even in the sciences, at least in the early grades, Japan continued to stress rote learning, parroting the teacher while embracing schooling more generally in an elaborate maze of rules and codes of conduct. Here too, Japan continued to generate a culture among children that, while no less modern than that of the West, was genuinely distinctive. Also important was the encouragement to the formation of close bonds among students themselves, promoting group cohesion; by the later twentieth century this quality would continue to distinguish Japanese education in the early grades, taking precedence even over obedience to adults. This same group emphasis encouraged Japanese teachers to rely considerably on shaming as a disciplinary tactic, even as its use declined in the West, and particularly the United States, because of concerns about children’s self-esteem. By the early twenty-first century Japanese students who faltered in math were still publicly identified to their classmates – a practice that was actually illegal by this point in the U.S., on grounds of protection of privacy. Whatever its other drawbacks, the Japanese approach remained more successful in encouraging academic performance.
For its qualities both old and new, education became more important in Japanese society than it was in the West, in terms of defining access to later careers. Like Western Europe, and in contrast to the United States, the Japanese system placed great stock in qualifying examinations, which would ultimately open the path to universities for the minority of successful students. Parents who aspired for their children’s success accordingly added to their own responsibilities to childhood the need to work hard to promote academic achievement, including providing opportunities for entertainment and letting off steam amid the seriousness and intensity of preparation for exams.
Education brought additional changes in its wake, many of which rather unexpectedly moved Japan closer to the Western version of modern childhood. Two of the changes were predictable enough. Birthrates began to drop rapidly during the nineteenth century, which followed logically from decreased family reliance on the labor of younger children and from increasing costs, including getting children ready for school; this pattern began to emerge amid the expansion of schools even before 1868, and accelerated thereafter. Birth rates remained higher than in the West through the 1930s, though dropping; after the 1950s Japan changed even more rapidly, moving from 2.7 children per woman in 1950 to a mere 1.4 in 1995, well under the levels needed to sustain the population. Government-sponsored public health measures, one of the other early interests in copying from the West, rapidly cut into traditional child mortality rates during this period as well. Infant mortality had dropped to 16 percent by 1920, 10 percent by 1939; the level the West had achieved by 1920, at 5 percent, was reached by 1950. And the process continued, with 0.04 percent infant mortality, one of the world’s lowest rates, by 1995. These fairly rapid changes in children’s demography, as earlier in the West, made the individual child a more precious commodity within the family.
Other adjustments followed. Japan had not offered a particularly clear definition of childhood as a separate phase of human life or of society, prior to the later nineteenth century. It had an extensive premodern school network, but this was conceived as a system, not a definition of discrete childhood. Other than the private schools themselves, there were no separate institutions, and particularly public institutions, for children – youthful offenders were mixed with adults, for example, in the prison population. Even as the school reforms took hold, government leaders rarely mentioned children themselves – national goals were paramount. But the implications of childhood devoted to schooling, plus further contact with the West, began to generate a more explicit view of childhood itself.
As early as 1874 one reformer, Mitsukuri Shuhei, commented on the need to protect young children, as part of the preparation for successful education, sounding remarkably like earlier Western thinkers in the process:
From infancy until they are six or seven, children’s minds are clean and without the slightest blemish while their characters are as pure and unadulterated as a perfect pearl. Since what then touches their eyes or ears, whether good or bad, makes a deep impression that will not be wiped out until death, this age provides the best opportunity for disciplining their natures and training them in deportment. They will become learned and virtuous if the training methods are appropriate, stupid and bigoted if the methods are bad.
Similar ideas encouraged reformers to argue that parents had a special responsibility to care for and enlighten their innocent offspring – but that most parents, at least given Japanese traditionalism, did not know how to do this properly. Teachers and child experts were essential not just to educate, but to promote proper care for children more generally. As in the West, and partly because of the Western example, childrearing manuals and other advice literature began to proliferate. The new ideas gained force as Japan was urbanizing rapidly, taking many parents away from the extended family structures that had once helped care for children in the villages; and often both husband and wife had to work outside the home, compounding the childcare problem. Worries about children roaming free in the cities, and sampling urban life independently, clearly promoted the new ideas about devising special care for the young. Childhood became an increasingly common topic of discussion in the popular press as well as in expert literature. A host of new periodicals, like The Family Magazine, attempted to communicate the new ideas about children, urging careful attention but also a modern belief that, rather than seeing them as problems, Japan should convert to the idea of “the child as treasure.”
Many reformers focused on the poor, who so often lacked the means to pay proper attention to the children they loved. This sentiment helped generate the first daycare centers in Japan, sometimes under Christian missionary sponsorship. By 1912 there were 15 centers nationally, mainly in the biggest cities, but by 1926 the number had grown to 273. The centers offered not only physical care, but also advice to poor families about promoting children’s health and providing psychological support as well. Center employees often took whole families on excursions to places like city parks, hoping to convince them of “the limitless joy expressed when the whole family is together.”
Another set of developments that sprang from explicit concern for children, and from the Western example, involved special juvenile courts and reform houses for offenders, again pulling children away from undifferentiated contact with adults even amid deviance. The government mandated a reformatory in each district in legislation of 1900. Other legislation banned factory employment for children under 12, in 1911, a crucial measure that occurred much earlier in Japan’s industrialization process than had been true in most Western countries. Additional protective efforts included the outlawing of smoking by children, which lasted for several decades. Government and private agencies pushed the creation of orphanages, nursery schools, clinics for children, vocational counseling for youth; by 1920 programs for children were consuming 60 percent of the budget of the Home Ministry. For the middle class, the same basic impulse encouraged a growing range of toys produced especially for children, designed “to liberate the child to freely explore its own interests and curiosity,” while a playground movement created new public spaces for children. One playground created by child psychologists in 1917 included a zoo, a wading pool, a plant garden, seesaws and slides, and a sumo wrestling ring.
