Juvenile Delinquency in Japan: Reconsidering the

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY IN JAPAN BRILL’S JAPANESE STUDIES LIBRARY edited by H. BOLITHO AND K.W. RADTKE VOLUME 18 JUVE...

Author: Gesine Foljanty-Jost

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JUVENILE DELINQUENCY IN JAPAN

BRILL’S JAPANESE STUDIES LIBRARY edited by H. BOLITHO AND K.W. RADTKE

VOLUME 18

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY IN JAPAN Reconsidering the “Crisis” EDITED BY

GESINE FOLJANTY-JOST

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2003

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Juvenile delinquency in Japan : reconsidering the “crisis” / edited by Gesine Foljanty-Jost. p. cm. – (Brill’s Japanese studies library, ISSN 0925-6512 ; v. 18) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-13253-8 (alk. paper) 1. Juvenile delinquency—Japan. 2. Juvenile delinquency—Japan—Prevention. I. Foljanty-Jost, Gesine. II. Series. HV9207.A5I88 2003 364.36’0952–dc21 2003052253

ISSN 0925-6512 ISBN 90 04 13253 8 © Copyright 2003 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS

Introduction ...................................................................................... Gesine Foljanty-Jost

vii

Juvenile Delinquency in Japan—Reconsidering the “Crisis”......... Gesine Foljanty-Jost/Manuel Metzler

1

The “Japanese Triangle” for Preventing Adolescent Delinquency—Strengths and Weaknesses of the Family-School Adolescent Relationship from a Comparative Perspective............. Toyama-Bialke, Chisaki Youth in Crisis: Public Perceptions and Discourse on Deviance and Juvenile Problem Behavior in Japan........................................ Annette Erbe Changes in Values and Life Orientation among Japanese Youth... Kadowaki, Atsushi Changes in School Environment and Deviancy—A Survey Analysis and an Intervention Program for Schools......................... Taki, Mitsuru Repression of Deviancy as a Reason for New Deviancy................ Tokuoka, Hideo Inequality in Family Background as a Reason for Juvenile Delinquency...................................................................................... Yonekawa, Shigenobu Youth Deviant Behaviour, Conflict, and Later Consequences: Comparison of Working and Middle Class Communities in Japan ............................................................................................. Robert S. Yoder The Reform of the Japanese Education System as an Answer to Delinquency...................................................................................... Fujita, Hidenori

19

51 75

91 103

115

129

143

vi

CONTENTS

The Debate about the Reform of the Juvenile Law in Japan ......... Christian Schwarzenegger

173

Counseling Systems as a Means of Preventing Delinquency ......... Nakano, Yoshiaki

199

The Revival of Local Networks for Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency...................................................................................... Minei, Masaya

211

The Juvenile Training Schools of Japan—Teaching Young Serious Offenders How to Live and “How to Be”.......................... Anne Metzler

221

Problem Behavior and Social Control in Japan’s Junior High Schools.............................................................................................. Manuel Metzler/Gesine Foljanty-Jost

253

List of Contributors ..........................................................................

267

Index .................................................................................................

269

INTRODUCTION Gesine Foljanty-Jost Juvenile violence was one of the most urgent problems in many countries during the nineties. While in Germany it was violence against people of a non-German cultural background that caused deep concern in society, in the US the public became alarmed by news about weapons at schools. In Great Britain the appearance of hooligans during football games was an issue of public debate and even in Japan, which is known for its well-integrated youth, an increase in bullying and violence at schools was reported. This volume presents an inside view of the Japanese debate carried out by prominent Japanese social scientists on issues involving sociology, psychology, and education. Articles written by experts from Germany and Switzerland supplement this debate, offering an outside perspective. All the articles present research results on the causes of juvenile delinquency in Japan during the nineties and discuss aspects of how Japanese society deals with the problem behavior of its youth. The introductory article by Gesine FOLJANTY-J OST and Manuel M ETZLER demonstrates that, especially in comparison to Germany, the problem of violence in Japanese schools seems to be highly overestimated within Japanese public opinion. They stress that, contrary to what the mass media suggests, problem behavior among young people is not a new phenomenon; that young Japanese junior high schools have not become more brutal and that the number of violent cases is about 10 times lower than in Germany. Chisaki TOYAMA -BIALKE offers an explanation for the low deviancy rate in Japan, suggesting that the low crime rate is linked with Japanese behavior towards children. According to her, education and socialization in Japan is characterized by emotional bonds in human relations in which adult norms and values are transmitted to youngsters. Young people strive to conform to adult norms and values so intensely that they are acutely sensitive to any kind of deviancy. The next article, “Public Perceptions and Discourse on Deviance and Juvenile Problem Behavior” by Annette E RBE , shares this view. Erbe’s analysis supports the view of FOLJANTY-J OST and METZLER

viii


that general, deep concern among the public in regard to juvenile deviancy is often unrelated to statistical ups and downs. She concludes that the theme of youth in crisis seems to lend itself to emphasizing and legitimizing all sorts of otherwise contested claims. The contributions of Hideo TOKUOKA, Shigenobu YONEKAWA and Robert S. YODER all deal with the background of juvenile problem behavior. They share the view that society and conditions in the living environment are the main reasons for delinquency. TOKUOKA employs the term moral panic, coined by Stanley Cohen, to circumscribe his view that juvenile delinquency in Japan is the mere result of labeling young people as deviant, enforcing control and thereby provoking new waves of delinquency. Y ODER also supports this theory that delinquency results from the labeling of juveniles as delinquent. He presents his ethnographic fieldwork on deviant youth behavior and two follow-up studies in two suburbs of Tokyo. By applying conflict-labeling theory, he argues that juveniles in working-class communities, unlike those in middle-class communities, are confronted with stringent and stigmatized delinquent controls that pave the way for social reproduction of class when these youngsters become young adults. Similarly, YONEKAWA argues that social inequality is one important reason that young people become delinquent. He demonstrates that out of all offenders of juvenile law, a higher than average proportion are young people with low educational performance, with parents of low educational background and low educational aspirations. They are the young people who do not have good job prospects and tend to drop out of school. By applying anomie theory, YONEKAWA is not far from TOKUOKA and YODER, who argue that both the reaction of society and the unequal opportunities that society offers young people are reasons for juvenile delinquency, even though all of them agree that the rate of incidence is not alarming. With this view, they differ from Atsushi KADOWAKI and Mitsuru TAKI, who claim that a lack of social competence on the part of young students is responsible for their becoming deviant. KADOWAKI bases his argument on three surveys of value change among Japanese juveniles between 1976 and 2000. He demonstrates that the so-called apathetic type as well as the non-confrontational type is increasing among young people in Japan. He stresses that apathy and resignation characterize interpersonal relationships among the young generation.

INTRODUCTION

ix

His view that Japanese young people lack social competence is shared by TAKI, who presents the results of case studies that show that children in Japan have changed in that they are less concerned with others. His data show that children feel intensive stress through personal interaction with others, especially with peers. Since he demonstrates a strong correlation between stress, the stressor and problem behavior, he presents the Japanese Peers Support Program as a means of helping children to develop social abilities in order to avoid deviant behavior. The goal of this program is to compensate for missing experiences with peer groups by offering “skills training” and by reconstructing traditional Japanese activities for children to offer the children a sense of the effectiveness of such interaction with peers. The articles by Christian SCHWARZENEGGER , Hidenori F UJITA , Yoshiaki NAKANO, Masaya M INEI , Anne M ETZLER , and the one by Manuel METZLER and Gesine FOLJANTY-JOST deal with the reaction to and prevention of juvenile deviant behavior. SCHWARZENEGGER discusses the legal reactions to juvenile delinquency. He argues that although the rhetoric of Japanese juvenile law has become stricter, its general approach remains what it was before: reintegrative and unreliant on punishment only. FUJITA discusses in his paper the implications of recent educational reforms aimed at the prevention of deviancy. He offers a critical evaluation of the reforms with regard to their ability to respond to the so-called “disruption of classes”. He agrees with FOLJANTYJOST/METZLER and E RBE that problem behavior in Japan is overestimated and functionalized for other ends and purposes, even by policymakers. He calls for genuine reform of school education with the participation of the local community and families. NAKANO and MINEI also refer to education reform and discuss perspectives on the prevention of juvenile deviancy in the future. NAKANO introduces prevention programs already in operation in some local communities in Tokyo that explicitly rely on cooperation between schools, parents and the local community, even though the school as a “caring community” continues to play the most important role in education and therapy. MINEI shares the view that the local cooperation of parents, schools and the community is the most important aspect toward the creation of deviancy-free schools. He reports on the experiences of a newly created “Educational Conference” in Kawasaki City, which brings to-

x


gether various members of the local community for educational engagement. Anne METZLER supplements the contributions on prevention with an article on reintegration practices for juvenile delinquents through re-education. She describes the reintegration procedures as harsh and rigid, but she makes clear that the efficiency of the system is undeniable: the number of those youngsters who return to delinquency after re-education is remarkably low. In the final article, M. METZLER and FOLJANTY-JOST present partial results of the Halle research project on deviancy and conformity among Japanese junior high school students. They point out that the intense and broad scope of control over and correction measures for juvenile behavior are typical of prevention activities at Japanese schools, and this is largely unrelated to the degree of deviancy that takes place. They argue that the high sensitivity towards any kind of rule-breaking in Japanese society paves the way for legitimizing all sorts of control at a very early stage, that is, long before violence or other forms of severe deviancy take place. High sensitivity therefore might be considered a kind of prevention strategy in itself and could explain low rates of delinquency. All contributions to the volume were subject to a broad GermanJapanese debate during the third symposium on juvenile delinquency in both countries held from June 7 to 9, 2001 at the Institute for Japanese Studies at Martin Luther University in Halle. The symposium and the preparation of this volume have both been generously supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, to which we feel deeply indebted. Annette Erbe helped with the editing work, and Simone Barth did a lot of coordinating. Thanks to both of them. Japanese terms have been transcribed using the Hepburn system with lengthened vowels indicated by a circumflex. Japanese personal names have been given in the Japanese order of family name followed by personal name. In order to make this more clearly; the family names of all contributors to this volume have been rendered in uppercase letters.

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY IN JAPAN: RECONSIDERING THE “CRISIS” Gesine Foljanty-Jost and Manuel Metzler Since the mid-1990s Japanese society has become deeply concerned about the situation at schools, namely deviancy and delinquency among students following a number of horrific cases of violence against teachers and classmates. The mass media, social scientists and state officials have cited these tendencies: 1. A dramatic increase in juvenile crime 2. An increase in homicide and other forms of violence including bullying both inside and outside of schools 3. An increase in juveniles who explosively become violent without clear motivation (kireru) 4. An increase in juvenile drug abuse In order to describe the general situation at schools the term gakkyû hôkai or the “disruption of classes” has been created, indicating that juvenile deviancy has developed a new feature compared with previous years. The term implies that beyond violence and crime, a general breakdown of class discipline, a loss of values, and a lack of social competence are ruling daily life in schools. The description of the situation indicates that we have to deal with two areas of problem behavior that are usually discussed separately: juvenile crime, which we will refer to as delinquency, and problem behavior at schools without juridical consequences, which we will refer to as deviancy. Both are integrated in public discourse because the increasing problem behavior at schools may indicate rising juvenile criminal offenses in the future. The Japanese discussion of the matter indicates that in the case of juvenile crime, a significant relationship can be drawn between low academic performance, low socio-economic background and problem behavior (see Yonekawa in this volume). In the cases of juveniles becoming deviant at school, it has been stressed that most of them have a “sound” family background, which means that they live with

2

GESINE FOLJANTY-JOST/MANUEL METZLER

both parents, of whom at least one earns money (Hayami 1989: 109–128, Mori 1999: 60–64). Taki has furthermore stressed that since the 1970s, problem behavior and delinquency of young students has become an individual act that is no longer integrated with group activism. In contrast to previous years, no specific motivation for becoming violent can be identified; students are mostly reacting spontaneously and only in their own individual interest. Becoming violent is no longer in any case related to low academic performance, as students with high scores become violent as well (Taki 1998). In cases of frustration, they react explosively (kireru) without any sensitivity towards other people and without any signs of warning. Taki argues that kids reach a point where they cannot tolerate frustration, and they lack the social competence to deal with conflicts or frustration (Taki in this volume). The mainstream argument in literature concerning juvenile delinquency is that in the 1990s, unlike in past decades, any child could become deviant and deviancy appears in various forms such as bullying, absence from school, sexual misconduct, drug abuse, violence, and so forth. The Ministry of Justice uses the term “generalization” (ippanka) to emphasize this dramatic situation according to which today every child without regard of social background or educational performance could or even will become deviant (Hômushô Hômu Sôgô Kenkyûsho 1998: 421). As for reasons for the new phenomenon of deviancy, we can differentiate between three basic approaches. The first approach focuses on general changes in society such as the “privatization” of society (Morita 1997), according to which young people today care only about themselves and neglect the needs of other people and society. The second approach concentrates on the family, stressing that the educational competence of today’s family is diminishing and fails to instill a proper value consciousness in children (Fukaya 1997). The third approach claims that the school system, namely the organization of Japanese junior high schools, is the cause of students deviancy, since schools exert high pressure on students through examinations, excessive regulations and control. While the second approach is dominant in research on juvenile crime, the critics of schools as responsible for deviancy can mainly be found among sociologists and experts in the field of education. In summary, the issue of violence, bullying, and problem behavior is regarded with pessimism among mass media commentators, aca-


3

demics, educators and public institutions such as the police and schools in Japan. They share deep concerns about their “children in crisis”1 (kodomo ga abunai), claiming that the control of juvenile behavior has broken down and that a whole generation regardless of age, gender, social background or academic performance is in danger of disintegration due to failures in teaching the values of society.

1. What is the Nature of the Problem? Reconsidering Delinquency in Japan From the perspective of a foreigner, the Japanese debate on the crisis of juveniles merits examination in at least in two respects: 1. The first question is whether the high level of awareness of the problem reflects the actual situation. The mass media tend to dramatize and generalize particular cases of delinquency, but there is no empirical research available concerning the decline of conformity among school children with the exception of data on violence and bullying. 2. The second question focuses on what the consequences of problem perception are. Japan is known as gakureki shakai or an “meritocratic society” in which educational success is of extreme relevance to further career opportunities; the commitment of parents, teachers, and the general public to educating children is extremely high. Because of the high sensitivity with regard to all issues concerning child rearing and education, we expect a correlation between a high degree of concern towards children in general and major efforts to prevent deviancy and dense control mechanisms. The public sense of crisis should therefore not be assumed to be accurate. Since the understanding of perception of the problem depends deeply both on an understanding of the definitions of deviancy in a given society and on reliable data, this paper will explore the preconditions of the pessimistic view on juveniles in Japan2. We will first examine exactly how deviance is defined in Japan and what the respective juridical formulas mean. Second, we will explore the actual 1

The term has been coined by the journal Aera published by Asahi in November 1997. 2 The paper presents parts of the findings of the research project mentioned in the introduction of this volume.

4


situation of juvenile problem behavior by reviewing data from public institutions, distinguishing between juvenile crime and deviant behavior at schools. Our findings will demonstrate a discrepancy between the real situation of student deviant behavior in junior high schools and the public debate on it. The intensity of the feeling of crisis in the Japanese public does not suit the low level of problem behavior. The consequences of this discrepancy for the conceptualization of social control in schools and their preventative activities will be discussed in the Metzler and Foljanty-Jost chapter (“Problem Behavior and Social Control in Japan’s Junior High Schools”) in this volume.

