Anne Walthall & Sabine Frühstück 
Child’s Play 
Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan

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Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues have propelled Japan into the center of a set of global conversations about the nature of children and how to raise them. Engaging both the history of children and childhood and the history of emotions, contributors to this volume track Japanese childhood through a number of historical scenarios. Such explorations—some from Japan’s early-modern past—are revealed through letters, diaries, memoirs, family and household records, and religious polemics about promising, rambunctious, sickly, happy, and dutiful youngsters.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations and Table

Acknowledgments


Introduction


PART ONE: Premodern Period

1. Nasty Boys or Obedient Children?: Childhood and Relative Autonomy in Medieval Japanese Monasteries

Or Porath

2. Growing Up Manly: Male Samurai Childhood in Late Edo-Era Tosa

Luke S. Roberts

3. For the Love of Children: Practice, Affect, and Subjectivities in Hirata Atsutane’s Household

Anne Walthall


PART TWO: Early Twentieth Century

4. Consumer Consumption for Children: Conceptions of Childhood in the Work of Taisho-Period Designers

Jinno Yuki

5. “Children in the Wind”: Reexamining the Golden Age of Childhood Film in Wartime Japan

Harald Salomon

6. Children and the Founding of Manchukuo: The Young Girl Ambassadors as Promoters of Friendship

Koresawa Hiroaki


PART THREE: Asia-Pacific War

7. Reversing the Gaze: The Construction of “Adulthood” in the Wartime Diaries of Japanese Children and Youth

Aaron William Moore

8. Outdoor Play in Wartime Japan

L. Halliday Piel

9. “ . . . And my heart screams”: Children and the War of Emotions

Sabine Fru¨hstu¨ck


PART FOUR: Contemporary Japan

10. From Grade Schooler to Great Star: Childhood Development and the “Golden Age” in the World of Japanese Soccer

Elise Edwards

11. Treatment and Intervention for Children with Developmental Disabilities

Junko Teruyama

12. Food, Affect, and Experiments in Care: Constituting a “Household-like” Child Welfare Institution in Japan

Kathryn E. Goldfarb

13. Monju-kun: Children’s Culture as Protest

Noriko Manabe


Contributors

Index

Über den Autor

Sabine Frühstück is Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her publications include Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan and Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army.  Anne Walthall is Professor Emerita of Japanese History at the University of California, Irvine. Her publications include The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration, and Japan: A Cultural, Social, and Political History.