Historical Interrogations of Japanese Children amid Disaster and War, 1920–1945

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.

Notes

¹ Sakaguchi, ‘Shōgakusei nikki’ (Sakaguchi writes in it from 1941), blank diary, 1939, introduction. Emphasis is in the original.

² Uno, Passages to Modernity; Ambaras, Bad Youth; Jones, Children as Treasures; Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan; Roden, Schooldays in Imperial Japan; Tsurumi, Factory Girls.

³ Tamanoi, Under the Shadow; Shamoon, Passionate Friendship; Yamashita, Daily Life in Wartime Japan.

⁴ Orbaugh, Propaganda Performed.

⁵ Ambaras, Bad Youth.

⁶ The volumes were overseen by a seven-person editorial committee. Volumes 5 (Naka, Fukoku kyōhei-ka no kodomo) and 6 (Kami, Gekidōki no kodomo) deal with modern Japan between 1868 and 1945.

⁷ Inagaki, Jogakkō to jogakusei; Saitō, Gakkō bunka no shi-teki kenkyū; on print media, see Kuwahara, Akai tori no jidai; Kuwahara, Shōnen kurabu no koro; Imada, ‘Shōjo’ no shakaishi; on labour and women, see Yamamoto, Aa Nomugi toge; Kagami, Yuki ni umoreta kinu no michi.

⁸ Hamana, ‘“Jochū” no hen’yō’; Shimizu, ‘Jochū’ imēji; Koizumi, Jochū ga ita Shōwa.

⁹ Ambaras, ‘Social Knowledge’; Young, Beyond the Metropolis.

¹⁰ Nihon Senbotsu Gakusei Shuki Henshū Iinkai, Kike wadatsumi no koe.

¹¹ Fukuhara, untitled memoir, 184.

¹² Zenkoku Sokai Gakudō Renraku Kyōgikai, Gakudō sokai no kiroku; Shinagawa-ku Rekishikan, Shinagawa no gakudō shūdan sokai; Akazuka, Ōsaka no gakudō sokai.

¹³ Jones, Children as Treasures, 4.

¹⁴ Here, we use ‘superior student’ to denote not just an identity confined to an urban elite or semi-elite, but the notion of a student seeking educational achievement for the sake of individual (and family) social and/or economic advancement (the student may simultaneously seek educational achievement for the sake of the good of the nation). In our understanding, this focus on private advancement is what differentiates the notion of the ‘superior student’ from that of the ‘little citizen’, who is wholly dedicated to national advancement.

¹⁵ Terasaki and Senjika Kyōiku Kenkyūkai, Sōryokusen taisei, 108‒112.

¹⁶ Jones, Children as Treasures, 241.

¹⁷ Analysis of the Ministry of Education’s Annual Reports (Monbushō nenpō) indicates that the rough proportion of primary school graduates who went on to selective secondary education (including middle schools, girls’ high schools, and the various types of vocational school) rose from 21% in 1935 to 30% in 1940. These figures are subject to the caveat that it is not possible to know exact proportions, since it was possible to enter selective secondary schools a year or more after graduating from primary school, and a few entrants (exact proportions unknown) did so. Nonetheless, the overall picture is clear.

¹⁸ Okada, Tōkyō furitsu chūgakkō, 20–23.

¹⁹ On the removal of ‘economically worthless’ children from the labour force and the ‘sacralisation’ of childhood in the nineteenth century, see Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child. In Japan, as Jones points out in Children as Treasures, this trend came later (as did its industrialization), but with similar force as ‘child-like children’ became a preoccupation of the middle class. For general methodological approaches, see: James et al., Theorizing Childhood, Heywood, A History of Childhood, and Stearns, Growing Up.

²⁰ Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations, 264‒74. On youth opposition to adult authorities on the factory floor, including sabotage and strike actions, see Saitō, Tōkyō-to gakuto kinrō dōin, 340‒48.

²¹ Interview with Mr N., born Saitama prefecture, 1928, on 11 February 2013.

²² Ashida, Ashida Enosuke sensei senshū, 647–854; Noji, ‘Gakudō shochū kyūka nisshi’. Cuore, a fictional child’s diary, fused narratives of personal development to national unification, which proved popular in Chinese translation as well. See Moore, ‘Growing up in Nationalist China’, 12–13.

²³ Private diaries include those by the 12-year-old child (and future novelist) Akutagawa Ryūnosuke in 1904, see Noji, “Gakudō shochū kyūka nisshi”, 22–23; and higher primary student Ōnishi Goichi in 1911–12, see Ōnishi, Namaiki shōnen nikki. Assignments include the 1916 diary of Aichi girls’ high school student Kanae (family name unknown), see Yamashita and Takada, ‘Aichi-kenritsu dai-ichi jogakkō jikkasei no “nisshi”’.

²⁴ Namekawa, Nihon sakubun tsuzurikata kyōikushi 2 and 3; Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 13–69.

²⁵ Maynes, ‘Age as a Category of Historical Analysis’, 116.

²⁶ For example, see Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms; Yamashita, Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies; Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries.

²⁷ Figal, ‘How to jibunshi’.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was part of the project ‘ Remembering and Recording Childhood, Education, and Youth in Imperial Japan, 1925–1945,’ supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) research grant AH/J004618/1.