2. How to Define Delinquency: Reconsidering Definitions As far as definitions are concerned, we have to take into account that deviancy is not a universal category, but depends on factors such as culture, time, gender, age, and so forth This means that children are not deviant per se but are labeled as deviant according to the definitions of what is regarded as deviant in their society. Definitions influence problem perception, data collecting, and counter-measures for prevention. We may distinguish between various levels in society where norms and deviancy are defined. Besides the general norms being defined by the family, the neighborhood and the social environment, juveniles are confronted with legal norms, formulated in the Juvenile Law (shônenhô) and norms as defined by schools. Since almost all Japanese between six and eighteen attend school nearly all day, we expect the influence of schools in inducing conformity is especially high. Rules of what is right and what is wrong as defined by schools represent the concentration of norms, which are commonly shared by society and those which are involved in education. Due to a highly centralized education system and a strong middle-class orientation among the majority in Japanese society, we may expect that the norms juveniles are taught are uniform and homogenous for all children of the same age group. Reconsideration of the norms as defined by law and by schools shows the following results: With regard to norms defined by the Juvenile Law of 1949, there is a high level of conformity between Germany and Japan. This can be


5

explained by the strong influence German law had on the formulation of Japanese Juvenile Law (Kühne/Miyazawa 1979). In both countries delinquent juveniles are defined as those who are suspected of having violated criminal stipulations. These include homicide, rape, drug abuse, theft and so on. The definitions do not not differ significantly between the two countries. The Japanese special law against the reckless driving of motorcycle gangs (bôsôzoku) is a formal exception. Japanese as well as German or American law reserves a specific category for juveniles who have not yet become delinquent, but show a tendency towards it. This behavior is called guhan in Japan, being similar to the “status offenses” in the US. These include missing school, hanging around in public or with friends who might lead them into delinquency and so on (Metzler/Metzler 2000: 134–139). Below this surface, differences begin to appear. In Japan, police regulations exist which define the furyô kôi (“bad behavior”). The usage of terms such as “furyô” (bad) in official sources along with terms such as “unhealthy fun”, and “immoral contact with others” do not exist in official German sources and indicate a moralistic approach towards juvenile behavior, while in Germany terms such as “harmful tendencies” (schädliche Neigungen) in legal or sociological sources have been strongly criticized because of their moralistic connotations. (Brunner/Dölling 1996, Albrecht 1993). According to these regulations, Japanese youth should not hang around in bars, game centers or pachinko parlors, should avoid “dangerous” friends, should not watch pornographic movies or videos, and should not drink alcohol or smoke tobacco. All young people under the age of twenty are targets of these regulations. This basically corresponds to the German “Juvenile Public Protection Law” of 1985 (Gesetz zum Schutze der Jugend in der Öffentlichkeit). In Japan, however, the definitions are clearly stricter. To offer the most explicit example: German juveniles may drink distilled alcohol such as whisky at eighteen years of age. They may drink beer or wine at 16. They may drink beer or wine even when they are not yet sixteen if their parents or a guardian accompany them (section 4). They may smoke tobacco at sixteen (section 9). The Japanese police simplify things: alcohol and tobacco are forbidden until twenty years of age. We therefore may conclude that the responsibility for oneself among juveniles is expected to start later in Japan, where juveniles up to the age of twenty are regarded more or less as children who have to be protected.

6


This logic continues as we follow the definitions under the legal stipulations. School is the most important institution defining norms for all children. On the most formal level, schools follow the Ministry of Education in distinguishing between three types of deviancy at school: according to legal definitions, schools should report violence (bôryoku kôi), bullying (ijime) and absence from school (futôkô) to the local boards of education. The ministry defines bullying as various forms of continuous aggressive behavior of a group of students towards a single one (see Morita 1997: 85). For absence from school, the definition implies not attending school for more than thirty days during compulsory education. Until 1990, more than fifty days were taken into account. Below this level of official definitions, schools may define their specific rules in school regulations (kôsoku). Regulations usually include rules concerning hairstyle, how time is spent after school, “junior high school student” behavior, along with more school-related rules. The power of definition granted to the schools is much broader than in Germany; the school is entrusted with the definition and the control of behavior even in those fields that are typically left in the hands of the family or the individual in Germany (Toyama-Bialke 1998). Figure 1: School Regulations of Aka Junior High School in Niigata Prefecture 1.

Concerning life outside school • It is forbidden to watch movies without parents with the exception of movies that are approved by the school. • It is forbidden to enter game centers. • It is forbidden to come to school by bicycle.

2.

Concerning school life • Breaks between the classes should be used for preparation for the next class.

3.

Outer appearance • Dying and perming hair are forbidden. • Boys should have their hair shorter than the eyebrows and the ears. • Girls should bind their hair if longer than the shoulders.

Source: Aka Junior High School’s education plan (school’s name altered)


7

To sum up, at the most formal level of legal definitions we can not find any differences between Japan and Germany. In semi-juridical regulations and stipulations, definitions tend to be stricter in Japan. And below this level, the Japanese reaction to juvenile deviancy is clearly more restrictive than the German one.

3. Reconsidering the Crisis of Japanese Youth: a Review of Data In terms of available empirical data, we have to distinguish between official data provided by public agencies on the one hand and academic research on the other (Morita 1994, Taki 1996, Metzler, A. 1999). Most detailed data concerning the delinquency and deviant behavior of juveniles are collected and published annually by the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Education and related public institutions. The data draw on identical definitions and are available for all public schools, unlike in Germany. We therefore have a broad database for criminal offenses as well as for problem behavior at public schools. But even though there is no lack of data, it remains difficult to qualify the situation. Generally speaking, the reliability of data concerning problem behavior at schools and especially violent incidents is crucial, not only in Japan but in other countries as well. Data are available only for criminal offenses, which include violence and bullying at schools as well as absence from school, but not for breaking informal or moral norms, and it is these informal or moral norms that seem to influence the public’s current pessimistic view of junior high school students as heavily involved in violence and bullying. Data depend on the willingness of schools to cooperate with the administration and to report bad news about the school. It can be expected that schools are highly reluctant to call the police. But we do not have any reason to believe that the Japanese figures are less reliable than those of other countries (see Uchiyama 1995: 40–41). Like in every criminological research study in the world, figures not only vary according to the reporting behavior of teachers, citizens, and shopkeepers and so on (see Mori 1998: 72; for Germany see Albrecht, G. 1993: 502; Scholten/Siethoff 1986: 584–585), they also vary according to registration and calculation methods that are used.

8


Data greatly depend on the attention that the agents of control (such as the police) pay towards juvenile crime. This is even more pronounced when the mass media get involved. Official data on problem behavior contain data only for public schools3. Private schools, which make up approximately 28% of all students in compulsory education, are therefore omitted. Definitions and methods of collecting data have changed over time, influencing the total numbers heavily. For instance, in the case of violence since 1997, the numbers include not only violence at school but outside of school as well. Until 1994 only school principals were allowed to report on bullying, but since then students and teachers have also been allowed to do so. Numbers have risen as a result, but this has had no impact on commentaries by critics and others, who use the data without taking into account the fact that definitions have been changed. We therefore have to keep in mind that official data on juvenile delinquency and problem behavior at schools are not reliable enough to describe reality. But similar methodological problems exist in other countries and official data are the only sources that have provided us with information for more than fifteen years about the distribution of the types of offenses and about the gender and age of the offenders. We therefore have decided to carefully use the official data of the police, the Family Court and the Ministry of Education in order to reexamine the empirical grounds of the purported juvenile crisis. Data for both offenses against juvenile law and deviancy were analyzed from three perspectives: 1. Actual states of deviancy with regard to types of offense, gender, and age. This is to examine the argument that students in the 1990s have become increasingly brutal, showing a new quality of violence. 2. Changes in numbers over the last fifteen years. This is to examine the argument that juvenile problem behavior in the 1990s is new and on the rise. 3. Comparison with other countries to qualify the numbers from an international perspective.

3

As a reason for collecting data only from public schools, school administrators reported that in order to protect equal opportunities for all private schools and to prevent stigmatization, private schools are excluded.

9


4. Findings The analysis of the data on juvenile delinquency and problem behavior at schools produced the following results: 1. The data support the fact that numerically the highest incidence of problem behavior with respect to violence, bullying and absence from school can be found at junior high schools. In 1997, junior high school students committed 73% of violent incidents, and the overwhelming majority of the offenders were male. 2. But in cases of major delinquency, including violence reported by police, junior high school students are underrepresented. Most of these offenders are juveniles who do no longer attend school. Figure 2: Percentage of Selected Offenses Against the Juvenile Criminal Law, 1999 % 100

9,998,989 11.9

26,844

82,240

7.9

7.3

15,473

2,143

17.6

absolute number of cases

27.2

80

Employed 42.6

55.1

47.5

27.1

60

27.9

1.7

22.1

40

20

Unemployed

13.5 11.0

34.2

Junior High School Students

43.8 25.9

Senior High School Students

31.7

33.2 10.8

0 Total juvenile Illegal use of population bicycles

Theft

Simple assault

Serious violence

Sources: Keisatsuchô 2000:119, Rôdôshô 2000: 38, 44, Monbushô 2000: 24.

10


3. In contrast to what the Japanese debate on juvenile problem behavior suggests, juveniles have not become more and more brutal during the 1990s. Arguments that young people have become more violent than ever neglect to note that the rate of homicide, the most serious crime conducted by juveniles during the sixties, was three times higher than today. After high numbers of violent incidents at schools between 1982 and 1985, numbers decreased until 1991, only to increase again thereafter. In 1996 the highest level of the 1980s was surpassed, but since 1998 bullying in particular has again been on the decline. Figure 3: Arrests of 10–19-Year-Olds in the Category of Simple Assault (Physical Injury, Act of Violence, Blackmail, Threatening Behavior) Per 100,000 Youths of the Same Age, 1960–1999

250

Physical injury

Total

200

150

100

50

0 60

65

70

75

80

85

90

95

Source: Hômushô Hômu Sôgô Kenkyûsho (Ed.): Hanzai hakusho 1998: 493.

11


4. The majority of criminal offenses committed by students are minor cases of shoplifting and the illegal use of bicycles. Nearly 80% of the offenses are handled without proceeding to Family Court (see Metzler, A. 1999a). Figure 4: Juvenile Delinquency 1998 (Ratio of Type of Delinquency Among the Arrests of 14–19-Year-Olds in Percent; Total = 157,385 Arrests) Other 3% Simple aussault 11% Serious Violence 1% Theft 64%

Illegal use of bicycle 21%

Source: Compiled after Keisatsuchô: Keisatsu hakusho, 1999: 12.

5. Data about deviancy at schools exist for violence, bullying and absence from school, of which only the last has been increasing for more than ten years continuously. The numbers of violent incidents are increasing at a low level, even though the most frequent offenses are verbal attacks against classmates, followed by minor cases of violence and vandalism (Sômuchô Seishônen Taisaku Honbu 1997: 138).

12


Table 1: Problem Behavior in Japanese Public Schools 1985 (in %)

1990 (in %)

1997 (in %)

Inner-school violence senior high schoolsa)

0.021

0.041

0.146

Inner-school violence junior high schoolsa)

0.087

0.091

0.364

Inner-school violence elementary schoolsa)

----------

----------

0.01

Absence from schoolb) junior high schools

0.483

0.784

1.690

Absence from schoolb) elementary schools

0.037

0.085

0.209

2.2

2.2

2.6

Senior high school students arrested by policed)

1.215

1.055

1.571

Junior high school students arrested by policed)

1.999

1.376

1.419

Drop-outsc)

Note: Percentage of all students of the given type of school who have been reported by schools to the Ministry of Education a) Since 1997 numbers include violence outside of schools b) More than 50 days per year c) Senior high school students only d) According to the data of the Ministry of Justice Sources: Sômuchô 1999: 15–17, Monbushô 1998: 51, 57, Hômushô 1998: 203.

6. To use rates of increases for argumentation neglects the absolute figures. For instance, in 1997 the reported 56% increase in robbery related to an increase of 600 cases, and the 55% increase in homicides to an absolute increase of 41 cases. (Keisatsuchô 1998: 315; 1999: 3). The data therefore do not support the view that Japanese juveniles are becoming more and more brutal. The number of major cases of violence with the police and the Family Court involved is not higher than in past decades. In schools, violence and bullying increased during the 1990s, but it is only a very small minority of students who become violent.

13


Figure 5: Ratio of Juvenile Delinquency, 1987–1996 (Suspects/Arrests per 100,000 of the Same Age)

8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0 1987

1988

1989

1990

Japan France

1991

1992

1993

USA Germany

1994

1995

1996

Great Britain South Korea

Note: The term “juvenile” is defined as the age group of 10–17 years (France, Japan, South Korea, USA), 10–17 years (10–18 years before 1993) (Great Britain), 14–17 years (Germany). In the case of Germany, the crime rate appears to be higher because the age group of 10–13-year-olds is excluded. Source: Hômushô Hômu Sôgô Kenkyûsho 1998: 363, 413.

International comparison shows that besides South Korea, Japan has the lowest numbers of criminal offenses in juvenile delinquency, including violence and homicide. In 1996 the ratio of juvenile delinquents in Germany was six times higher than in Japan. Unlike in other countries, the numbers have not risen over the years. In comparison to other countries, Japanese juvenile offenses are minor cases, typical for their age group. With regard to the ages of juvenile delinquents, it is remarkable to note that in Japan, unlike in the USA, Great Britain and South Korea, delinquency decreases with increasing age, that is delinquency during the school period does not constitute the beginning of a criminal career. This view is supported by research that demonstrates that the majority of deviant juveniles in Japan return to conformity after leaving school (Metzler, A. 1999b).

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Table 2: Violence Among 13–15-Year-Old Students in Germany and Japan, 1997

Number of students (reference figure)

Germany

Japan (in parentheses: including cases of bullying

2,721,602

4,481,480

55,027 Absolute number of victims Ratio of violent cases among all students

(projection based on random sample of 3 % of all reported victims)

9,542

(14,765)

2.02 %

0.21 %

(0.33 %)

Sources: Unfallkassen (Accident Insurers); unpublished data 2000; Sômuchô 1998: 192, 195, Monbushô 1998a: 48, 50, 57.

With regard to bullying and violence at school, an international comparison is extremely difficult since at least in Germany no nationwide data are available, and the data that do exist are based on definitions different from those used by the Japanese. Therefore, we can only calculate on the basis of supplementary materials. As table 2 demonstrates, in the case of violence, we may estimate that in Japan approximately 0.3% of junior high school students become violent while in Germany we may expect approximately 2 to 3%.

5. Conclusion Our findings do not support the pessimistic view we have found in public discourse on deviancy in Japan. We cannot ignore the fact that problem behavior exists, and we even can confirm that there was an increase of violence at junior high schools in the mid-1990s. But to call this phenomenon part of the “disruption of classes” is not appropriate. The efficiency of the Japanese education system has not come to an end. Becoming deviant or even delinquent is not a general trend but as the data show, is limited to a small minority of students. The proportion of Japanese students who become violent is low in comparison with students of other countries, and the number of severe cases handled by police is sharply decreasing—from a level that is


15

already one of the lowest among industrialized countries. Compared with former waves of problem behavior in the 1980s and compared with the situation in other countries, the situation at Japanese schools in the second part of the 1990s seems to be less dramatic than expected. There are problems at schools, but the overwhelming majority of students is well integrated, a higher proportion than in any other developed country. Therefore we have to conclude that there is a discrepancy between the high public concern about juvenile deviancy and the figures. These findings provoke further questions. Unlike Japanese colleagues, who argue that uniform, coercive school organization and stress are responsible for the crisis in schools (Taki 1998), we would argue that the low rates of deviancy at schools, as well as the fact that the majority of deviant juveniles return to conformity at latest when leaving school, indicate that Japanese schools are still able to integrate and reintegrate the overwhelming majority of students. We would therefore argue (see Metzler and Foljanty-Jost in this volume) that the overestimation of the problem of deviancy, or what Tokuoka (in this volume) has called “moral panic” may be part of prevention itself, since dramatization of the situation at schools may work as a permanent warning for all those involved in education.

