Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

Abstract

Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth-Century Japan Mark A. Jones Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. Contents, notes, works cited, index. 407 pp. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780674053342In the last decade, scholars in a range of fields have explored the rich child-centered world of contemporary Japanese consumer culture. Works like Anne Allison's Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2005) and Joseph Tobin's edited collection, Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon (2004), have illustrated the ways contemporary Japanese children live in a world full of imaginative playthings linked to powerful currents of national culture and global commerce. Scholars know much less, however, about the origins of one of the world's most influential play cultures. We also understand little about how Japanese children's pervasive popular culture conflicts with an apparent national obsession with entrance examinations and juku (cram schools). Mark A. Jones's ambitious Children as Treasures provides a welcome history of childhood in Japan in the first decades of the twentieth century. Jones embeds his examination of childraising practices within a complicated background of changing class identities, arguing that the "rearing of children became the defining emblem of middleclass identity in early twentieth-century Japan" (p. 2).There are really two stories in Children as Treasures-one about the shaping of a middle class in early twentieth-century Japan and the other about emerging popular and intellectual conceptions of childhood-and Jones deftly weaves the two together. The book is also divided chronologically between a first half on the late Meiji period (1880s to 1912) and a second half on the Taisho period (1912 to 1926), which preceded the authoritarian militarism of the early Showa period. During the late Meiji era, established elites fashioned a vision of the middle class as the social foundation for a national community rooted in morality rather than materialism, reflecting anxieties about rapid growth in urban spaces and materialist desires. In this context, the image of the ryosai kenbo, the "good wife, wise mother," was charged with shaping a generation of shokokumin, or "little citizens," who were "morally virtuous and physically vigorous, a symbol of a sound family, a sturdy middle class, and a strong nation" (p. 147). The later Taisho era witnessed the expansion of an education system that provided new opportunities for social mobility as well as the growth of a mass media catering to middle-class aspirants, which resulted in new pressures that reshaped both the image of the middle class and that of the ideal child. Through the 1920s, two visions of childhood competed for the attention of parents: the yutosei, or the "superior student," and the kodomorashii kodomo, or the "childlike child." By the end of the Taisho era, the image of the yutosei-a disciplined child who constantly prepared, both in school and after in juku, for rigorous entrance exams-emerged triumphant, valued because of its role in nationalist education and the opportunities schooling afforded for climbing the social ladder in a period of expanded social mobility. …