#seinenki

“Among the upper classes, as with the lower classes, bad homes were thought to lie at the root of the problem. Writer after writer explained that upper-class men not only kept concubines but also were often absent on business and cared little for home life. When they were home, claimed Tomeoka Kōsuke, men from this class often slept with their housemaids, and the resultant offspring showed a remarkable tendency toward delinquency or feeblemindedness. Mothers, on the other hand, were frequently former geisha, and were “crazy about actors.”

They were deceitful, incompetent household managers who reigned as “queens” and allowed maids, houseboys, carriage men, livein students, and visitors to spoil or pervert their children (or stepchildren, of whom, as in the lower classes, there were many). These people drank, threw lavish parties, and let their young acquire harmful tastes for money and the high life. And while they might enjoy spending money, they disdained the effort to earn it: educator Hara Masao wrote in 1906 of the problem of enervated, feeble, urban students of both sexes who “look down on work as something for the lower classes,” and “dream of lives of luxury and indolence.”

In practical terms, reformers argued that parents from more respectable segments of society had to learn how properly to care for their own young before they grew to be delinquent students. An emerging group of child-study experts were eager to help them. During the Tokugawa era, writers on childhood had tended to espouse the view that children were innately good but had to be molded by their environment into social beings, and these writers called upon parents to exercise care in this regard. Late-Meiji experts in “educational pathology,” however, codified a range of child-related problems, from “bad habits” to delinquency or other forms of deviance and abnormality (including mental illness or retardation). Ototake Iwazō, a professor at Tokyo Higher Normal School, emphasized in a 1910 book that the presence of one or more bad habits—such as “selfishness,” which entailed willful unruliness; gang formation; pranks; bullying; and abuse of animals—did not necessarily lead to delinquency. But by describing delinquents as pathological examples of traits that all children possessed, he and his peers left the boundaries between these conditions ambiguous, and thus stimulated parents' and others' anxieties.

Social Darwinist ideas clearly structured the logic of the late Meiji child-study movement. Invoking the recapitulation theories of sociologist Herbert Spencer (whose writings had also deeply influenced Tokutomi Sohō's writings on Japan's social development) and psychologist G. Stanley Hall, the new experts explained that during their development children passed through the various stages of human biological and moral evolution, and that their behavior thus derived partly from hereditary vestiges of primitive social organization. Takashima Heizaburō, for example, suggested that fighting and cruel behavior echoed primitive men's instincts for self-defense, while even the game of tag embodied the premium placed on speed by savages in their harsh environments. Parents, educators, and society at large thus needed to channel these instincts so that, for example, possessive urges led not to theft but to thrift. Experts emphasized children's particularly powerful imitative instinct as another factor in their socialization, and called upon adults to exercise the utmost caution in screening out harmful examples. Explained Ototake: “[N]ormal children, when nurtured and educated, see their bodies gradually develop into those of civilized people, while their spirits follow suit.”

While they sought to minister to both fathers and mothers, pediatric experts devoted far more attention to the latter. At a time when government officials, social reformers, educators, and others worked to institutionalize the “good wife, wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo) as the model to which women should conform, members of the Child Study Association (Jidō Kenkyūkai, established in 1898, later renamed Jidō Gakkai) offered popularized lectures and texts on juvenile physiology, psychology, and other child-related subjects including the prevention of delinquency. Experts' lectures attracted many women whom Takashima described as “making middle-class homes.” (Indeed, as Kathleen Uno notes, the model of a professional wife and mother would not have been practicable in lower-class households that relied on the income from women's fulltime work.)

By the second decade of the twentieth century, concerns about their children's prospects for educational success and social mobility in a fiercely competitive society led growing numbers of newmiddleclass parents, especially mothers (who were increasingly graduates of girls' high schools), to apply the advice they read in child-rearing manuals and newspaper advice columns.

Just as they played to families' status anxieties, child-study experts emphasized the public significance of their work for Japan's survival in a harsh international environment. As the Child Study Association's Matsumoto Kōjirō explained during the Russo-Japanese War: “The state does not consist of just the present generation; in order to ensure the future development of the state, the family must awaken to its responsibility. Although it may seem thoughtless to discuss the home during this time of war, I do so solely out of my desire to achieve the final national victory.” Or as Takashima, contrasting the declining “countries of the Orient” with the advancing “Anglo-Saxon races,” pointedly told a lecture audience in 1909: “In countries where civilization has not progressed, ignorant people abuse their children, deny them education, and view them as their personal possessions. In civilized countries, child protection activities are flourishing.” The government rewarded these experts with regular invitations to speak at venues such as the Home Ministry's Reform and Relief Seminars.