6. References Albrecht, Günther (1993): Jugend, Recht und Kriminalität (Youth, Law and Crime). In: Krüger, Heinz-Hermann (ed.): Handbuch der Jugendforschung, 2nd rev. edition. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, pp. 495–525. Brunner, Rudolf/Dölling, Dieter (1996): Jugendgerichtsgesetz (Juvenile law), 10th edition. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Fukaya, Masashi (1997): Japanische Jugendliche im internationalen Vergleich: Grundlegende Merkmale und aktuelle Tendenzen (Japanese youths in international comparison: basic characteristics and recent trends). In: Foljanty-Jost, Gesine; Rössner, Dieter (eds.): Gewalt unter Jugendlichen in Deutschland und Japan–Ursachen und Bekämpfung. Unter Mitarbeit von Britta Bannenberg und Annette Erbe. Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 139–150. Hayami, Hiroshi (1989): ‘Hikô no ippanka’ ron saikô (The Theory on ‘the Generalization of Crime’ Rconsidered), Hanzai Shakaigaku Kenkyû 14, pp. 109–128. Hômushô Hômu Sôgô Kenkyûsho (ed.) (annual publication): Hanzai hakusho (White Paper on Crime). Tôkyô: Ôkurashô insatsukyoku. Keisatsuchô (ed.) (cont.): Keisatsu hakusho (White Paper on Police). Tôkyô: Ôkurashô insatsukyoku.

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Kühne, Hans-Heiner/Miyazawa, Kôichi (1979): Kriminalität und Kriminalitätsbekämpfung in Japan (Crime and Crime control in Japan). Wiesbaden: Bundeskriminalamt. Metzler, Anne (1999a): Jugenddelinquenz und Jugenddevianz in Japan. Eine Datensammlung (Deviancy and Juvenile Delinquency in Japan. A Collection of Data). Materialien zu Jugend und Devianz in Japan: Occasional Papers, vol. 5. Halle: Seminar für Japanologie der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. —— (1999b): Jugendkriminalität in Japan im internationalen Vergleich (Youth Crime in Japan in International Comparison). Materialien zu Jugend und Devianz in Japan: Occasional Papers, vol. 8. Halle: Seminar für Japanologie der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Metzler, Anne/Metzler, Manuel (2000): Wer sind die Täter? Merkmale krimineller japanischer Jugendlicher (Who are the Offenders? Characteristics of Japanese Juvenile Delinquents). In: Foljanty-Jost, Gesine (ed.): Schule, Schüler und Gewalt—Beiträge zu Deutschland, Japan, China und der Mongolei. München: Iudicium, pp. 170–195. Monbushô (cont.): Monbu tôkei yoran (Educational and Cultural Statistics). Tôkyô: Ôkurashô insatsukyoku. Mori, Takeo (1998): Saikin no hikô/hikô shônen ni tsuite (On Recent Deviancy and Deviant Youths). Keijihô no sho-mondai 5. Senshû Daigaku Hôgaku Kenkyûsho kiyô 23, pp. 61–112. —— (1999): Die Krisentheorie. Ein Erklärungsmodell für delinquentes Verhalten Jugendlicher (The Crisis Theory. A Model for Explaining Juvenile Delinquent Behavior). Translated by Metzler, Anne; Metzler, Manuel. Materialien zu Jugend und Devianz in Japan: Occasional Paperss, vol. 6. Ed. by Gesine Foljanty-Jost. Halle: Seminar für Japanologie der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Morita, Yôji (1997): Privatisierung in der japanischen Gesellschaft und die Struktur von Schikane an Schulen (Privatization in Japanese Society and the Structure of Bullying at Schools). In: Foljanty-Jost, Gesine/Rössner, Dieter (eds.), Gewalt unter Jugendlichen in Deutschland und Japan. Ursachen und ihre Bekämpfung. Unter Mitarbeit von Britta Bannenberg und Annette Erbe. Baden-Baden: Nomos. pp. 85–99. Rôdôshô (ed.) (2000): Rôdô tôkei yôran (Labour Statistics). Tôkyô: Ôkurashô Insatsukyoku. Scholten, Hans Joseph/Siethoff, Frank G. A. (1986): Jugendstrafe und Jugendstrafvollzug in den Niederlanden (Punishment and Imprisonment of Juveniles in the Netherlands). In: Dünkel, Frieder; Meyer, Klaus (eds.), Jugendstrafe und Jugendstrafvollzug. Stationäre Maßnahmen der Jugendkriminalrechtspflege im internationalen Vergleich. Teil 1: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Skandinavien und westeuropäische Länder. Freiburg: Eigenverlag, pp. 567–664. Sômuchô (ed.): Seishônen hakusho (White Paper on Youth). Tôkyô: Ôkurashô Insatsukyoku. Taki, Mitsuru (1996): ‘Ijime’ o sodateru gakkyû tokusei—Gakkô ga tsukuru kodomo no sutoresu (Characteristics of Classes that Generate ‘Bullying’—Children’s Stress Created by the School). Tôkyô: Meiji Tosho. —— (1998): Kodomo no sutoresu to sono yôin (Children’s Stress and its Causes). Kokuritsu kyôiku kenkyûsho kenkyû shûroku 36, pp. 1–11.


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Toyama-Bialke, Chisaki (1998): Adolescents’ Daily Lives and Parental Attitudes toward the School: A German-Japanese Comparative Study. Studies in Educational Evaluation 24/4, pp. 347–367. Uchiyama, Ayako (1995): Hanzai-hikô no ryôteki ha’aku (Quantitative Assessment of Crime and Delinquency). In: Hoshino, Shûkô; Yonekawa, Shigenobu et.al (eds.): Hanazai-hikô jiten. Tôkyô: Ôsei Shuppan, pp. 32–41. Unfallkassen (2000): http://www.unfallkassen.de/Studie.PDF/26.09.2000.

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THE “JAPANESE TRIANGLE” FOR PREVENTING ADOLESCENT DELINQUENCY: STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE FAMILY-SCHOOL-ADOLESCENT RELATIONSHIP FROM A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE Chisaki Toyama-Bialke

1. Introduction The main aim of this article is to consider Japanese policies of education and socialization in the context of how the Japanese prevent adolescent delinquent behavior. By international comparison, the crime rate of Japanese juveniles is low. Metzler (Metzler, A. 1999) concluded on the basis of her close analysis of criminal statistics from Japan, France, Germany, Great Britain, South Korea and the United States that it is obvious that Japan has a significantly low crime rate among juveniles compared to Western nations. For example, in cases of mayhem and homicide, the crime rate of Western juveniles is at least three to five times higher than that of Japanese juveniles. Most juvenile offenses in Japan are not heinous crimes but petty larceny, that is, shoplifting and the theft of motorcycles and bicycles.1 Despite such a low crime rate, Japanese public discussion and the statements from government about juvenile delinquency are characterized by pessimistic and exaggerated views. Although the statistical increase in the number of arrests involving juvenile offenders is highly influenced by the increase in policing activity, changes in the methodology of producing the statistical data and so forth, mass media reports about the increase are widespread and as a result people are under the impression that conditions are deteriorating.

1

The criminal statistics also show that the crime rate in Japan reaches a peak between the ages of 14 and 17 and falls significantly within the older age categories of youth and adults. Consequently, the low crime rate of adults is a remarkable feature of Japan by international comparison (Metzler, A. 1999).

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CHISAKI TOYAMA-BIALKE

This kind of situation has the potential of creating a form of paranoia that feeds on the public’s perceived image of juvenile behavior in society (Ayukawa 1995)2. In a similar way, the Japanese government and the mass media have reported on a surge in cases involving violence in the family (mostly violence by sons towards their parents), school violence (mostly violence in schools by students towards teachers) and bullying among students. Although some scholars (for example Yamamura 1995, Itô 1997) have warned that such statistical data are highly affected by those who interpret and count such cases and therefore are not necessarily reliable, people have come to believe that juveniles are becoming increasingly brutal.3 In attempting to explain the Japanese crime rate among juveniles, which is low by international comparison, and the high level of awareness of problem behavior among people in Japan, it is necessary to pay more attention to policies of education and socialization, of whose features members of Japanese society are not often conscious. There are at least two ways to elucidate such features that are regarded as ‘natural’ in everyday life. One is a historical approach to examine the changes in educational policies and the adult views of youngsters that underlie the policies and that are shared by people during particular periods. Examples of this approach are found in studies conducted by Itô (1996) and by Hirota (1998), which describe changes in discourses of juvenile problem behavior after World War II in Japan. Another approach is a cross-cultural comparison of education and socialization policies. This approach is used in this article, and some 2

It is often reported in the White Paper of the police or other departments as well as by the mass media in Japan that there have been apparent peaks in the number of offenses committed by juveniles: the first was in 1950, the second was from 1961 to 1966, and the third was from 1983 to 1988. The third peak was proclaimed in sensational ways to be the worst since World War II by the mass media as well as the Japanese government. Analysing such phenomena from a constructionist perspective, Ayukawa (1995) argued that such rises in delinquency statistics should be interpreted as the number of arrests and not crimes. The number of delinquency cases decreased during a period in which the police concentrated on controlling political activity by student activists, new leftist groups and terrorist groups in the late 1960s, whereas the number rose when the police’s energy was redirected towards controlling minor delinquent juvenile behavior again. Moreover, the main cause of the third statistical peak included an increase in larceny, mostly shoplifting and the theft of motorcycles and bicycles. 3 It seems to be more difficult to produce reliable data about “bullying” than criminal statistics. Therefore, this will not be discussed in this article directly.

THE “JAPANESE TRIANGLE”

21

cross-cultural studies are reviewed in order to explore the background of the contradiction between the crime rate in Japan, which is low by international comparison, and the pessimistic pecepstion of juvenile crime in Japanese society. In my opinion, international comparative studies using standardized questionnaires on educational policies and values are problematic. One considerable problems is the fact that questionnaires are highly influenced by cultural biases from the researcher’s perspective (see Toyama-Bialke 2000: 77–84). This is not to say that quantitative studies have no strengths in cross-cultural comparisons. However, in studies with qualitative approaches, data are often obtained in the context of each culture and relatively free from the cultural biases of the researchers. This is important if we take into account the fact that our view towards the problem behavior of juveniles is affected strongly by culturally biased values. In this article, therefore, the findings reviewed are mainly from studies based on the analyses of qualitative data. Reviewing the findings from those studies shows that features of Japanese cultural policies of education and socialization are reflected most in the relationship between family, school and children, which can be called here the Japanese triangle. This implies basic and consistent features in educational policies and values that are observed in social interactions between parents and children (that is, in the family) as well as between teachers and students or among students (that is, in school). The features of the Japanese triangle seem to play an important role as measures against problem behavior. Thus, in the first part of this article, the main features of this Japanese triangle will be presented, as described in a number of cross-cultural studies. We will then concentrate on diversity within respective cultures in the second part, that is, problem behavior of adolescents from lower social strata who tend to misbehave more frequently than middle-class adolescents in Western societies as well as in Japan. This may offer another perspective for considering how effective the Japanese triangle is in preventing problem behavior for diverse social sub-groups.

22


2. The Japanese Triangle From Comparative Perspectives When we consider the Japanese triangle from a comparative perspective, it seems to be useful to make a distinction between two aspects of the triangle. The first is the aspect of adult behavior towards children, in other words, how adults treat children in Japanese cultural policies of education. And the second is the aspect of adult norms and values implied in an adult view of how children and adolescents should be. Adults try to transmit such norms and values to youngsters through their “behavior” (see also Kornadt/Trommsdorff 1984, Yamamura 1993). Each aspect plays an important role in dealing with the problem behavior of youngsters. In this chapter, let us begin with Japanese adult behavior towards children and consider which basic features can be found beyond the diversity within respective cultures. We will then review findings of cross-cultural studies focusing on one side of the Japanese triangle, the family-child relationship and then on the other side, the schoolchild relationship, and finally on the side of the family-school relationship. We will also shed light on the question of how problem behavior is treated by parents and schoolteachers in the context of Japanese behavior. After this consideration, Japanese adult norms and values will be illustrated. It must be noted that a term such as problem behavior can vary in different cultures because different actions are regarded as problems or as deviant. Therefore, this article also attempts to describe which concrete actions or behavior are viewed and treated as “deviant” in each culture. Studies that help to illustrate the Japanese triangle have often been conducted in the field of cross-cultural psychology. Some ethnographic studies whose data are based on observation at Japanese schools by foreign (mostly American) scholars also include implicit comparative perspectives. In these fields, most cross-cultural studies on Japanese education and socialization have focused on AmericanJapanese comparisons. In addition to these studies, I will also refer to German-Japanese comparative studies, although their number is limited. This is not to say that the results of comparisons between the USA and Japan on the one hand and those between Germany and Japan on the other are the same. However, essential features in Japanese


23

cases seem to be clear in comparison with both American and German cases. 2.1 Japanese Adult Behavior Towards Children 2.1.1 Basic Features of Japanese Behavior Hess and Azuma (1991), who conducted a Japanese-American comparative study on mother-toddler interactions, distinguish between two cultural modes through which cultural transmission takes place. One is osmosis, in which nurturing, interdependence, and close physical proximity provide exposure to adult values and instill a readiness on the part of the child to imitate, accept and internalize such values. The other is teaching, in which direct instruction, injunctions, frequent dialogue and explanations are used. According to the findings from their comparative study, parents in Japan are more inclined to use osmosis than American parents. Osmosis is enhanced in an empathic relationship between the child and his or her socializing agent as well as close physical proximity for long periods of time. Under these conditions, feelings and behavior patterns of the socializing agent penetrate even without injunctions and intentional teaching. This mode of cultural transmission can be found in Japanese patterns of mothering as well as socialization at schools (Azuma 1994). 2.1.2 Family-Child Relationship According to some cross-cultural psychology findings, one of the central features of the Japanese family is the close emotional motherchild bond. Japanese mothers tend to stay physically closer to their infants for a longer time and are more sympathetically responsive to their children than American or German mothers. They indulge their children and keep them interdependent with them (Hess/Azuma 1991, Trommsdorff/Friedlmeier 1993). This evokes a strong sense of interdependence in the child and helps it to assimilate the hopes, feelings and values of its caretaker. This Japanese child-rearing pattern might contribute to weakening aggressiveness. Kornadt (1988) explains that low aggressiveness is predicted if aggression is not needed by the child to enhance his selfesteem and if aggression is neither experienced nor rewarded in early mother-child interaction. According to his study conducted in Japan and Germany, Japanese mothers become less annoyed with their chil-

24


dren and they seldom interpret misbehavior in ways that might threaten or harm the child’s self-esteem. They avoid conflicts and an escalation of anger, but nevertheless lead the child towards obeying rules and social norms. 2.1.3 School-Child Relationship Empathic human relationships and close physical proximity between people who transmit norms and values can be also found in Japanese school education, albeit in institutionalized ways. Ethnographic studies in Japanese pre-elementary, elementary and junior high schools show that developing strong, positive bonds—between teachers and students as well as among students—is the most important concern. Japanese teachers place a strong emphasis on building interpersonal bonding and this involves trusting relationships between teachers and students and understanding how children feel and think. They regard this as just as important for social relationships in their school life as successful academic instruction (Shimahara & Sakai 1995, Fukuzawa 1996). Elementary school teachers try to stay close to their students for long periods through playing with them, eating lunch with them in class and cleaning the classroom with them. In most elementary and junior high schools, a “lifestyle diary” is used as an essential tool for building a strong bond (Shimahara & Sakai 1995, LeTendre 1996). Students fill out lifestyle diaries, writing down how many hours they have studied at home, special things they have done and problems that are bothering them. Homeroom teachers return the diaries with comments on a daily or weekly basis. This allows teachers to gain personal information that can be also used to form a strong emotional connection with their students. Japanese schools also have a lot of features that foster interpersonal bonding among students. One of the most common practices in Japanese elementary schools is the use of small groups (han) to which children can feel connected more easily than to a big class. Group members learn to work together through the pursuit of a wide range of activities, from learning activities such as science experiments or art projects to eating lunch together or cleaning the classroom. Lewis (1996) suggests that these family-like small groups differ from groups organized in American schools. The former includes children of various abilities so those children have access to other children who can read, explain mathematics, or are good at sports. Moreover, its members stay together for relatively long periods of time, such as a few


25

months. In contrast to this, groups at American elementary schools are often task-specific (for example reading) and temporarily organized according to the student’s level of ability. Although small groups are also organized during the junior high school years, school clubs are more important in building close bonds among students. Most junior high schools provide a large variety of leisure activities in school clubs and the majority of students attend such after-school activities almost every day. Clubs often have an important function in junior high school life from the student’s perspective. Most students belong to one club throughout the junior high school years and meet their best friends in clubs (Fukaya 1983, Nishijima et al. 1999). They not only enjoy leisure activities but also learn to endure hardships for the sake of the group by following the orders of the senior members and taking responsibility within the clubs (LeTendre 1996). 2.1.4 What is “Japanese Behavior” When Dealing With Problem Behavior? Japanese families and schools deal with problem behavior in similar ways. By comparison to American or German mothers, Japanese mothers are less likely to feel annoyed and more willing to excuse children’s behavior, believing they are not yet responsible or do not understand the situation (Azuma 1994, Kornadt 1988, Kornadt/ Trommsdorff 1990). Their strategies tend to avoid conflicts, appealing to the child’s feelings and his or her identity as a “good child”. These basic patterns can be seen also at school. Strategies utilized by Japanese teachers to manage problem behavior differ according to the student’s age, but they have some basic elements are common: they minimize direct confrontation and are based on empathic human relations. Studies based on observation in Japanese pre-schools show that Japanese teachers try not to isolate disruptive children from the group by singling them out for punishment or excluding them from a group activity (Tobin/Wu/Davidson 1989). They avoid interacting with children in unpleasant and stressful ways and encourage other children to deal with their classmates’ troubles and misdeeds in various ways. Therefore, they maintain order without intervening directly in children’s disputes and misbehavior (Lewis 1984). Moreover, Japanese pre-school teachers also use various unofficial group categories in everyday practices (Yuki 1994). These groups help children to recog-

26


nize deviant behavior as behavior that is different from majority group behavoir. Thus, they learn to reject deviant behavior and they are encouraged to correct their behavior through modeling themselves after the well-behaved majority group. Similar treatment patterns of deviant students were also observed in elementary and junior high schools. Teachers control students not through rewards and punishments but by building the students’ bonds to others or promoting their long-term internalization of values. Elementary school teachers often try to help deviant children preserve their identity as “good children”, or save face with classmates (Lewis 1996). In contrast, American teachers tend to use disciplinary techniques which appeal to their authority and believe that a classroom will be reduced to chaos if teachers handle disruptive students in a lenient way (Tsuneyoshi 1992). In the junior high school years, it is difficult to avoid conflicts between teachers and students or among students going through puberty. It is important here to note that “problems” in this age group seem to vary among different cultures significantly. These are reflected not only in the ways adolescents are treated in each culture but also in the adult norms and values towards them, which will be illustrated later. Institutionalized strategies called “seikatsu shidô” (life guidance) or “seito shidô” (student guidance) demonstrate how adolescents are treated in most junior high schools in Japan. They consist of a series of preventive measures as well as procedures that treat problem behavior directly. The preventive measures consist primarily of uniforms, school rules and control over the student’s daily behavior. By using these strategies, teachers emphasize the importance of the “correct” style of living regarding manners and deportment. Most public junior high schools have official uniforms and control students according to strict school rules. Teachers regularly control the student’s appearance such as dealing with a missing name tag, the length of a girl’s skirt, or a different color of headband from one that is stipulated by the rules. Teachers believe that outward appearance is an indication of whether the student is prone to getting into trouble and of whether the student is disconnected from school (LeTendre 1996). Moreover, teacher responsibility for student behavior is not restricted to the school grounds; teachers also check and patrol local trouble spots such as stores and entertainment centers during the school vacation. In addition to institutionalized strategies for problem behavior, strategies to treat misbehaving students in junior high schools are


27

characterized by their integration into empathic human relationships at school. Disruptive students are not excluded from school life. Teachers often try to use club participation as a way of reintegrating students with their peers. Teacher invest enormous time and energy in repeated after-school counseling sessions and home visits, as well as by having the students write reflection papers and by lecturing in assemblies. In sharp contrast to this approach, American teachers are inclined to expel disruptive students from the class and send them to the vice-principal’s office or to outside professionals such as the police, psychologists and counselors (LeTendre 2000). Such strategies can be also found in American pre-elementary and elementary schools, in which disruptive children are sent to special offices (Tobin/Wu/Davidson 1989, Tsuneyoshi 1992). Thus, Japanese teachers’ involvement and responsibilities extend far beyond the American notion of a teacher’s role (LeTendre 1996). Although there is little evidence arising from German-Japanese comparative studies, the same seems to be true for a comparison with German cases generally. As described above, Japanese teachers give the same or more importance to extra-curricular activities and dealing with emotional and behavioral problems than to instruction in academic subjects. This forms a striking contrast to German schools. Although in Germany, more attention has recently been paid to expanding the role of the school as a socializing agent through extracurricular activities and through cooperation between school and social work agencies (Holtappels 1994, Olk et al. 2000), German schools have been institutions mostly for academic learning. This is reflected in the fact that time spent in extra-curricular activities at Japanese schools is more than three times the amount at German schools (Toyama-Bialke 2000). The German notion of “school” as a site of academic learning has been constructed over long periods of time and is widespread among people, and it seems to be resistant to change. 2.1.5 Family-School Relationship It is likely that the different role assignment given to teachers in Japan and Germany has to do with the different role of families as well as with the different family-school relationships. Japanese schoolteachers deal with emotional and behavioral problems and this is more fully supported by Japanese parents than by German parents. According to a German-Japanese comparative study (Toyama-Bialke 1998, 2000),

28


German parents are likely to assign only the limited role of academic work directly to the school. They expect their children to make independent decisions about their own lifestyles and that the school should not attempt to control their children’s lives. In contrast to this, Japanese parents view the school not so much as a place to study but rather more as a place to live. They also want the school to control the “outof-school” life of teenagers. This difference in role assignment between home and school leads to a difference in how families and schools cooperate. Fukuzawa (1996), whose field work compared Japanese junior high schools with American schools, also described a situation in which Japanese teachers try to build a united front with parents to effect changes in student problem behavior and request parental support for school discipline. They supply parents with frequent, detailed information on school events and monitor the home life of students. This “united front” does not necessarily mean that Japanese parents are much more satisfied with the school and school policy than German or American parents. However, in parent-teacher communication, Japanese parents express less criticism of teachers than do German or US parents. The greater initiative in education on the part of the Japanese school system is more accepted (Stevenson et al. 1990, Fukuzawa 1996, Toyma-Bialke 2000: 217–221). 2.2 Japanese Adult Norms and Values Towards Children What norms and values are transmitted through the Japanese triangle described above? These include the adult view of children and expectations of how children should behave. Therefore, adults are closely related to what is treated as a “problem” and is reflected in the definition of “delinquency” in law or in various sanctions in a classroom. The core of adult norms and values in Japan seems to imply the importance of interpersonal harmony and social skills. These are not only educational goals but also traits that more greatly strengthen emotional bonds between children and their caretakers. An AmericanJapanese comparative study on mothers of pre-school children shows that Japanese mothers emphasize adequate social skills in human relationships as an educational goal, whereas American mothers give more importance to verbal assertion and independence (Azuma 1994). A German-Japanese comparative study also emphasized that educational goals such as cooperation, empathy and compliance were mentioned more often by mothers of toddlers in Japan than in Germany


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(Kornadt/Trommsdorff 1990). In a cross-cultural study on the definition of a “bad kid”, Japanese adolescents and mothers were much more likely than their American and Chinese counterparts to mention behaviors that are disruptive to interpersonal harmony (Crystal/Stevenson 1995). Which norms and values are emphasized also differ according to the age of the youngsters within each culture. In the junior high school years, adequate social skills remain important as an educational goal. However, the content of learning social skills is gradually more oriented towards adulthood. Junior high school students are also expected to endure hardships for the sake of the group and take responsibility within groups. This is expected not only on the part of teachers (LeTendre 1996) but also parents (Toyama-Bialke 2002). Parents and teachers also agree to conditions that foster this development. Hardship and discomfort are regarded not as barriers to education, but as educational situations in which challenges are posed and an opportunity for improvement is provided (Rohlen 1996). This indicates that the junior high school years are a part of the whole process of “character building” that leads to maturity. This explains why Japanese junior high schools attempt to control student appearance and behavior by means of strict school rules. Student commitment to material youth culture that is influenced strongly by consumer industries and the mass media are treated severely. Identification with peer groups not sanctioned by the school as well as the public exhibition of close boy-girl relationships are considered undesirable for this age group by school teachers (LeTendre 2000). This control is also expected by parents (Toyama-Bialke 2002). All of the elements that are assumed to form a part of adolescent-specific behavior in Western societies are treated severely because they are characterized as the opposite of “hardship” and “discomfort” that provide adolescents with an important opportunity for character building. In Germany, such issues are not in the responsibility of the school. At the same time, German parents allow more independent decisionmaking on the part of teenagers with regard to their lifestyles. This is also regarded as an important educational goal by them (ToyamaBialke 2002). Therefore, how German teenagers commit themselves not only to schoolwork but also to peer groups, close boy-girl relationships and youth culture are dealt with more directly by each family than in Japan. The American situation is more similar to the German than to the Japanese one (Fuligni/Stevenson 1995). From a Western

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point of view, Japanese strategies might evoke a well-known image of restrictive Japanese schools often reported not only by the Japanese media but also by the Western media and researchers. However, according to a study based on long-term observation in junior high schools in Japan and the U.S. (LeTendre 2000), the majority of Japanese teachers basically tend to ignore a great deal of behavior that would have been labeled as disruptive in American schools. American teachers interpret student non-task behavior—talking in class, moving about, playing with materials—as a sign of disrespect or an attempt to undermine their authority. In similar cases of problem behavior such as using disrespectful language towards teachers, which was observed both in American and Japanese classrooms, American teachers regarded this as defiance of authority and treated such actions severely, whereas Japanese teachers attribute such disruptive behavior to a sign of immaturity and a demand for attention (see also Tsuneyoshi 2001). Thus, the following three features of the Japanese triangle should be noted: firstly, the view of desirable or undesirable adolescent behavior differs between cultures considerably. From the Japanese point of view, interpersonal harmony takes the highest priority. Secondly, compared to Germany, Japanese adult norms and values are relatively homogenous. In other words, there is a relatively strong consensus between the family and school. Thirdly, it can be assumed that these relatively homogeneous norms and values towards children, such as a strong emphasis on interpersonal harmony, are transmitted to youngsters at home and in an institutionalized system at school on a continuous basis. All of these can protect Japanese children and youth from the diversity of values relatively more than is the case in Germany and weaken the risks and uncertainty caused by so-called “individualization” (Beck 1986, Heitmeyer/Olk 1991). Japanese youth are less confronted with the problem of making life choices and decisions by themselves (Kreitz-Sandberg 1994, Toyama-Bialke 2000). Thus, from a cross-cultural perspective, it seems reasonable to assume that the Japanese triangle contributes to setting clearly defined educational goals and generally preventing children and adolescents from delinquent behavior. This can explain the low crime rate of Japanese juveniles. On the other hand, this does not mean that there are no delinquent adolescents in Japan. It is therefore worthwhile to examine how well the cultural policies of education and socialization in Japan serve as


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preventive strategies. If we focus on differences between cultures, we are likely to forget that the Japanese triangle also has diverse variations. The question that we must consider next is how valid the Japanese triangle is for diverse social groups. We will focus now on the question of which adolescents are most likely to misbehave and how they come to misbehave within the Japanese triangle, as well as on how this process differs from the processes in other societies such as Germany.

3. The Diversity of the Japanese Triangle Today in Japan, different social backgrounds of children and adolescents are less noted as a cause of problem behavior than in Western countries (Foljanty-Jost 2000, Metzler 2000, Sato 1991) There is, however, evidence to prove that adolescents from lower social strata who show poor academic performance also exhibit more delinquent behavior (see Yonekawa and Yoder in this volume). From this perspective, let us again consider the triangle of family, school and problem behavior, first through the lens of some quantitative studies. 3.1 Findings from Studies with Quantitative Approaches 1. According to studies using quantitative data and research methods that examined relationships between educational achievement and social strata in Japan, the relationships between parental occupational status and educational levels and child school performance and educational achievement has remained unchanged in Japan since World War II. The higher the parents’ socioeconomic status, the better educated the children (Kariya 1995). Although it is often believed that Japan is a “meritocratic” society, this effect that stems from family background in Japan is comparable to the effect of family background in other industrialized nations (Ishida 1989). Furthermore, it was proved that manual workers show lower educational aspirations for their children than white-collar parents (Shimizu/Tokuda 1991, Yonekawa in this volume). 2. There is also evidence that young people from relatively lower social strata are more likely to become delinquent (Matsumoto 1984, Hoshino 1986, Hirota 1999, Yonekawa in this volume). This is also the same finding that is found in other industrialized coun-

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tries. For instance, studies in Germany (for example Engel/Hurrelmann 1989) point out that adolescents whose fathers are less educated and have a lower socioeconomic status commit delinquency more often. 3. It has also often been proven in Japan that the commitment of lowachieving students to school life is relatively low and they tend to misbehave more often (Metzler/Metzler 2000). Delinquent adolescents are likely to show more problems in adjusting to school by exhibiting defiant behavior in the classroom or by skipping school (Matsumoto 1984). This is true not only for Japan but also for Germany (Busch 2000). This relation between school, family background and problem behavior seems to be same in Japan as in many other societies. Therefore, a similar explanation for delinquent behavior can be also found. If adolescents fail to be successful at school in the context of intense academic pressure, they feel frustrated and commit themselves to delinquency.4 However, this may be only an interpretation of results from quantitative data analyses and cannot explain what is really happening within the Japanese triangle in cases of adolescents from lower social strata. Thus, it is worth examining this question with regard to studies with qualitative approaches whose major strength is that they can clarify complex relationships of the phenomenon. 3.2 Findings from Studies with Qualitative Approaches No American-Japanese or German-Japanese comparative studies has ever tried to answer questions about why and how adolescents come to misbehave and what role family and school play in their respective cultural contexts. In the following section, a review of some qualitative studies in Japan in comparison with German cases will be attempted. It is not possible to give a conclusive answer to the question without any cross-cultural studies. Therefore, the purpose of this review is to provide some useful perspectives for further comparative studies by analyzing how problem behavior arises in respective cultures. There are fewer studies focused on youth in lower social strata or misbehaving adolescents using qualitative approaches than quan4

A significant difference between the German and Japanese discussion is that the German discussion focuses on the inequality of educational opportunity according to family background as a cause of delinquency, whereas the social strata of students play only a minor role in the Japanese discussion (Foljanty-Jost 2000, Metzler 2000).


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titative ones. However, qualitative approaches certainly proposed some interesting perspectives in respect to the following three points: first, the diversity of the triangle; second, the complexity of interaction processes between family, school, community and adolescents in which problem behavior arises; and third, the importance of insider perspectives, such as how misbehaving youth explain their own misbehavior. In this section, some findings mainly from qualitative studies are presented according to these three points. 3.2.1 The Diversity of the Triangle It must be noted that categories such as “lower social stratum”, “school”, or “problem behavior” include diverse sub-categories. For example, in Japan the category “families from lower social strata” can include various family types, such as families in a working-class community, those in a Buraku5 community, a segment of single-parent families, families with handicapped members or with a sick person and cultural minorities. With respect to school, we should not forget that school culture is also diverse. There are, for example, different types of approaches with regard to school control as shown towards student problem behavior and also between schools with a lot of trouble in the same working-class community. As Shimizu and Tokuda (1991) explain, one is characterized by tight control and physical punishment and the other mainly by frequent counseling sessions, home visits and contacts with misbehaving students also outside the school. And it must also be observed that student sub-cultures are also diverse within the same school and that there are also different types of student problem behavior.

5

Buraku people are the largest population group facing discrimination in Japan. They are not a racial or a national minority, but a caste-like minority among the ethnic Japanese. They are generally recognized as descendants of outcast populations in the past. Outcasts were assigned such social functions as slaughtering animals and executing criminals and the general public perceived these functions as “polluting acts” under Buddhist and Shintoist beliefs. At present, the word “Buraku” is usually referred to as communities where marginalised Buraku people reside. Today, there are 6,000 Buraku communities with an overall population of more than 3 million. Although the living standards of Buraku people have become better compared to the past, there are still gaps between Buraku and non-Buraku people. In addition, there are many incidents of discrimination, particularly in marriage and employment as well as discriminatory remarks and inquiries made by non-Buraku people, including public officials.

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3.2.2 The Complex Interaction Processes Between Family, School, Community and Problem Behavior As illustrated above, Japanese behavior towards children is characterized by the building of emotional bonds that lead to the integration of students into school life. We will now ask in which human relationships some students from lower social strata become delinquent. Is the strategy of building emotional bonds effective neither for the academic success of such adolescents nor for their integration into school life? Here we concentrate first on the problem of academic success and observe the following three points as reasons why and how adolescents from lower social strata tend to be less successful at school: 1) the different living conditions between school teachers and students from lower social strata, 2) the stereotyping or discriminative views on the part of school teachers as well as community and 3) the lower academic aspirations of parents from lower social strata. a) Academic Success of Children and Adolescents from Lower Social Strata 1. Both in Germany and Japan there are studies that point out that student behavior from lower social strata in a classroom tends to be evaluated negatively by school teachers who belong to middle-class culture (Nishida 1996b, Ditton 1993, Gomolla 1998). This can lead to their poor school performance and finally to low educational achievement. Although this mechanism may vary according to students’ various family backgrounds such as those found in workingclass culture or cultural minorities, one common point is that the living conditions (Bourdieu 1987) of such students plays a role in the evaluation process in a classroom. This might be a complex interaction process in which lower expectations on the part of teachers towards students from lower social strata—as Auernheimer (1996) puts it hypothetically—fuction as a “Pygmalion-effect” in a classroom. 2. The stereotypical view of teachers towards families from lower social strata may also exert negative effects on students from minority groups. Kudomi and his team (1993) studied this mechanism in a municipal apartment with a high rate of families receiving income support by doing interviews with residents, parents and youth, teachers and social workers. According to this study, the following complex relationship was found. Despite the high educa-


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tional aspirations of single parents, they often become the target of gossip in the neighborhood and are isolated in the community. They have almost no resources of time and energy to deal with their children’s academic or behavioral problems at the school. On the other hand, schoolteachers have a stereotypical view of singleparent families or those receiving income support and believe that such families do not take care of their children sufficiently or do not support their children’s schoolwork. Due to this stereotype, they cannot develop adequate support programs with such families that students really need. Therefore, if such students fail to be involved in school life and associate themselves with delinquent peer groups or exhibit “school refusal syndrome”, teachers simply blame their family background or students themselves. In the case of Buraku youth in a fishing village studied by Ikeda (1985), factors outside of the family and school also play an important role. Buraku youth, whose parents and ancestors have suffered a long history of discrimination, tend to fail at school due to their disadvantages. At the same time, because of discrimination and the exclusion of Buraku youth in the town community, they form peer groups that are characterized by a unique lifestyle and strong solidarity. The manual worker culture of Buraku people is reflected in this out-of-school lifestyle. Thus, they rebel against school, which is, however, only one example of a reaction to the exclusion from dominant groups of the town community. Similar patterns may also be true in German cases. In Germany it is often said that immigrant (especially Turkish) adolescents commit themselves to delinquency the most. Auernheimer (1998, 2000) points out that German schoolteachers have stereotypical views towards Muslim students as well as their families. They are likely to regard immigrant families as authoritarian and such students as oppressed. This shows a concordance with discriminative views of people in a community (Klink/Wagner 1999). In such contexts some adolescents—as Tertilt (1997) illustrates with respect to adolescents from Turkish backgrounds—tend to build peer groups that show strong solidarity and also commit criminal activities. According to a study conducted by Popp (2000) using questionnaires and interviews, Turkish students experience more negative labeling and feel less accepted in their class group than their German classmates.

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Such discriminative views on the part of the teachers or community and classmates is not always the direct cause of problem behavior of adolescents from lower social strata. However, it at least plays a role in the whole interaction process. 3. It is well known that working-class parents have lower academic aspiration for their children in Western societies (for Germany see IFS-Institut 1998: 18). Little attention has been paid to this phenomenon in Japan due to its famous image as a meritocratic society in which everyone is geared to participate in academic competition (Kariya 1995). However, as stated above, some findings from quantitative studies deny this image. Nishida (1996a), who studied a working-class community through participant observation and interviews, also pointed out that parents and adolescents have low academic aspirations, are not competitive at school and do not share a desire for the middle-class oriented life course such as going to a high-ranking university and getting a good job at a famous company. However, they all encourage and cheer high-achieving classmates to be successful at entrance examinations for good high schools. Such low aspirations of students and parents in workingclass communities are, however, considered to be due of a lack of engagement by schoolteachers. Thus, underprivileged adolescents often fail to perform academically and lose their motivation for active participation in school learning. This seems to be common in Japanese and German cases. Here may be some potential that leads them to disconnect from the school and to commit delinquent actions. However, it would be hasty to conclude that Japanese adolescents from lower social strata build no positive emotional bonds at school. b) Integration of Children and Adolescents Into School Life The Japanese school system has a wide role by trying to integrate students into school life and convey social norms to students through emotional bonds more actively than for example, the German school system. How does this strategy work for cases of adolescents from lower social strata? Findings from some qualitative studies indicate its effectiveness in the following two features of the Japanese school system: 1) its life guidance and 2) the plurality of its evaluation criteria.


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1. Although Japanese teachers view students from lower social strata with their stereotypes and blame the family background for student misbehavior, they try to be eagerly or more eagerly committed to such students through life guidance than to well-behaving students and tend to take on parental roles. A case study at a school in a working-class area (Nishida 1994) shows that teachers at this school also place emphasis on building emotional human bonds through various extra-curricular activities such as frequent contacts with misbehaving students and their home, home visits, phone calls to parents, counseling sessions and a homeroom newspaper which informs parents about everyday life in the classroom. It is not uncommon for teachers to make such efforts almost daily till late at night. If such efforts are acknowledged by misbehaving students and they have the feeling that teachers are working for their sake, then they will accept the teachers’ advice and also punishment, including being hit, as “a matter of course” (Nishida 1994).6 Because of such close emotional bonds between them, scenes of misbehaving students and teachers who sob together saying goodbye on the last school day are often observed. Nishida points out that this contrasts with the case of “lads” at a British school in a working class area, as illustrated by Willis (1977). After they rebelled against the school, they were happy to leave it. 2. One more feature of the Japanese school system is the plurality of criteria for evaluating students. Kaneko (1999) discovered through her classroom observation at an elementary school that there are different strategies among pupils to gain a respectable position in the classroom and they are not limited to academic work. For example, lower-graded pupils positively recognize their teachers’ evaluation in everyday life and react to it accordingly. They try to attain their own positions in the classroom through actively participating in school events or projects, taking responsibility as class representatives, or presenting their talents in some fields such as being good at dealing with computers or handicrafts. In other words, the Japanese school system provides students with diverse ways of being acknowledged and evaluated positively. This is also 6

Although physical punishment is forbidden by law in Japan, it seems to be used at schools. Nishida explains that student acceptance of being hit seems to depend on the closeness of teacher-student relationship. Imazu (1999) states that physical punishment seems to be—despite being officially denied—acknowledged by the majority in public opinion and regarded as the “whip of love”.

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true for club activities or school events. Students who are not able to perform well in academic subjects but are good at sports can enjoy a high status at school due to their talents in a sports club or sports event. Accordingly, studies on club activities in junior high schools (Nishijima et al. 1999) and in high schools (Shiromatsu 1993, 1994) proved that students who engaged in clubs actively are likely to show positive attitudes towards school, even though they do not perform well academically. Clubs contribute by integrating low-achieving students into school life successfully. These features—emotional bonds and the plurality of the evaluation criteria—might contrast with the situation in the German school system. Combe and Helsper (1994), who observed a classroom at a “Gesamtschule” (comprehensive school) in Germany and conducted interviews with a misbehaving student named Tim from Croatia, describe how Tim’s problem behavior arises in a classroom. Tim lives with his mother who cannot speak the German language well and feels overburden by the responsibility for Tim’s education as well as her hard job. Making mistakes in a class and being laughed at by classmates and teachers hurts the self-esteem of a low-achieving student such as Tim. He attempts to take the position of ignoring academic tasks, disturbing the classroom, or exerting violence towards classmates. His homeroom teacher, Gert, regards not only academic work but also social relationships in the classroom as important. However, his image of an ideal student seems to be limited to one type of student, that is a critical student who actively participates in a class and is engaged in student committees such as Rolf, who often becomes a target of violence exerted by Tim. There seem to be few institutionalized systems that reward diverse student talents other than academic work in the German classroom or school. It is also interesting that this misbehaving student Tim tries to build personal and informal relationships with teachers in the classroom (pp. 77–93). Such attempts were always rejected by teachers in the context of the academic purpose of the classes. More noteworthy is that his homeroom teacher, who shows personal interest in his students, invites them to his home, visits parents and plans some events in order to build strong social relationships in his class. This, however, brings more conflicts or an emotional and personal character into relationships between him and (misbehaving) students such as Tim. Moreover, attempts of the homeroom teacher to build close relationships with his students cannot be accepted by them; Tim demands a certain


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distance between him and the teacher because it does not suit the school context from his perspective. Why did the teacher fail to build a positive relationship with Tim? Against the background of such contrasting cases in Japan and Germany, there may be various factors that cannot be identified only according to the studies cited above. Nevertheless, one possible explanation is that the relatively narrow definition of the evaluation criteria in German school culture might gain a more ambivalent character due to a close and positive teacher-student relationship than at a Japanese school with diverse evaluation criteria. One more explanation is that a certain distance, which Tim demanded from the teacher, can mirror the meaning of emotional human relationships in a whole socio-cultural context. Trommsdorff (1984) indicates that the interference of parents in matters of decision-making on a life course tends to be refused by German adolescents, whereas it is likely to be regarded as love and a close relationship by their Japanese counterparts. The distance in human relationships to a certain degree may be needed for adolescents to develop independent identities in a German context. In a Japanese context, it is a relevant condition for being able to build close human relationships towards maturity (see also LeTendre 1996, Rohlen 1996). In this context, demands for personal attention are inevitable and might be accepted more easily. As LeTendre (2000) discovered, Japanese teachers interpret disruptive student behavior as a demand for attention. Contrary to this, Tim’s attempts to get teachers’ attention were often rejected by them and defined as disruptive, in line with the views of American teachers. On these grounds, we may conclude that the Japanese strategy basically works also in cases of adolescents from lower social strata with regard to integration into school life and the transmission of values such as interpersonal harmony. We can therefore assume that this contributes to reducing delinquent behavior among adolescents generally. Nevertheless, even though emotional bonds at a Japanese school integrate low achievers into school life successfully, it cannot compensate them for their inability in academic work. Nishida (1994) described most of these adolescents as dropping out or losing their jobs after they graduate from junior high school. In such cases, junior high school teachers are worried about them but remain helpless.

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3.2.3 Insider perspectives It is now interesting to ask why and how some adolescents—despite the relatively strong integrative power of Japanese schools—commit delinquent actions? Is the strategy to build a strong human bond not effective for them? Let us look at this question from another perspective and move to the third point of “the insider perspective”, that is the motives that misbehaving adolescents assign to their own actions. Important findings with regard to this question can be summarized in three points: firstly, the attraction of deviant actions is the main motive; secondly, such actions are important for adolescent self-identity; and thirdly, delinquent activities occur in the dynamics of activities in peer groups. With regard to the first point, it is critical that young people from lower social strata—as already mentioned—not perceive an academic career or knowledge gained at school as useful. Their life plans differ considerably from those of going to a good school, entering a good university and getting a job at a good company. Therefore, it seems that psychological strain from, for example, an “inferiority complex” or frustration arising from limited academic achievement, which scholars and journalists often infer is a major cause of delinquent behavior, is in fact not the cause of delinquent behavior. An ethnographic study of motorcycle gangs by Sato (1991) explains that one of the important factors that lead the youth to activities of a motorcycle gang, is the attraction of these activities; the play-like quality of the activities was perceived by them as the most exciting and thrilling experience. Once they are less interested in schoolwork, such exciting experiences in their peer groups gain more attraction. Thus, from the perspective of youth, their motive for misbehavior is not from the frustration of being a failure at school, but from the fun of being bad. This was also shown by the study on Buraku youth of Ikeda (1985) with regard to rebellion against schoolteachers, fighting, vandalism and truancy. This motive can be also found among criminal groups of Turkish adolescents as well as hooligans in Germany (Bohnsack/Nohl, in press). Such adolescents seek exciting “action” on the street or in soccer games that contrast with the boring life of monotonous bluecollar labor. Second, deviant activities play a role in the adolescent search for self-identity. Sato (1991) pointed out that the activities of motorcycle gangs have an important significance for adolescent development of


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their self-identity, that is macho identity. The motorcycle gang provides adolescents with a self-image that exemplifies the rough and tough masculinity. After their adolescent “moratorium”, most of the motorcycle gangs members become according to Sato, “ordinary” manual workers. They also know that this moratorium comes to an end at a certain age (mostly 18–20). This interpretation is more valid in the sense that the crime rate of Japanese juveniles falls within the older age sections of youth (see footnote 1). The same is also true for Turkish criminal adolescents in Germany. Bohnsack and Nohl (in press) demonstrate that problem behavior of German and immigrant adolescents in Germany reach its highest point in the middle of their adolescent crisis. After a period of “criminal actions” with peers, they begin to orient themselves to a non-criminal way in which they seek their own individual style of self-fulfillment. Thus, a part of delinquent actions might be interpreted as one aspect of “adolescence” in lower social strata both in Japan and Germany. Third, striving for “action" or, in other words, the seeking of selfidentity seems to occur often in a series of activities in peer groups. Busch (2000) indicates that membership of groups whose group culture is characterized by group solidarity, provocative behavior and risk-taking, strong group boundaries and a hierarchic group structure is connected to delinquent and aggressive behavior. Such features can be also found in groups of motorcycle gangs, which are described by Sato (1991) as well as in peer groups of aggressive immigrant adolescents in Germany studied by Bohnsack and Nohl (in press). Shimizu and Shimizu (2001), who observed immigrant adolescents from Brazil and Indo-China in Japan, report also that some of them form peer groups and rebel against the school or commit delinquent activities. And in this case, it seems to be related to seeking self-identity as a cultural minority whose cultural background is at risk in the context of the dominant majority culture. We therefore can assume that the emotional bonds in human relationships at a Japanese school cannot so easily attract some segments of adolescents such as peer groups, which are not sanctioned by the school.

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4. Summary and Discussion In this article, findings mainly from studies using qualitative approaches were summarized to pose hypothetical viewpoints for further research on adolescent delinquency and its prevention. The core of cultural policies of education and socialization in Japan is characterized by emotional bonds in human relationships in which adult norms and values are transmitted to youngsters. Focusing on adolescents from lower social strata who tend to commit delinquent activities more often than middle-class adolescents, we can assume that the Japanese school system is successful to a certain degree in integrating such adolescents into school life through the wider role of the school and teacher as well as various evaluation criteria at school. On the other hand, the disadvantage youngsters from lower social strata experience in reaching higher educational achievement do not seem to be compensated by the Japanese school system. This is the same situation as in other industrialized societies such as Germany. A widespread notion that such students become delinquent because of frustration or an “inferiority complex” from failure at school has not been proven. It is more likely that delinquent actions arise out of various factors in complicated ways. Due to some disadvantages, lower academic aspirations and/or discrimination, children and adolescents from lower social strata are likely to fail to perform well academically and their motivation at school decreases accordingly. Although some students find ways to do activities at school actively and integrate themselves into the school, there are adolescents who build peer groups not sanctioned by the school and commit delinquent actions because of the attraction of delinquent behavior and/or their demand for a self-identity in adolescence. To return to our interest at the beginning, we can say that the low crime rate of Japanese juveniles can be explained by “Japanese behavior towards children” which works relatively successfully. This might be an advantage of the Japanese school system in comparison to the German school. On the other hand, the pessimistic view within Japan seems to be rather related to “adult norms and values”. In the following last section, we will point out three problems of “Japanese adult norms and values”.


