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Andrea J. Horbinski ([personal profile] ahorbinski) wrote2014-03-22 12:00 pm

Book review: Bad Youth

Bibliographic Data: Ambaras, David Richard. Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Main Argument:
If delinquency symbolized the dangers of uncontrolled social change and the defects of existing social arrangements, champions of juvenile reform and juvenile protection envisioned an orderly, productive Japan that could master the challenges of the modern era, from industrialization to imperialist expansion to total war. The ideas of these reformers, and the thick, intrusive network of socialization agencies that they constructed, have to this day played a critical role in shaping Japanese experiences of home, school, work, and play, and in fostering the culture of discipline and social vigilance for which contemporary Japan is internationally known. (2)

Historiographical Engagement: Lots of sociologists and Japanese historians

Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Ambaras argues that "juvenile delinquency" is not an objective social fact "but a phenomenon constructed through particular modes of representation, analysis, and treatment in relation to power structures that emerged in the modern era" (2). He contends that delinquency became a meaningful category only after conformity and a yardstick against which to measure it became important in the modern era, and to prevent delinquency, "the state and its allies endeavored not simply to bolster existing social structures but to radically transform social relationships and reconfigure social space" (4). Middle class reformers who were familiar with the "transnational disciplines of social work, education, penology, criminal justice, labor management, psychology, and medicine" played a key role in these efforts, both from inside and from without the government, and "they shared a desire to create a Japan free from the dislocations, alienation, and moral confusion they saw afflicting modern industrial society" (4, 5). Ambaras also argues that total war was "a catalyst for enduring changes in the position of youth and the structures of social discipline in Japan" (7). Specifically, wartime practices in their continuation facilitated postwar Japan's rapid economic growth as well as its formation as a society "mobilized to 'protect' young people and defend against delinquent behavior" (ibid). Notably, until total war mobilization, delinquency was characterized as an urban problem, and Ambaras focuses specifically on Tokyo, which "most starkly symbolized Japanese metropolitan modernity in its various manifestations" (8).

Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the antecedents of "juvenile delinquency" in the Tokugawa period and argues that "young people's misbehavior challenged the state's efforts to contain the populace within a complex of status organizations, each with clearly defined responsibilities and internal hierarchies" (9). With each successive challenge presented by these figures--from their struggles with a peacetime and nationally integrated labor market in the early Tokugawa era to those bought by increasing class stratification within the status system, which eventually brought it near to total unmooring by the bakumatsu period--"the state's response centered on bolstering the legal, institutional, and ideological underpinnings of the status system" (10).

Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the construction of social problems as symbolized and as part of the perceived emergence of a new class of social delinquents, who were symbolized by beggar children of the Tokyo slums but who, for the middle-class reformers bent on "civilizing" them, principally through education, in fact constituted a much larger category: "the lower classes of unskilled, casual laborers and others who, living in squalor and reproducing uncontrollably, threatened to infect society with the 'virus' of crime and barbarity" (31). For these reformers, "these children had to be rescued from their environments, and those environments themselves had to be reformed so that the lower classes could be assimilated into the industrial capitalist economy, the nation-state, and the empire" (ibid). The reformers' response, both in the form of studies and of institutions, "invariably affirmed the desirability and superiority of middle-class norms of hygiene, diligence, frugality, domesticity, and temperance" (63)--an affirmation designed to situate them as the arbiters of progress and health. Thus, the lower classes appeared as ethnographic subjects in a framework that was more or less a colonial mentality, and "the construction of social problems in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century thus signals the country's integration in a global network of power and knowledge organized around multiple imperial and industrial centers" (ibid). Institutions, which never fully closed the cultural and economic gap between classes, were constructed around an ideal tripartite social world of home, school, and work, a world that did not have the same appeal for the lower classes as it did for the middle.

Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the "problem" of elite youth, which as it emerged at the turn of the C20, "reflected reformers' concerns that the nation's future leaders were at risk and that its social institutions were still too fragile to meet the challenges of modern military and economic competition" (66-67). Opinions about the causes tended to credit either the problems of modern society or the developmental nature of the (newly constructed discourse of) childhood itself, and since these students represented the cream of the elite, keeping them away from "the unauthorized popular cultural opportunities and alternative traditions of youth to which they notheless had access, and molding them into future pillars of modern society, lay at the core of the mission to civilize the student body" (68). The answer to this problem lay in determining "not only the moral and intellectual content of modern education but also the practical techniques of school administration required to concentrate students' energies on their prescribed missions," as well as deciding who should have access to education and how much of it--in other words how to reproduce the "respectable classes" as a bloc (95). The answer involved surveillance of students at school and the "reconstitution of class-based standards of domesticity" and "the empowerment of new forms of professional knowledge in society at large"--i.e. experts on childhood (ibid). Thus began the mobilization of Japanese women as mothers to discipline their children into the discourse of respectability.

Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the development of social work programs and institutions--juvenile protection programs--as well as the people who participated in them and who "often went beyond individual delinquents to subject families, workplaces, and other aspects of everyday life to external administration" (98). The development of this interventionist system was fueled not only by the marked increase in the number of young people in urban areas, but also by "fears of disorder" and "also by new civic ideologies," particularly European ideas of "social solidarity" which argued that "each member of society had an obligation to contribute to the progress of the whole and to maintain its most disadvantaged members," with the happy result that they would then contribute to overall productivity (100). In Ambaras' view, juvenile protection formed part of the 'small d' in the sense of "popular" in the imperial/Taishô democracy period: "people's increasing participation in various agencies…that determined the shape of their lives and the life of the nation" (128). At the same time, however, it is important to note that reformers were often unable to affect the structural realities that contributed to or even reproduced "juvenile delinquency," and the "scientific" casework approach often obfuscated the systemic nature of underlying causes of individual delinquency. To be blunt, the Home Ministry did not want to spend money uplifting the poor, and alleged beneficiaries of these programs themselves unevenly bought in to the premises of the programs. Conveniently, however, the lack of final success in resolving these issues authorized continued and even more vigorous efforts.

Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at reformers' efforts to discipline and direct youth work and youth play--or more precisely, to train young people for the former and to restrict their access to the latter, particularly the flashy, honky-tonk demimonde of Asakusa and the glitz and glitter of Ginza. These efforts took two main tracks: "vocational guidance" programs designed to ease the transition from school to work, and the openly violent police disciplinary actions "against youthful behavior that contravened dominant notions of work, morality, and gender," part of the role of "the people's nursemaids" that the police had adopted for themselves since the Meiji era (131). Thus, police campaigns against youth culture accelerated in the interwar era, when all that was solid melted into air, urban modernity entered a new, destabilizing phase, and national crises (namely involvement on the Asian continent) required ever more "reinforcement of behavioral norms linking modernity to self-discipline and sacrifice in the name of nation and empire" (164). By the late 1930s, despite the desire to hold only Japan's modern times, these campaigns had succeeded in repressing the most flamboyant expressions of them among young people. Furthermore, despite the attention that the cafe waitress received, it was in fact young men who remained the focus of reformers' attention, even as the "increasing reliance on such heavy-handed approaches only underscored the persistent shortcomings of reformers' efforts to construct a comprehensive system of socialization and protection" (ibid).

Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at wartime programs to manage working youths, who as a social group "occupied a central position, along with spies and thought-criminals, in the regime's schema of internal threats" (166). In many respects the programs evolved to deal with this threat were merely the continuation of the ideas first conceptualized in mid-Meiji.
But total war, by expanding the size of the "precocious" working element and the urban space that bred it, and by imbuing the rhetoric of national struggle with a concreteness and immediacy that it earlier had lacked, gave these strategies grater salience and practical force–as did the fact that they were now applied by a state intent on establishing "a structure of national unanimity in politics, economy, culture, education, and all other realms of national life." In a word, the nation at arms was also a national reformatory. (167)
In another word, this national reformatory was focused on nothing so much as "becoming Japanese," which "involved the acceptance not simply of nativist and martial ideologies but also of middle-class values and habits," which should sound familiar to students of postwar Japan and which also had its parallels in the kôminka and kyôwa programs directed at Korean and Taiwanese imperial subjects during these years (190). Although the politics of everyday life enabled some degree of resistance to wartime policies in general, the over-determined character of these programs--and the fact that there was never just one program, but instead, all acted within a totality of more of the same--in many ways made anything but some level of consensus impossible, if nothing else through the surveillance programs that total war authorized. Indeed, for officials, "national mobilization was…a long-term process that neither began nor ended with the military conflict; indeed, it was the most crucial element in the organization of a modern polity" (191). Ambaras goes so far as to argue that the most long-lasting legacy of this mobilization was the standardization of lifeways across the archipelago.

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Ambaras summarizes the regime of socialization through 1945 as "premised on the notion that every aspect of a young person's life should be rendered visible and subject to intensive guidance" (192). Although the exact nature of these programs evolved over time until 1945, they remained remarkably ideologically consistent: "preventing delinquency was above all a matter of cultivating and allocating human resources across class and gender categories, and thus of promoting national efficiency" (193). In Ambaras' view, many of these pre-1945 programs were reconstructed and expanded after the war, with the result that "discourses on juvenile delinquency continue to figure prominently in efforts to organize class, status, gender, national, and racial identities in Japan" (197-98). Recent panics over misbehaving adolescents merely recapitulate earlier panics, lending credence to Ambaras' assertion that "it is the overwrought anxiety concerning delinquency and the persistent efforts to mobilize society to prevent it that have characterized the century-long project to create ideal subjects in modern Japan" (198).

Critical assessment: This is a well-written, thoughtful study that does what it says on the tin and illuminates one of the most pervasive aspects of modern Japanese society very effectively along the way. I am also very grateful for Ambaras' attempts to recover the politics of everyday life and the reactions of those subjects of these regimes to their workings, even if the evidence is sparse in some respects and he cannot offer a fully polyvocal history.

Further reading: Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense; Kingsberg, Moral Nation; Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales; Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire