Chair: W. Miles Fletcher III, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

During the 1930s and 1940s, intensive national mobilization in Japan stimulated the expansion of a new, modern space that Jacques Donzelot and others have termed the social: a realm in which work, family relationships, and other aspects of everyday life became increasingly subject to external forms of administration and discipline. Focusing on the relationship between social discipline and national mobilization, this panel offers new perspectives on the dynamics of power and authority in modern Japan. Eschewing a schema in which power flows unilaterally from state to society or from "ruling class" to "the people," the papers address the complex question of agency in the development of Japan’s wartime regime.

In her analysis of the activities of the Shuyôdan, Elyssa Faison elucidates the responses of factory managers and their allies to the challenges of disciplining female workers in the shifting conditions of the 1930s. Sumiko Otsubo’s analysis of the debates over eugenic legislation challenges common perceptions of the relationship between government officials and private experts in the formation of wartime social policy. David Ambaras explores the ways in which concern for juvenile delinquency and labor productivity led a broad group of actors to collaborate in the development of new socialization programs under the rubric of "lifestyle guidance." Together, the presenters argue that power in the Japanese polity must be understood as a multi-layered grid of agencies that acted upon each other as they sought to shape the social body and the contours of Japanese modernity.

Elyssa M. Faison, University of Minnesota

In 1906, Hasunuma Monzo formally established a civic-oriented youth association called the Shuyôdan, or Cultivation Group. During its first twenty years, this national organization used "discipline and brotherly love" to mold school-aged boys and young men into loyal imperial subjects dedicated to hard physical and spiritual work, and to a communitarian ideal of "service to the advancement of the imperial nation."

In the 1920s, social reformer and labor management specialist Uno Riemon championed the Shuyôdan as a perfect tool for the moral and physical training of young female factory workers. And by 1929—the year the legal prohibition on night-work in the country’s industrial factories went into effect—the Shuyôdan had begun to offer training courses for women and girls. In the textile industry, managers quickly made membership mandatory for their employees in order to mitigate union activism, promote efficiency, and reassert ideological control over the largely female work force. Factory workers, however, often resisted the cultivation groups’ middle-class values of moral purity and maternal domesticity, and expressed their resentment of the coercive nature of such disciplinary strategies in essays and letters submitted to union and women’s publications.

The deployment of cultivation groups in factories accorded with managerial drives to rationalize operations. As part of a broader trend of national mobilization that intensified throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Shuyôdan activities exemplified efforts to train and educate textile industry employees both as productive workers and as gendered national/imperial subjects—categories increasingly valued by the state as it slipped further into war.

Sumiko Otsubo, Creighton University

In 1939, Representative Yagi Itsurô introduced the fifth eugenic sterilization law plan to a lower house committee. In his emotional speech, Yagi asked the "state (seifu)" not to ridicule the Diet and not to trifle with bills prepared by parliamentary members. Originally a local family physician, Yagi had encountered people fearing that they were likely to produce "unfit" offspring. He thus felt the need for a law authorizing medical doctors to perform sterilizing operations for those who wanted them. In the aforementioned introduction, Yagi expressed his willingness to compromise and negotiate with the state, so that the state, which had been unenthusiastic about eugenic legislative efforts, would take the matter much more seriously.

This episode poses many questions concerning our common perceptions about the dynamics of state policy making and the fascist state. What did Yagi mean by the "state"? Diet records make it clear that he referred to the Ministry of Health and Welfare as the State. But wasn’t the Diet itself part of the government? Weren’t legislators supposed to make laws to be administered by bureaucrats? Wasn’t the state believed to be interventionist, eager to impose eugenic policies to improve the Yamato minzoku? Why did the seifu crush all the previous eugenic bills even after Nazi Germany passed its sterilization law in 1933? In order to answer these questions, I will examine the complex interrelationships among Diet members, officials, military leaders, and medical and legal experts who were involved in the enactment of the National Eugenics Law.

David R. Ambaras, North Carolina State University

During the 1930s and 1940s, as Japan mobilized for total war, authorities developed an extensive range of programs to prevent delinquency among male youths recruited to staff the nation’s munitions factories. Since the "discovery" of juvenile delinquency as a social problem at the turn of the century, reformers had argued that the proper training of youth was the key to creating a healthy modern society, administering human resources, and fortifying Japan’s position in a fiercely competitive international order. After 1937, many socialization projects assumed a stridently martial character that set them apart from earlier efforts. Yet wartime agencies, such as factory youth schools and the Industrial Patriotic Association’s Youth Brigades, continued to emphasize middle-class reformist programs for encouraging a proper work ethic, savings, life course planning, and hygiene.