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1. Because of these strong norms shared by adults, Japanese society is also more likely to cause so-called “moral panic” (see also Tokuoka in this volume). And this might contribute to the discovery of “new problems” in children and adolescent behavior. Itô (Watanabe/Itô 1996) argues that the growing incidence of children’s behavior that is regarded by adults as “not desirable” has been defined as a “problem”. Adults expect that “children should go to school everyday happily” and “maintain interpersonal harmony”. But those who do not do this are called “school refusers” or “bullied” students. This also seems to be related to a lack of perspective which takes the attraction of delinquent activities or the seeking of selfidentity as an adolescent motive into account concerning juvenile delinquency in Japan. This may be a side effect of “Japanese adult norms and values” which include a strong belief in how adolescents should be: “Young people should learn social skills for interpersonal harmony and develop personality traits such as endurance and persistence under conditions of hardship and discomfort.” “They should not indulge themselves in material youth cultures or have close boy-girl relationships at an early age.” Nevertheless, such strong norms and values may become a “double-edged sword”. Whereas adult consensus on the importance of interpersonal harmony and efforts can foster emotional bonds and the integration of adolescents into school life, it also helps adults to define the adolescent search for self-identity as “deviant behavior” (see also Toyama-Bialke 2002). Without acknowledging such adolescent demand for self-identity, it is impossible to distinguish between delinquent behavior that is specific only for adolescent periods and that which develops into anti-social deviant behavior continuously past adult age (Petermann 1995, Busch 2000). It is also impossible to support adolescents seeking self-identity in non-delinquent ways. 2. The second problem is that little attention has been paid to social inequality with regard to educational achievement as well as delinquent behavior in Japan. This includes questions such as how Japanese teachers contribute to social reproduction in a classroom, which discriminative or stereotypical views towards students from lower social strata they have and how these affect students. Such questions have been often regarded as taboo in the process of educational expansion for Japanese teachers who place a strong emphasis on the equal treatment of students. Because of the strong

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belief in Japanese “meritocratic” society, little attention has been paid to scholarly work on this issue (Kariya 1995). Japanese teachers do not recognize or pretend not to recognize differences among students according to their family background, although they really do see them (Kudomi 1993, Nishida 1996b). This may differ from Western circumstances. Some ideological premises such as the notion that children are all the same in ability and have the same possibility to develop themselves may play a role and lead to a discrepancy between recognition and action or between levels of recognition. We need further research that focuses on this problem. As demonstrated above, it is likely that adolescent delinquency is related to the problem of social reproduction. If it is strongly believed by adults that school success depends only on student effort to be integrated in school life and improved through hard work, it is likely to be overlooked that students come from diverse family backgrounds. It is necessary to clarify various processes on how students from lower social strata fail to be successful academically. One must identify the various disadvantages of some children and adolescents which may differ depending on whether they come from working-class families, Buraku families, single-parent families, cultural minorities and so forth and meet adequate support measures for each group (Kudomi 1993, Shimizu/Shimizu 2001). 3. In the social context of “moral panic”, the educational system has been criticized for the last two or three decades in public discussion within Japan. The mass media claim that the surge of problem behavior as well as juvenile crime is caused by youth frustration with the oppressive Japanese school culture. This is supposed to be represented by strict school rules, strong control over student behavior by schoolteachers, or old-fashioned values such as an emphasis on endurance and persistence in non-democratic human relations. Added to this, critics argue that the strong academic pressure in a highly competitive Japanese school system intensifies student frustration and that the standardized school curriculum hinders development of student's individuality and freedom. However, those critiques have not necessarily been proven empirically. For example, as already indicated, it is doubtful whether Japanese school is highly competitive (see also Fujita, T. 1996). Moreover, although there is no evidence that indicates direct causal relationships between the alleged surge of delinquency and the alleged problems of the Japanese school system, such critiques


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provide a motive for the ongoing drastic reform of Japanese educational system (see also H. Fujita in this volume). This might undermine the strengths of the Japanese educational system. Added to this, these unproven critiques within Japanese society have been transferred to the international media and have created some notorious images of the Japanese educational system (see also Kreitz-Sandberg 1996). This may deprive other nations of learning from Japan. Recently in Germany, for instance, expanding the role of the school and placing more emphasis on the social aspects of school learning have been discussed. However, a stereotypical understanding of the Japanese system, which the Japanese discussion itself brought about, may hinder Germany from learning from the Japanese example (Schubert 1998). Therefore, it is necessary to identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Japanese system in an international comparison. Because of the limited number of studies that can be referred to in dealing with our interest, we need further cross-cultural research. This would provide us with comparable data between cultures as well as between different sub-groups within a respective culture, especially using qualitative approaches.

5. References Auernheimer, Georg (2000): Schulkonflikte in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft (School Conflicts in the Immigration Society). Migration und Soziale Arbeit 3–4, pp. 36–43. —— et al. (1996): Interkulturelle Erziehung im Schulalltag (Intercultural Education in Daily Life at School). Münster: Waxmann. —— et al. (1998): Wie gehen Lehrer/innen mit kulturellen Differenzen um? (How do Teachers Deal with Cultural Differences?). Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 1, pp. 597–611. Ayukawa, Jun (1995): The Construction of Juvenile Delinquency as a Social Problem in Post World War II Japan. In: Holstein, James A.; Miller, Gale (eds.): Perspectives on Social Problems, Vol. 7. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, pp. 311–329. Azuma, Hiroshi (1994): Nihonjin no shitsuke to kyôiku: hattatsu no Nichibei hikaku ni motozuite (Discipline and Education of the Japanese. A Comparison of Development in Japan and the United States). Tôkyô: Tôkyô Daigaku Shuppansha. Beck, Ulrich (1986): Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity). Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp. Bourdieu, Pierre (1987): Die feinen Unterschiede (Schwibs, Bernd; Russer, Achim Bernd, Trans. “La distinction”). 4. ed., Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp (Original work published 1979).

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Bohnsack, Ralf/Nohl, Arnd-Michael (in press). Jugendkulturen und Aktionismus: Eine rekonstruktive empirische Analyse am Beispiel des Breakdance (Youth Culture and “Actionism“: An Reconstructive Empirical Analysis of the Breakdance Example). In: Merkens, H.; Zinnecker, Jürgen (eds.): Jahrbuch Jugendforschung Vol. 1, Opladen: Leske+Budrich. Busch, Ludger (2000): Jugendcliquen und aggressives Verhalten in der Schule: Die Bedeutung der Gruppenkultur (Peer Groups and Aggressive Behavior in School: The Importance of Group Cultures). Empirische Pädagogik 14, 1, pp. 3–33. Combe, Arno/Helsper, Werner (1994): Was geschieht im Klassenzimmer? (What Happens in the Classroom?). Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag. Crystal, David S./Stevenson, Harold W. (1995): What is a bad kid? Answers of adolescents and their mothers in three cultures. Journal of Research on Adolescence 5, 1, pp. 71–91. Ditton, Hartmut (1993): Bildung und Ungleichheit im Gefüge von Unterricht, schulischem Kontext und Schulsystem (Education and Inequality in the Context of Classroom, School and School System). Die Deutsche Schule 85, pp. 348–363. Engel, Uwe/Hurrelmann, Klaus (1989): Psychosoziale Belastung im Jugendalter: Empirische Befunde zum Einfluß von Familie, Schule und Gleichaltrigengruppe (Psycho-social Strain in Adolescence: Empirical Findings on Influences of Family, School and Peer Groups). Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Foljanty-Jost, Gesine (2000): Schule und Gewalt in Deutschland und Japan—Problemstand, Analyse und Prävention im Vergleich (School and Violence in Germany and Japan—Problems, Analysis and Prevention in Comparison). Materialien zu Jugend und Devianz in Japan: Occasional Papers Band 11. Veröffentlichungen des Seminars für Japanologie der Martin-Luther-Universität HalleWittenberg. Fujita, Takeshi (1996): Senbatsu shisutemu to chûgakusei no kyôsô ishiki (The Entrance Exam System and the Competetive Consciousness of Junior High School Students). Tôkyô Daigaku Daigakuin kyôikugaku kenkyûka kiyô 36, pp. 139–148. Fukaya, Masashi (1983): Monogurafu chûgakusei no sekai: Chûgakusei no bukatsudô (Monographs of Junior High School Students’ World: Junior High School Students and School Clubs). Vol. 14, Tôkyô: Fukutake Shoten. Fukuzawa, Rebecca I. (1996): The Path to Adulthood according to Japanese Junior High Schools. In Rohlen, Thomas P./LeTendre, Gerald K. (eds.): Teaching and Learning in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 295–320. Fuligni, Andrew J./Stevenson, Harold W. (1995): Time Use and Mathematics Achievement among American, Chinese and Japanese High School Students. Child Development 66, 3, pp. 830–842. Gomolla, Mechthild (1998): Institutionelle Diskriminierung in der Schule (Institutional Discrimination in the School). Das Argument 224, pp. 129–143. Heitmeyer, Wilhelm/Olk, Thomas (1991): Individualisierung von Jugend (Individualization of Youth). Weinheim: Juventa. Hess, Robert D.; Azuma, Hiroshi (1991): Cultural Support for Schooling: Contrasts Between Japan and the United States. Educational Researcher 20, 9, pp. 2–8. Hirota, Teruyuki (1998): Kodomo no genzai o dô miruka (How should We Examine Childhood in Contemporary Japan?). Kyôiku shakaigaku kenkyû 63, pp. 5–23.


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—— (1999): Nihonjin no shitsuke wa suitai shitaka? (Do Japanese Families today Fail to Educate Kids?). Tôkyô: Kodansha. Holtappels, Heinz Günter (1994): Ganztagsschule und Schulöffnung (Full-Day Schooling and Opening the School). Weinheim: Juventa. Hoshino, Kanehiro (1986): Wagakuni no shakai henka to hanzai hikô no sûsei (A Tendency towards Social Change and Delinquency in Japan). Hanzai to Hikô 69, pp. 4–30. IFS-Institut (1998): Jahrbuch der Schulentwicklung (Yearbook on School Development), vol. 10, Weinheim: Juventa. Ikeda, Hiroshi (1985). Hisabetsu buraku ni okeru kyôiku to bunka: Gyôson buraku ni okeru seinen no raifu sutairu ni kansuru esunogurafî (Educational Achievement of Buraku Youth and Its Cultural Background: Ethnography of a Rural Buraku Community and Lifestyle of Youth). Ôsaka Daigaku Ningen Kagakubu kiyô 11, pp. 249–273. Imazu, Kôjirô (1997): “Taibatsu wa hitsuyô da”: Kakusareta otona no jikoai to shihaiyoku (“Physical Punishment is Necessary“: Adults’ hidden Self-love and Desire of Control). In Imazu, Kôjirô; Hida, Daijirô (eds): Kyôiku gensetsu o dô yomuka. Tôkyô: Shinyôsha, pp. 233–258. Ishida, Hiroshi (1989): Gakureki to shakai keizaiteki chii no tassei (Educational Credentials and Socio-Economic Status). Shakaigaku hyôron 159, pp. 252–266. Itô, Shigeki (1997): “Ijime wa konzetsu sarenakereba naranai”: zenhitei no jubaku to katarushisu (“Bullying should be Eradicated”: Magic and Catharsis of the Total Negation). In Imazu, Kôjirô; Hida, Daijirô (eds): Kyôiku gensetsu o dô yomuka. Tôkyô: Shinyôsha, pp. 207–231. Kaneko, Mariko (1999): Kyôshitsu ni okeru hyôka o meguru dainamikusu—kodomotachi no kôdô senryaku to gakkô tekiô (Dynamics of Evaluation in the Classroom—Pupils’ Strategies and Adjustment to School). Kyôiku shakaigaku kenkyû 65, pp. 69–89. Kariya, Takehiko (1995): Taishu kyôiku shakai no yukue (The Future of Mass Education Society). Tôkyô: Chûô Kôronsha. Klink, Andreas; Wagner, Ulrich (1999): Discrimination Against Ethnic Minority in Germany: Going Back to the Field. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 29, 2, pp. 402–423. Kornadt, Hans-Joachim (1988): Entwicklungsbedingungen unterschiedlicher Aggressivität in Japan und Deutschland: Beitrag des Kulturvergleichs zur Motivationstheorie (Developmental Conditions for Differences in Aggressiveness between Japan and Germany: Contribution of Cross-Cultural Research to Motivation Theory). Psychologische Beiträge 30, pp. 344–374. ——/Trommsdorff, Gisela (1984): Erziehungsziele im Kulturvergleich (A Comparison of Educational Goals). In: Trommsdorff, Gisela (ed.): Jahrbuch für empirische Erziehungswissenschaft. Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann, pp. 191–212. —— (1990): Naive Erziehungstheorien japanischer Mütter (Japanese Mothers’ Lay Theories of Socialization. A German-Japanese Comparison). Zeitschrift für Sozialisationsforschung und Erziehungssoziologie 10, pp. 357–376.

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Kreitz-Sandberg, Susanne (1994): Jugend in Japan. Eine empirische Untersuchung zur Adoleszenz in einer „anderen Moderne“ (Youth in Japan: An Empirical Study on Adolescence in “Another Modernity“). Rheinfelden, Berlin: Schäuble Verlag. —— (1996): Suizid bei Jugendlichen in Japan und Deutschland—Ein Beitrag zur kulturvergleichenden Jugendforschung (Suicide in Japan and Germany. A Comparison from the Perspective of Youth Studies). Japan Studien: Jahrbuch des Deutschen Instituts für Japanstudien der Philipp-Franz-von-Siebold-Stiftung, vol. 8, pp. 287–318. Kudomi, Yoshiyuki (1993): Yutakasa no teihen ni ikiru—Gakkô shisutemu to jakusha no saiseisan (Living at the Bottom of Affluent Society—School System and Reproduction of Disadvantages). Tôkyô: Aoki Shoten. LeTendre, Gerald K. (1996): Shido: The Concept of Guidance. In Rohlen, Thomas P., LeTendre, Gerald K. (eds.): Teaching and Learning in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 275–294. —— (2000): Learning to be Adolescent: Growing Up in U.S. and Japanese Junior High Schools. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Lewis, Catherine C. (1984): Cooperation and Control in Japanese Nursery Schools. Comparative Education Review 28, pp. 69–84. —— (1996): Forstering Social and Intellectual Development: the Roots of Japanese Educational Success. In Rohlen, Thomas P./LeTendre, Gerald K. (eds.): Teaching and Learning in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 79–97. Matsumoto, Yoshio (1984): Zusetsu hikô mondai no shakaigaku (Handbook of Sociology of Delinquency). Tôkyô: Kôseikan. Metzler, Anne (1999): Jugendkriminalität in Japan im internationalen Vergleich (Japanese Juvenile Delinquency in International Comparison). Materialien zu Jugend und Devianz in Japan: Occasional Papers Band 8. Veröffentlichungen des Seminars für Japanologie der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. ——/Metzler, Manuel (2000): Wer sind die Täter? Merkmale krimineller japanischer Jugendlicher (Who are the Offenders? Features of Criminal Juveniles in Japan). In Foljanty-Jost, Gesine (ed.): Schule, Schüler und Gewalt: Beiträge zu Deutschland, Japan, China und der Mongolei (School, Students and Violence: Reports on Germany, Japan, China and Mongolia). München: Iudicium, pp. 170–195. Metzler, Manuel (2000): Devianz auf Japanisch—Wissenschaftliche Hintergründe des Verständnisses von Norm und Abweichung (Deviance in Japanese—Scholarly Background for Understanding of Norm and Deviance). Materialien zu Jugend und Devianz in Japan: Occasional Papers Band 7. Veröffentlichungen des Seminars für Japanologie der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Nishida, Yoshimasa (1994): Seito shidô no esunogurafî—kyôiku konnankô ni okeru “tsunagaru shidô” to sono haikei (Ethnography of Student Guidance—“Guidance of Bonding” at one Problem School and its Background). Shakai mondai kenkyû 42, 2, pp. 323–352. —— (1996a): Bunka jutaku-gai no seishun: Teikaisô shûju chiku ni okeru kyôiku chii tassei (Adolescence in “bunka jutaku” Apartments: Educational Achievement in a Low-income Residential Area). In Tani, Tomio (ed): Raifu hisutorî o manabu hito no tame ni (Handbook of Oral History). Tôkyô: Sekai Shisôsha, pp. 149–178.