If society and the international arena were sites of struggle, so were the mind and body of the individual adolescent. Drawing heavily upon Hall's research, Takashima and his peers argued that adolescence (seinenki, seishun, or, more technically, sbunjō hatsudōki, the stage of sexual awakening), with its physiological and psychological changes, was a period of “storm and stress” which, if not weathered properly, could ruin one's entire life. Takashima offered a rich catalogue of adolescent traits, which seemed primarily to reflect the situation of affluent students, especially in middle schools. Adolescents had active imaginations; became easily agitated and were prone to fantasizing (which could lead to despair or skepticism); experienced numerous desires and passions; were impulsive, easily infatuated, and increasingly motivated by lust; agonized over the conflict between their fantasies and reality; developed strong interests in religion and philosophy; were potentially violent or aggressive; and were prone to hysteria and nervous exhaustion.

Adolescents had to be carefully and sympathetically guided in order to become able to guide themselves. Failure in this pedagogic enterprise, however, would signify a stunting or reversion of the evolutionary process, an inability to complete the transition from savagery to civilization. Such youths would remain, as an article in a leading education journal had put it in 1899, “barbarians with knowledge.” Japan's new educational institutions were no doubt creating environments conducive to a reconfiguration of young people's mentalities. However, experts' descriptions of adolescence clearly derived less from any empirical analysis of Japanese youths (although Takashima did work directly with a few families) than from the new experts' determination to make Japanese social reality conform to the logic of a global modernity that they, as cultural entrepreneurs and self-proclaimed arbiters of national progress, felt best suited to interpret.

While the “middle-class home” was the desired locus for leading children out of savagery, middle schools were supposed to be the central site for completing their transformation into civilized people. Yet to many critics, schools only fueled adolescent students' degenerate propensities. Not all writers used the delinquency issue to attack liberalism, constitutional theories that treated the emperor as a non-divine organ of the state, and ideas of popular sovereignty, as did Inspector Yamamoto, but many no doubt agreed with his view that imported educational models prioritized knowledge and the pursuit of selfish interests while neglecting the moral and spiritual education required by the Japanese people. 

Like the increasingly dysfunctional apprenticeship system, which had traditionally served to socialize commoner youths within a purportedly family-like environment, schooling for the male offspring of the elite and elite-aspiring classes had in critics' eyes been reduced to a cold cash relationship stripped of any moral bonds. Schools had become impersonal institutions and “the way of the teacher” had declined. Instructors were merely salaried employees whose jobs depended upon their ability to spout empty theories; some held jobs at several schools and had no time for their students' questions. Students, on the other hand, saw teachers as hirelings who existed to help them pass exams and proceed to the next stage of schooling; they felt no obligation toward their instructors, nor could they find in them models to emulate.

These criticisms reflected the changing conditions that governed postelementary education at the turn of the century. By this time, the state had consolidated a hierarchical system of institutions through which students had to pass successfully if they were to reach the apex, the higher schools and then the imperial universities that guaranteed graduates elite careers in government agencies or other professions. Within this hierarchy, middle schools became the key institutions for both selecting the handful of elites and breeding the broader middle class (whose members, engaging in a wide range of occupations, would form the “brain and skeleton” of society). 

For young people in a position to consider schooling beyond the compulsory elementary program, a middle-school education was the key to “success” in life. It was thus no wonder that one contributor to the journal Child Studies in 1906 found that 80 percent of middle-school students were concerned only with exams and credentials. The worst of these students, he wrote, were “frivolous, indolent” types, while another 10 percent of middle-school boys were actually or on the verge of becoming “degenerate.

A similar critique applied to girls' high schools. In 1899, Education Minister Kabayama Sukenori had explained that girls' high schools 

exist for the nourishment of good wives and wise mothers [by] nourishing a warm and chaste character and the most beautiful and elevated temperament … [as well as] furnish[ing] the knowledge of arts and crafts necessary for middle to upper class life.

As we have seen, however, popular songs and other texts reveal that many critics complained that girls treated the schools simply as a means to polish their “high collar” credentials, focusing more on preening, gossip, and romance than on the substance of being a proper modern woman; other writers complained that male teachers in girls' schools lacked proper qualifications and were of dubious moral integrity. In his 1914 study, Inspector Yamamoto also argued that the drive among less-affluent girls to attend girls' high schools and enter the middle class had left them vulnerable to numerous problems. Such girls had trouble finding marriage partners who satisfied their aspirations: they were too educated for men of their own status, but too lowly to qualify as spouses for the elite gentlemen they desired. Frustrated and prone to hysteria (another new subject of professional and popular interest), these young women took jobs as elementary school teachers, nurses, and office workers, positions in which they were vulnerable to seduction by delinquent youths and other lechers. Rather than go to secondary school, Yamamoto advised, these girls would be better off learning the skills appropriate for making homes of lower-middle class or inferior standing.”