Organizer and Chair: Gerald LeTendre, Pennsylvania State University

Discussants: Mary C. Brinton, Harvard University; Nancy E Sato, Independent Researcher

Following the American occupation and throughout Japan’s subsequent dramatic economic expansion, rapid changes (demographic shifts in the population age, percent of women working, the stratification of the education system; increasing attention to students from ethnically diverse, returnee, or foreign students) have come to prominent attention in the post-bubble era. The papers in this session address how youth have responded to postwar changes in the family and the state, especially shifting ideas of gender, opportunity, and adulthood. In the context of increasing evidence of youth disenchantment with postwar social institutions, the government has responded in a number of ways, most visibly in promoting educational reform. The papers in this panel explore the dynamic between shifting values and ambitions among Japan’s youth and institutional policy. The panel seeks to articulate important lines of social science research on adolescents and institutions in the 21st century that can address major issues facing Japan and better inform policy makers. The papers give significant attention to adolescent girls and how these changes will impact their future lives. The ethnographic and survey data represented all convey a restiveness on the part of young women, who seek to question regimentation and hierarchy as well as the overarching gender segregation that has characterized Japanese society and schools. Yet policy change often has unintended consequences, and women’s own challenges are often couched in ambivalence about stepping outside of prescribed directions. The panel is unusual in its exploration of both individuals on the ground and macro-level policy responses.

Ayumi Miyazaki, University of California, Berkeley Center for Japanese Studies

I analyze Japanese junior high school girls’ relationally bounded identity negotiations through examining girls shifting linguistic and social practices with their peer groups in the cultural space of gakkyuu, a fundamental unit of Japanese schools. The late 1990, when I started my longitudinal ethnography, marked a turning point for the educational system and the gendered norms of Japan. The gakkyuu composed of up to forty students who undertake many group activities together throughout the day is now under siege, as students resistance to the system of group-centered gakkyuu has intensified all over Japan. The Japanese gendered language norms have also faced increasing challenges from the younger generations.

Within this changing configuration of power relations in Japan, the Japanese girls at my field site, through tactically shifting the feminine, neutral, and masculine spectrum of their speech, negotiated their identity with their peer groups under strong pressure from the gakkyuu system to conform to the group and to use gender-proper language. For this presentation, I analyze how seventeen girls in a seventh-grade gakkyuu experienced a major regrouping of peer groups, forcing them to negotiate vigorously and shift dynamically their linguistic and social practices according to their changing peer-group relationships. The deep interrelationship of individuals and groups apparent in these girls shifting practices challenge "Western "assumptions about the primacy of the individual and the boundedness and fixity of personal identity, as Kondo (1990) explains, and illuminate the dynamic picture of identity practice as relationally and inter-subjectively defined.

Amy Borovoy, Princeton University

The paper explores the ambivalent attitudes towards the gendered body, maternalism, and the middle-class success story of the housewife that dominated the years of postwar economic prosperity. Japanese education fully endorsed and produced this trajectory, with its rigid forms of gender socialization and gender segregation: girls and boys are called separately in role call (boys before girls), wear separate-colored clothing and accessories, and often socialize separately. Discourse on sex and sexuality (in the context of sex education and domestic education) has described the physical changes that accompany maturity as precursors to motherhood. And yet young women are increasingly questioning these connections, and drawn towards the exploration of sexuality as independent from adulthood and motherhood. Drawing on two surveys of junior high school and high school young women, and a series of interviews with college students, the paper considers the ambivalence of these young women towards conventional definitions of maturity. Young women often express interest in earning money (not being "dependent" on their husbands") and developing themselves professionally, but these same women insist on the importance of being with a newborn child for the first years of life. Many aspire to share duties in the home and to have a partnership, and yet they continue to see the ideal partner as a matter of pragmatism rather than romantic idealism. The paper explores these shifts and the responses they have engendered among school counselors and those interested in promoting gender equal education, considering both the bold steps and the limits of changes taking place.

Gerald LeTendre, Pennsylvania State University

Japanese teachers have typically acted as mentors, counselors and role-models for students, but little work has been done on how female teachers, specifically, view their roles.  Using interview and survey data from the Trends in International Math and Science Study databases, this paper examines how major policy shifts between 1995 have affected female teachers’ ability to act as mentors or role-models for adolescent girls. In 1995, teachers voiced significant concerns about their ability to maintain "human relations" with students given the new schedules demanded of them. Between 1995 and 2005, the Ministry of education actually decreased the school week, yet teacher workloads increased by nearly an hour per week. Although the reforms were designed to increase free-time, the results appear to have actually increased structure and regimentation.  Past studies have linked such "top down" control with less teacher-student bonding and a decrease in democratic participation in the classroom. One first-year teacher described the changes she had personally witnessed:

"….. It is strange to say, but the level was higher, the school I went to. All the students went on to some college. So, the amount of freedom was just at the right level. We were free, but we had responsibility.… At that kind of school you can, we had the power to make decisions. So if I compare myself to these students: 'This is bad, that is bad, those are bad too,' who are pressed down by all these rules, I think they are a bit pitiful. "