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—— (1996b): Fubyôdô no saiseisan to kyôshi. Kyôshi bunka ni okeru sabetsusei wo megutte (Reproduction of Social Inequality and School Teacher. Discrimination in the Teachers’ Culture). In Yagi, Tadashi (ed.): Hisabetsu sekai to shakaigaku (World of Discrimination and Sociology). Nishijima, Hiroshi et al. (1999): Chûgakkô seikatsu to bukatsudô ni kansuru shakaigakuteki kenkyû (School Life and Club Activities in Japanese Junior High Schools: A Sociological Study). Tôkyô daigaku daigakuin kyôikugaku kenkyûka kiyô 39, pp. 137–163. Olk, Thomas/Bathke, Gustav-Wilhelm/Hartnuß, Birger (2000): Jugendhilfe und Schule. Empirische Befunde und theoretische Reflexionen zur Schulsozialarbeit (Youth Support and School. Empirical Findings and Theoretical Reflection on Social Work at School). Weinheim: Juventa. Petermann, Franz (1995): Aggressives Verhalten (Aggressive Behavior). In Oerter, Ralf; Montada, Leo (eds.): Entwicklungspsychologie. Weinheim: PVU, pp. 1016–1023. Popp, Ulrike (2000): Gewalt an Schulen als “Türkenproblem”? Gewaltniveau, Wahrnehmung von Klassenklima und sozialer Diskriminierung bei deutschen und türkischen Schülerinnen und Schülern (Violence in Schools as a Problem of Turkish pupils? Level of Violence, Perception of the Social Climate in Learning Groups and Social Discrimination among German and Turkish Pupils). Empirische Pädagogik 14, 1, pp. 59–91. Rohlen, Thomas P.(1996): Building Character. In: Rohlen, Thomas P./LeTendre, Gerald K. (ed.): Teaching and Learning in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 50–74. Sato, Ikuya (1991): Kamikaze Biker: Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press. Shimahara, Nobuo/Sakai, Akira (1995): Learning to Teach in Two Cultures: Japan and the United States. New York: Garland. Shimizu, Kokichi/Tokuda, Kôzô (1991): Yomigaere kôritsu chûgaku—Amagasaki shiritsu minami chûgakkô no esunogurafî (Public School again—Ethnography of Minami Junior High School in Amagasaki). Tôkyô: Yûshindô. Shimizu, Kokichi/Shimizu, Mutsumi (2001): Nyûkama to kyôiku: Gakkô bunka to esunishitî no kattô o megutte (Newcomer Kids and Education: Conflicts between School Culture and Ethnicity). Tôkyô: Akashi Shoten. Shiromatsu, Ken (1993): Bukatsudô ni kansuru jisshôteki kenkyû (Empirical Study on School Clubs). Kyôikugaku kenkyûu kiyô 39, pp. 129–133. —— (1994): Bukatsudô to seikatsu bunka no kankei ni kansuru kenkyû (A Study on the Relationship between School Clubs and Student Subculture). Kyôikugaku kenkyû kiyô 40, pp. 130–135. Schubert, Volker (1998): Kooperatives Lernen lernen? Zur Diskussion über das Bildungswesen in Japan (How to learn Cooperative Learning. On the Discussion on Education in Japan). Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 44, 3, pp. 397–409. Stevenson, Harold W. et al. (1990): Context of Achievement: A Study of American, Chinese, and Japanese Children. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 55, pp. 1–116. Tertilt, Hermann (1996): Turkish Power Boys. Zur Interpretation einer gewaltbereiten Subkultur (Turkish Power Boys. Towards an Interpretation of a Violent Subculture). Zeitschrift für Sozialisationsforschung und Erziehungssoziologie 17, 1, pp. 19–29.

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Tobin, Joseph J.; Wu, David Y.H.; Davidson, Dana H. (1989): Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the United States. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Toyama-Bialke, Chisaki (1998): Adolescents’ Daily Lives and Parental Attitudes Towards the School: A German-Japanese Comparative Study. Studies in Educational Evaluation 24, 4, pp. 347–367. —— (2000): Jugendliche Sozialisation und familiäre Einflüsse in Deutschland und Japan (Adolescent Socialization and Family Influences in Germany and Japan). Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag. —— (2002): Elterliche Erziehungsvorstellungen in Japan und Deutschland. Jugendbilder im Vergleich (Educational Perspectives of Parents in Japan and Germany. A Comparative Study on Conceptions of Adolescence). In Kreitz-Sandberg, Susanne (ed.): Jugendliche in Japan und Deutschland: Soziale Integration im Vergleich. Opladen: Leske+Budrich, pp. 91–115. Trommsdorff, Gisela (1984): Familiale Sozialisation im Kulturvergleich. Japan und Deutschland (Family Socialization in a Cross-Cultural Comparison. Japan and Germany). Zeitschrift für Sozialisationsforschung und Erziehungssoziologie 4, pp. 79–97. ——/Friedlmeier, Wolfgang (1993): Control and Responsiveness in Japanese and German Mother-Child Interactions. Early Development and Parenting 2, 33, pp. 1–14. Tsuneyoshi, Ryôko (1992): Ningen keisei no nichibei hikaku. Kakureta karikyuramu (An American-Japanese Comparison of Human Development. Hidden Curriculums). Tôkyô: Chûô Kôronsha. —— (2001): The Japanese Model of Schooling. Comparisons with the United States. New York: Routledge Falmer. Watanabe, Makoto/Itô, Shigeki (1996): Seito shidô no riron to jissen (Theory and Practice of Student Guidance). Tôkyô: Jusonbo. Willis, Paul E. (1977): Learning to Labour. How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. London: Saxon House. Yamamura, Yoshiaki (1993): Terebi bangumi ni miru Nihon no kodomokan (Japanese Conceptions of the Child in Television Programs). Rikkyô daigaku kyôikugakkka nenpô 37, pp. 1–14. —— (1995): Media shakai to kodomoron no jirenma: naze kodomo wa mienaika (Dilemma of Media Society and Childhood Discussion: Why are Children Invisible?). In: Kadowaki, Atsushi (ed.): “Ikai” o ikiru shônen shôjo. Tôkyô: Tôyôkan Shuppansha. Yuki, Megumi (1994): Shakaika to raberingu no genshô keitai. Yôchien ni okeru shûdan kategorî no kinô (Primordial Forms of Socialization and Labelling: Functions of Group Categories in a Kindergarden). Kyôiku shakaigaku kenkyû 55, pp. 91–106.

YOUTH IN CRISIS: PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS AND DISCOURSE ON DEVIANCE AND JUVENILE PROBLEM BEHAVIOR IN JAPAN Annette Erbe

1. Introduction Ever since the 1970s the interested public in Western countries has been exposed to a confusing mix of information concerning Japan. Western scientists have praised the Japanese education system for its high turnout of well-educated, committed, and cheerfully conforming youths, in sharp contrast to the rebellious and violent youngsters in their own countries. And indeed, the academic success of Japanese schooling has been reflected in international achievement tests for math and sciences. At the same time, the mass media in the not so competitive countries has painted a grisly picture of violence and oppression in Japanese schools, with Japanese youths turning on their peers in a vicious and twisted way or taking refuge in unhealthy withdrawal. While the statistics for juvenile delinquency and school violence has shown that Japan has had few problems compared to other industrialized societies, these reports would often be spiced and granted credibility by grim statements from Japanese scholars and experts who blame the education system for all but ruining a whole generation. As a closer look reveals, the foreign media reports actually reproduce the way these issues are presented in the Japanese media. For those without direct access to information on Japan and to Japanese reality, it has been impossible to bring these two pictures together. Could the gap be partly due to the way youth and youth problems are perceived and discussed in Japan? Whereas data and analyses of juvenile problems and delinquency in Japan have recently been made available in Western languages to some degree (Schoolland 1990, Foljanty-Jost/Rössner 1997, FoljantyJost 2000), what has remained mostly obscure is how these issues are

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discussed and interpreted within Japan. This paper attempts to offer some insights into this ongoing discussion on “youth in crisis” that may well have preoccupied the Japanese public to an even larger extent than is the case in other modern societies.

2. Children and Youth as Objects of Public Concern An apprehensive portrayal of youth is certainly no Japanese specialty. In many modern societies the young generation seems to be taken notice of mostly—or even solely—when they misbehave, and the youth appear in public discourse predominantly in connection with violence, crime and other behaviors that threaten the social order. Of course, while attempts are being made to account for such behavior, these negative stereotypes generally grant a rather hostile outlook on youth. As has often been remarked by foreign observers (White 1987), all issues of education and the raising of children in Japan are high on the national agenda and feature prominently in public discourse. A significant portion of newspaper and magazine articles, books, television and radio programs is devoted to educational topics. The very fact that youngsters until their high school graduation, that is eighteen, are generally referred to as kodomo (children) in general discourse can be interpreted as an indication of how far the perceived realm of socializing and educating stretches1. In recent years one could come to the conclusion that the fewer children and youth there are (Japan has one of the lowest birthrates worldwide and is a rapidly aging society), the closer they are under scrutiny in terms of their living conditions and chances for a healthy development, and especially concerning their moral standards, values and behavior. This is accompanied by a comparatively low tolerance for deviation from the social norm. In contemporary Japan, the violation of rules and rebellion against adult society are not seen as an unavoidable or legitimate by-product of adolescence, and the setting of alternative rules in subcultures is not condoned (Metzler 1999). Educational sociologist Tokuoka Hideo argues that in postwar Japan, the attention towards children and their misbehavior grew along 1

While there is a variety of terms, especially legal-professional ones, for children and youth of all ages, these are rarely used in a non-formal context.

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with the stabilization of society and the degree to which society could “afford” to worry beyond the mere necessities of life. The increased concern led to more control and polices activity and, in turn to more registered delinquents. At the same time, relatively minor offenses came to be considered as the first steps to serious delinquency and were therefore subject to stricter monitoring, as has been the case with shoplifting since 1982. While this shift in evaluation has been at least partly responsible for the rising figures of youth delinquency, it has also served to reconfirm the public view that the young generation has been going astray. The same cyclic mechanism can be assumed to have worked concerning the ever younger ages of those arrested or admonished by police—again, the result of a “net-widening” and a reason for growing concern (Tokuoka 2002). The deepening anguish of Japanese society over its youth is reflected in the increasing number of media reports and books published on youth problems (cf. Figure 1). However, while concern about deviant youth has been a characteristic leitmotif of Japanese public discourse over the last three decades, the mode has changed considerably. As educational sociologist Hirota Teruyuki has pointed out, the transformation of the underlying image of children, including those who are “dangerous” or “in danger”, can be related to larger political changes. Until the mid-1970s, all these children were viewed as in need of protection and/or correction by the state, in line with an active welfare state policy. However, after a decade of transition, this system came under attack from several sides during the mid-1980s. On the one hand, a movement for children’s rights and postmodern thinkers rejected the implied image of immature and helpless creatures and criticized the state policy as patronizing and unnecessary. On the other hand, supported by a moral panic following spectacular incidents of youth crime, conservative voices would challenge this policy as being too mild and inappropriate, asking for minors to be made fully accountable to the law and to be treated like adults (Hirota 1998, see Schwarzenegger in this volume).

Figure 1: Books Published on Youth Problems in Japan (School Violence, Bullying, Deviance, Delinquency, School Refusal, Suicide, Withdrawal, Drugs And Others, 1970–2000 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 1970

'71

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'99 2000

Note: For each year, all titles (books and serials) classified in NACSIS under seishônen mondai (youth problems) were retrieved, using the free keyword search. Source: NACSIS online catalogue.

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3. Youth Problems Turned Into School Problems However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the typical young troublemakers that caught the public attention were no longer members of motorcycle gangs, but high school and middle high school students ganging up against their peers and even teachers or vandalizing their schools (Erbe 1999). The newspapers and magazines were full of sensational reports on how schools tried to cope with their problem students, often calling in the police to handle the situation. While the quality as well as the size of these problems were mild in comparison to other modern societies, especially the United States, the degree of public attention was at least as intense. This shift of focus on youth problems from the streets to the schools reflected the fact that, by then, attending the three-year high school after the nine years of compulsory education had become the norm. For over ninety percent of Japanese youngsters, their life until the age of eighteen was largely ruled by their school. Not only was school the place where one’s success or failure determined life’s chances, it was also increasingly the main socializing agent, regulating students’ lives well beyond the boundaries of school itself and fulfilling tasks such as imparting discipline and moral standards that were formerly expected of parents and local communities (Tokuoka 2002). Thus, the wave of violent incidents, disruption and rebellion at Japanese schools was bound to fuel fears of a loss of authority, and at the same time, to direct public attention towards the country’s schools in a more general way. While some critics accused parents of failing to discipline their children, most—and especially the progressive critics—blamed the pressures of the exam and achievement-oriented education system. They recommended lightening these burdens, reducing class sizes and doing away with overly strict school rules. Instead, schools and the education authorities chose the opposite route to quell such rebellious behavior. Teachers were obliged to enforce school rules more strictly and new rules were often introduced. Schools would employ physically strong teachers, physical education teachers in particular, for the task of “student guidance”, and corporal punishment was supposed to have increased drastically in this period (Erbe 1998). In the short run, these strategies seemed to have worked as statistics by the Ministry of

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Education and police showed a significant decline in incidents of school violence.

