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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
150575
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| Summary/Abstract |
Studies of childhood in Japan frequently neglect to engage with the texts and images that young people produced, focusing instead on the adult imagination of youth. By looking solely at adults’ conceptions, we miss the importance of other children in forming their peers’ subjectivity. By analyzing the diaries, letters, postcards, yosegaki, and artwork of evacuated children during World War II, this article shows how adults framed the process of language acquisition, but also that children contributed to the creation of a shared language for describing their experiences. When children combined language learning with group experience, which was inscribed through collective writing practices, evacuees came to embrace a strong group identity. Grasping the relationship between collective experience, life-writing, and children’s culture is crucial to understanding how children perceived their world. Apart from these methodological considerations, dismissing the documents left behind by evacuees as mere recapitulations of adult discourse does the history of childhood a great disservice.
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| 2 |
ID:
150572
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| Summary/Abstract |
Historical research on modern Japan has often given insufficient attention to the lives and experiences of children and young people. However, this situation is beginning to change, as historians start to exploit the rich documentary resources, including children’s diaries and letters, that have been collected by institutions across Japan. Japanese children’s responses to disaster and war are especially well documented, and the articles in this special issue begin to explore the potential of these resources. They illuminate different ideals of childhood in Japan during the years between 1920 and 1945, and show how tensions and conflicts between these ideals played out under the stresses of natural disaster and man-made catastrophe. In analysing documents written by children, one crucial methodological and theoretical question is how to assess the degree of agency that such documents show. Adult influences on children’s writing cannot be ignored, and in modern Japan, the education system was arguably the most important channel for such influences. However, we should remember that children also influence one another, and also that the writing of children is, as is of course the case with adults, powerfully shaped by contemporary cultural and social contexts.
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| 3 |
ID:
150576
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| Summary/Abstract |
During the Pacific War, Japanese boys and girls were increasingly pulled out of secondary school to help the war effort as factory and farm workers. Their labor-service hours kept increasing until, by January 1944, many students were working year-long shifts. This paper argues that secondary students had a sense of entitlement to education that went against the grain of their patriotic duty to the state as shōkokumin, or ‘little countrymen’. Their later memoirs support the postwar view of their labor as child abuse. However, their identity as adolescents came more from their status as students than from their age; before 1945 most Japanese left school and entered the workforce at age 14. This paper brings together evidence that has not been linked previously: (a) the voices of student workers in diaries and memoirs; (b) the disaggregation of wartime labor by age; and (c) the differential treatment of students in the workplace.
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| 4 |
ID:
150574
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| Summary/Abstract |
From the summer of 1944 to the autumn of 1945, Japan’s government evacuated over 400,000 urban primary school pupils. They were sent in the custody of their teachers to rural areas away from the increasing threat of air raids. The children lived and were schooled with classmates in Buddhist temples, inns, and other facilities. Officials couched the policy in terms of a training exercise, placating military and political opponents to the removal of children from their families. Furthermore, the government offered images of nurturing teachers as surrogate guardians to assuage parental concerns. Local environments strongly influenced how comfortable or severe living conditions were, but food supplies dwindled throughout Japan. Evacuees largely avoided air raids but experienced health problems from insufficient nutrition and crowded residential quarters. This article explores the ideological underpinnings and implementation of Japan’s wartime school evacuation, finding evidence of contradictory principles, unauthorized motives, and illicit improvisations.
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| 5 |
ID:
150577
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article I aim to contribute to the discussion of Murakami Haruki’s significant role as a cultural mediator by examining his role as a translator with a focus on his attempts to explore cross-cultural effects. The discussion includes Murakami’s use of translation to experiment with language and to create his own writing style, his attitude towards his own translators, and the impact of his translation activity on his fiction writing.
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| 6 |
ID:
150573
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| Summary/Abstract |
Tokyo’s school children began writing essays about the Great Kantō Earthquake within weeks of the disaster as a simple pedagogical exercise. These remarkable accounts provide a panoramic view into children’s first-hand experiences of Japan’s worst natural disaster and daily life in the aftermath. Their usefulness, however, does not end there. In the period following the 1923 earthquake, children possessed a new and different utility to the state as the future generation to be listened to, learned from, and inspired by. Children’s essays struck a fine balance between reflecting on the past and dreaming of a better future. Moreover, they were ideal role models of resilience in an era of spiritual and physical reconstruction. Their promises to study hard, save money, and reconstruct Tokyo ‘even better than before’ represented exactly the kind of values that government officials wanted to cultivate in 1920s Japan.
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