By the 1920s, through a combination of new ideas about children and global economic opportunity, Japan began to become in fact a major toy exporter. The Japanese had imported toys from Europe during the early stages of reform, but with Western manufacturers distracted by World War I, the chance to participate in the world market became obvious. Japanese toy exports tripled during the war, and then tripled again by 1920. By this point, European competition resumed, which put new pressure on Japanese industry to innovate; and reformers were urging greater imagination, to help compensate for a presumed national tendency merely to copy and learn by rote. One firm that led the way in this direction was Nintendo, initially founded in 1889. A highlight of the Japanese approach, differentiating it from Western European toymakers though resembling the more innovative efforts in the United States, involved a self-conscious willingness to deal with children as children, and not miniature adults. European toys, like model soldiers, were well-made, popular and influential, but they were oriented to preparation for adult activities, including war. Japan, from the 1920s onward, approached child consumers more directly and appealed to their fantasy life. A popular comic book, The Adventures of Sei-chan, thus led in 1924 to spinoff products including playing cards and hats. Dolls carried out comic book themes as well. Toys based on commercial fantasy narratives were separated from the expectations of adults. And of course this theme continued once Japanese toy manufacture revived after World War II, leading the nation to a dominant position in the global export market and in defining children’s tastes. Japan easily retained a position, along with the United States, as the leader in the imaginative (some would say, exploitative) design of toys and products for children, even as actual manufacturing shifted to centers of cheaper labor such as China.
In childhood as on many other topics, Japan’s dramatic process of modern change requires some reasonably subtle analysis. Change was fundamental, as Japanese of all classes moved, within a very few decades – much more rapidly than had earlier been the case in the West – to a childhood of schooling and good health, amid a declining birth rate. We have seen that by the 1950s, with more explicit government encouragement, the Japanese birth rate had dropped to Western levels, though with greater reliance on abortion than in the West. Equally important was the fact that, as in the West, the installation of modern childhood encouraged a wider array of reconceptualizations of childhood, leading to a variety of new institutions and practices. Assimilating many characteristics from the West, Japan began to be able to contribute influences beyond its borders as well. At the same time, change did not create a fully Western type of childhood. The qualities sought and promoted in children retained distinctive values.
It is also important to note that, partly as a result of differentiated imitation, partly because of domestic impulses, Japan generated some aspects of childhood closer to those of the United States, and some closer to Western Europe. The educational and testing systems, with emphasis on intense academic standards before university and on careful tracking, were quite similar to those in France and Germany, from which they were borrowed. But the desire to promote educational advancement among all children in the primary grades, and as we have seen the child-centeredness of commercial toy manufacture, more closely resembled aspects of the United States. The complex combination, of course, furthers the impression of Japanese distinctiveness.
This complexity also means that there was and is active debate about childhood in Japan, both among social groups and within leadership ranks, and a continuous stream of change. While rote learning and group loyalties differed somewhat from emphases in the West, there were and are plenty of Japanese reformers encouraging more individualism and creativity.
American occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952 inevitably brought additional outside influences that colored Japanese childhood. Nationalism and particularly emperor-worship were downplayed in the schools, while greater individualism was encouraged. As social distinctions declined further, both secondary schools and universities expanded rapidly. It was at this point, in 1947, that nine years of schooling (through the lower secondary grades) were required by law. But debate continued as well, as conservatives in the 1960s rallied against the more individualistic ideas of citizenship Americans had promoted, talking about a renewal of “the cultivation of ethical consciousness.” Yet another burst of reform, in the 1980s, attacked undue emphasis on rote learning, urging a new attention to thinking ability and innovation as essential to Japan’s success in the global economy and the information age; the Ministry used phrases like “from uniformity and homogeneity to more diversity and the expansion of freedom of choice” and a need “to identify and develop the personality, abilities, and aptitudes of individuals.” At the same time, Japan was producing children who did exceptionally well in international academic competitions, and not surprisingly there were some nationalists who argued that it was the rest of the world that now had catching up to do. And the special moral education theme did not go away, with references to “proper national awareness” and the “unique culture and traditions of Japan”; as one conservative put it, “you have to teach tradition to the children whether they like it or not.” Here, as in other respects, Japan participated in setting standards for modern childhood, sharing key issues with many other societies but operating as well with some distinctive vocabulary and several special themes.
Brian Platt, “Japanese Childhood, Modern Childhood,” Journal of Social History 38 (2005); Gary Cross and Gregory Smits, “Japan, the U.S., and the Globalization of Children’s Consumer Culture,” Journal of Social History 38 (2005); Kathleen Uno, Passages to Modernity: childhood and social reform in early twentieth century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999); Herbert Passin, Education and Society in Japan (New York: Teachers College Press, 1965); Mark Lincicome, Principles, Praxis and the Politics of Educational Reform in Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995); Joseph Tobin, ed., Re-Made in Japan: everyday life and consumer taste in a changing society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Michael Stephens, Japan and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1991); Donald Roden, Schooldays in Imperial Japan: a study of the culture of a student elite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Helen Hopper, Fukuzawa Yukichi: from samurai to capitalist (New York: Longmans, 2004), on a leading educational reformer; Peter N. Stearns, Schools and Students in Industrial Society: Japan and the West 1870–1940 (Boston: Bedford, 1998); John Traphagan and John Knight, eds., Demographic Change and the Family in Japan’s Aging Society (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).