4. New Dimensions: The Case of Bullying Openly violent outbreaks at schools had only just vanished from the headlines, however, when a new educational problem emerged. This time, the emphasis shifted from “children as dangerous” to “children in danger”. Educators had pointed for some time to an increase in less direct acts of aggression among students, in less visible ways of hurting others. Such behavior would typically occur out of the sight of teachers, and would include teasing, ostracizing, ridiculing, stealing or hiding personal belongings and sometimes also forthright violence. Often it was perpetrated by a strong child or a group against one classmate that somehow stood out or appeared weak. While such children had traditionally been called ijimekko (bully) or ijimerarekko (bullied child), the reports now included the term ijime (bullying) to refer to the whole setting. While there had been previous reports on incidents of suicide or acts of revenge related to bullying among school children, the causal relation had not been emphasized; it was only from around 1984/85 that bullying came to be associated with death in newspaper reports (Yamamoto Y. 1996). Following the suicide of a girl who in 1985 left a note saying “please stop bullying”, newspapers began to run a series of reports on the plight of the victims and on the frequency of such suffering. The documentation of spectacular cases that led to suicide or mental and physical infliction served to establish the paradigm that a new type of bullying had developed, one that knew no limits, was persistent, cruel, wicked and difficult to recognize. This new quality was contrasted with the so-called “bullying in the old days” that was supposedly of a less serious nature, and even seen as natural and a necessary part of growing up (Monbushô 1984). In April 1985, the Ministry of Education instructed boards of education to conduct studies and set up a commission to survey problem behavior among students. Only two months later, the commission published an urgent appeal to work towards solving such problem behavior. Bullying became a regular topic in the media, and the Ministry released statistics that indicated an epidemic spread of this new phenomenon; for a nine-month period

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in 1985 public schools reported 155,000 incidents. These shocking numbers helped challenge the formerly common perception that some personality traits of the victim invited such behavior (Monbushô 1984). Instead, bullying was now presented as a structural problem, a syndrome of pathological developments in the education system and in society at large. Rapidly, bullying advanced from being a publicly acknowledged educational problem to a social problem, the documentation and analysis of which filled more and more bookshelves (cf. Figure 2). Whereas the general public agreed by then that bullying had gone too far and could not be tolerated, the majority of people asked in surveys thought the families were to blame, rather than the schools. In a nationwide opinion poll of March 1986, 45% attributed the increase in bullying to the fact that “families don’t discipline their children anymore” or to “parents’ overprotection”. Less than 20% thought it was due to school-related reasons such as unenthusiastic teachers, strict school rules or corporal punishment (Asahi Shinbun March 24, 1986). The public discourse, however, soon focussed on the schools and school education, and was dominated by the longstanding confrontation between the Ministry of Education and the Japan Teachers’ Union (Nikkyôso) and their respective followers. Matsunaga Hikaru, the Minister of Education, claimed that teachers had lost their authority and weren’t dedicated to student guidance anymore. In his opinion they failed to teach children social norms and values. He recommended that teachers be reinstated as persons of respect and that moral education be emphasized once again (Sankei Shinbun Nov. 8, 1985). Such attempts were vigorously rejected by progressive critics, who blamed in turn a repressive atmosphere in schools and the widespread use of corporal punishment to discipline students. Children bullying each other were perceived as merely passing on such violence and the intense pressure to conform to strict school rules and stiff competition (Sekai Feb. 10, 1986).

Figure 2: Books Published on Bullying in Japan, And Officially Registered Cases of Bullying (1 unit = 1,000 cases), 1981–2000 160 150 140 130 120 110 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

officially registered cases of bullying (unit: 1,000) books on bullying published

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Note: For each year, all books on children’s ijime (bullying) were counted. Note that the increase in registered cases from 1994 on is partly due to a modified, more comprehensive mode of registering. In 1985, the first year that schools were asked to submit data, they were not yet provided with a definition, which may account for the extremely high number compared to the following years. Sources: for publications: NACSIS online catalogue, author’s own computation; for number of cases: Monbushô statistics.

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Bullying was seen as yet another syndrome of “regulated education” (kanri kyôiku) under the Ministry of Education’s control, and traced back to predemocratic and militaristic traditions, granting renewed calls for the decentralization and democratization of the education system (Yagi 1986). In fact, contemporary society as such was held responsible for the bullying phenomenon, and blamed for overemphasizing achievement and conformity while neglecting emotional needs and satisfactory human relationships (Endô 1986, Egawa 1986). Lawyers’ associations and the Ministry of Justice drew attention to the fact that bullying was a form of discrimination and called for more respect for children’s human rights (Yomiuri Shinbun June 6, 1985). Yet another outlook was adopted by the high-profile National Council on Education (Rinkyôshin) that was set up by Prime Minister Nakasone with direct reference to the “desolation of education” as exemplified by student problem behavior. The Council was meant to help his reform initiatives towards deregulation and diminish the influence both of the Ministry of Education and the left-wing educators. Accordingly, in statements on the causes of bullying, Council members, many of them business representatives, blamed both the Ministry of Education for its ideology of overregulating (urusai kanrishugi) and the Left for its overemphasis on uniformity (kakuitsushugi) in education that stifles all individuality (Asahi Shinbun Oct. 23, 1985). Nikkyôso promptly agreed that the state’s control of schools was rightly criticized but roundly rejected the Council’s attack on the credo of egalitarianism, pointing out that bullying was caused, on the contrary, by too much competitiveness and achievement-orientation (Mainichi Shinbun Oct. 28, 1985). What united all combatants in this ideological struggle and the nonaligned public was a growing sense that today’s children were really victims of school and society and had nowhere to turn. Public attention on the bullying phenomenon reached a peak when in February 1986 a middle high school student hanged himself, leaving a letter in which he described his situation as “living hell”, having been persistently bullied by a group of schoolmates for months. Police and media investigations into his case brought to light the ignorance and failure of the school in realizing his predicament, with several teachers including his homeroom teacher having taken part in a mock funeral in his presence. In response, a major national newspaper in one of many similar reactions published an editorial “To You Who Are Being Bullied” begging the unknown victims not to despair, and not to kill

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themselves but to turn to adults for help even if they had not been very helpful in the past (Asahi Shinbun Feb. 6, 1986). To some extent this further fuelled the moral panic that this and previous cases had triggered. Their appeal was heard, if not by the children, then by an overwhelming number of adult readers who responded very emotionally, recalling own painful experiences and pledging sympathy and understanding (Asahi Shinbun Feb. 7, 1986). The general consensus that today’s children were to be pitied (kodomo ga kawaisô) and something was deeply wrong with Japanese schools remained strong and never quite subsided in spite of the swift decline in reported cases of bullying (cf. Figure 2) and a subsequent declaration by the Ministry of Education in 1991 that bullying had ebbed. Such doubts were partly due to the steadily growing number of children who refused to go to school. While analyses of the motives of school non-attendees show that their motives are manifold, this problem was mostly discussed in connection with and as a result of bullying (Erbe 1999).

5. The Second Wave of Bullying When suicides connected with bullying began appearing in the news again in 19942, the Japanese public was soon convinced that the problem had never really been solved, but simply had become more secretive and difficult to detect. Renewed attention in the media heightened public awareness and led to more urgent inquiries at schools along with modified criteria3 and—one can assume—in turn to more cases reported to the Ministry of Education (cf. Figure 2). This second wave of bullying, with registered cases reaching a peak of around 60,000 in 1995 and thus only a good third of the previous peak, led, however, to an unprecedented and sustained peak of public attention. As one intensely publicized suicide of a middle school boy in 1994 showed, 2

The second series of ‘bullying suicides’ began in December 1994. A middle school student who killed himself had described in his farewell letter to his parents how four schoolmates had repeatedly beaten him, and forced him to steal a total of 1.1 million yen from his parents and grandmother. Within the next twelve months, four to nine suicides by schoolchildren were reported to be due to bullying and widely publicized (Itô 1997: 212). 3 From 1994 on Ministry of Education numbers have reflected not only cases reported by schools but also by individual teachers or students.

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victims who took this extreme step would sometimes endure severe bullying or even criminal acts by their peers for a long time before they put an end to their suffering without ever having confided in their parents or teachers. Several large-scale student surveys were undertaken and invariably showed that more than a third of all students had been bullied once or more in their school life. Such experiences would often be limited to short periods or singular incidents and consisted mostly of teasing or name-calling, exclusion from the group or verbal threatening (Erbe 1999). However, under the conditions of moral panic that was now even more pronounced than in the mid-1980s, these two sides of the picture (the few extreme cases and the many minor ones) seemed to meld together in public discourse into the terrifying impression that significant numbers of Japanese children lived in fear and terror of their peers, yet were suffering in silence and on the brink of taking their lives. It almost seemed as if society wanted to make up for years of not taking proper notice by an intensified soul-searching and an activism that might be perceived as counterproductive in triggering more suicides4, and sometimes verged on the hysterical. A few days after the suicide case mentioned above, an unknown middle school student sent a fax to a TV station announcing that she would kill herself on her birthday. The prefectural board of education immediately asked all schools to interrupt lessons and to call conferences to search for the girl. Several newspapers and TV stations published appeals to her, begging “zettai ni shinaide hoshii” (we absolutely don’t want you to die) (Yamamoto A. 1996). In another incident a student called a counseling hotline and left a message on the answering machine saying he was bullied and wished to die. Education authorities called on all elementary and middle schools and played the recording to the teachers in the hope that they might recognize the boy’s voice. A press conference was called and newspaper carried appeals such as “rusuban no kimi—shinanaide!” (you from the answering machine, don’t die!). (Asahi Shinbun Dec. 21, 1995). 4

As the specialist in youth suicide, Inamura Hiroshi, had pointed out that intense media coverage of such incidents can produce a ‘suicide fashion’ among psychologically unstable adolescents; the so-called Werther effect, that had led to two peaks in suicide statistics in the seventies and eighties, following the suicides of pop idols. Inamura also questioned the simple attribution of suicides to bullying as a single cause (Inamura 1995).

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Education authorities from the local boards of education to the Ministry of Education established study groups, expert commissions and advisory bodies. As the schools’ reactions had formerly been criticized as being too soft and engaging in cover-ups in order to avoid a bad reputation, they were now urged not to react but to act. In face of public criticism and pressure from the educational administration, schools had to realize that any hesitation in exposing incidents of bullying could become the focus of intensive media investigations, and complied more eagerly than ever before by conducting anti-bullying campaigns and monitoring students repeatedly with questionnaires on ijime. In some cases, they made students write diaries about their school life regularly, that were then read by the homeroom or guidance teacher in order to detect any signs of bullying (Asahi Shinbun Feb. 5, 1996). The Minister of Education, Okuda Mikio, declared bullying to be “the most serious problem facing education today” and called on all sides for cooperation, taking the unprecedented step of approaching, amongst others, leaders of numerous teachers’ organizations (Japan Times Weekly Feb. 19–25, 1996). Nikkyôso, in an even more radical turn of policy, had declared in September 1995 its intention to end its long strategy of fundamental opposition to the Ministry of Education, noting that the urgency of the bullying problem made it necessary to cooperate. Unofficially this change of paradigm was seen by many as an attempt to halt the steady decline of membership, particularly among younger teachers, and the recognition that by continuing the union’s radical stance of antagonism, it might lose even more influence on education. However, in hindsight this strategy has not proven successful; Nikkyôso could not return to its old position of power, paralleling the decline of its most important ally, the Socialist Party. It is worth noting, though, that both the ministry and the union referred to the bullying problem in order to legitimize major moves of policy change that might otherwise have been difficult to perform without a loss of face. The crumbling of the antagonism between the Ministry of Education and left-wing teachers led by Nikkyôso was not the only aspect in which the social background to the second wave of bullying and the ensuing second wave of debate differed from the first. In 1985/86, Japan was still extremely successful economically and while public sentiment was critical towards the education system and society, it was not generally pessimistic in its outlook. A decade later, however, the second wave of bullying—or rather, of its percep-

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tion—struck a society that was already deeply unsettled by the burst of the bubble economy, the worsening recession and the threat of unemployment, a string of political scandals and new forms of proof of widespread corruption. It also coincided with the devastating results of the Hanshin earthquake and the deeply disturbing implications of the Aum Shinrikyô terrorist attacks. All of these added up to a bleak picture of contemporary society and its prospects. Public opinion surveys regularly conducted by the Prime Minister’s Office showed that between 1989 and 1997, the number of people thinking that Japanese society was going in the wrong direction rose from 25% to 72%. Those who thought it was moving in the right direction dwindled from 49% to a mere 13% (Kato 1998: 1). The re-emergence of bullying fit into this fin-de-siecle mood and drove home the message that not even the children were living in a sheltered world. At the same time it coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the second world war, and was often discussed in connection with reflections on postwar Japan. For progressive critics, the existence of bullying, still thought of as a Japanese idiosyncrasy, went on to show that Japan had not shed her feudal past (Fukaya 1995) or militaristic traditions (Inoguchi Kuniko in Asahi Shinbun Feb. 28, 1995). They pointed out that respect for the individual and for human rights had not yet been firmly established in Japanese society. Political scientist Inoguchi defined human rights violations as the common basis of bullying and war crimes, that is a complete breakdown of humanity, albeit on a very different scale. In the same interview, Asada Akira agreed that Japan had not really become a modern civil society, but was still at heart a village based on the pre-modern group principle. Contemporary bullies and Japan as an aggressor in the war shared the same characteristic: diffuse or a lacking sense of responsibility. The criticism of Japanese group mentality is a common ingredient of progressive analysis of Japanese society and blamed for a host of problems, especially in education (Horio 1997). In an interesting variation on that theme, the Central Council of Education, an advisory body to the Ministry of Education, also mentioned the lack of respect for the individual as a cause, but blamed this on the principle of dôshitsu (same quality, sameness). The council thus referred to and reinterpreted the egalitarianism (byôdôshugi) defended by progressive educators as equal to the kakuitsu (uniformity) principle of postwar education. It was thus in line with earlier and ongoing attempts to promote the cause of liberalization and differen-

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tiation in the education system by linking the two terms uniformity and egalitarianism as if they were synonymous and of the same root. The principle of uniformity, however, was not introduced to school life by left-wing teachers, but by traditionally minded teachers, who had received their training before the war and believed in the enforcement of discipline and order, best ensured by organizing school life in-groups. Such teachers also founded the Puro Kyôshi no Kai (Association of Professional Teachers) in 1970, in opposition to the teachers’ unions. The Association has received a lot of public attention and also frequently comments on issues of educational reform or student problem behavior. Members believe that postwar democracy with its “exaggerated” respect for individuality and human rights has relinquished schools to anarchy. From their point of view, in the postwar spirit of freedom, equality and respect for individuality children are allowed to do as they want and nobody dares to teach them morals or rules. It is all the more ironic that the very group that rejects teaching individuality blames a tendency of egalitarianism (byôdôshugi), “that is, the urge for everyone to be the same” among children for the bullying phenomenon (Kawakami 1997:562). Again, this can be seen as a deliberate attempt to discredit a central concept of postwar education by redefining it. The Association accuses the Ministry of Education of having subscribed to an ideology of individuality and freedom, clearly shown in its recent attempt to enhance a relaxed education system focussing on the students’ motivation, with the teacher as a mere “supporter” (Kawakami 1997). Meanwhile, other conservative critics made their own sense of bullying and the characteristics of Japanese society. In a book by psychiatrist Doi Takeo and literary scholar Watanabe Shôichi, the authors also lay the blame for the worsening bullying problem on the postwar (left-wing) ideology of equality. Under this ideology all feelings of envy were taboo, and thus found an outlet in bullying those who had more or did better than the others. The authors go on to compare Japan not to the bullies, but to the bullied child. They resent the postwar pacifism and beautification of defenselessness that makes the victims of bullying so helpless and Japan so weak in international relations. Both lack the fighting spirit, and apparently this spirit is “what we lost after World War II” as the English subtitle to their book states (Doi/Watanabe 1995). Many prominent right-wing commentators share their disgust at a supposedly predominant culture of the weak. Such a tendency is usually attributed to the fact that children are

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nowadays raised almost exclusively by their mothers, leading to a dominance of feminine influence in contemporary Japan. As Abe Jôji would have it, bullying is really the characteristic of girls; it would be more natural for boys to be engaged in a fair fight (Abe 1995). In a collection of statements on bullying in the monthly magazine Voice, Ishihara Shintaro, now governor of Tokyo, condemned the exaggerated pacifism pertinent in postwar Japan and declared that victims had to fight back for themselves (Ishihara 1996). Nishio Kanji felt the overemphasis on human rights was to blame since it prevented adults from giving the bullies what they deserved (Nishio 1996). Oda Susumu, a psychology professor who regularly comments on youth crime and violence in the mass media, in an earlier essay even went so far as to declare that “human rights killed Ôkochi” (the boy whose suicide marked the peak of this “second wave” of bullying, cf. footnote 2) (Oda 1995). For Nishibe Susumu this was yet more proof of the “convulsive humanism” that has plagued postwar Japan (Nishibe 1996) and Matsumoto Ken’ichi roundly declared that there was no need for democratic education (Matsumoto 1996). While it is true that in the 1990s the idea of bullying as violating human rights and a form of discrimination has been incorporated into official statements as well as the call for respect for each individual, further accusations against the Ministry of Education of succumbing to left-wing values seem unjustified. (As the emergence of the “next” educational problem showed, the Ministry would soon resort to more traditional ideas.) It should be noted here that such an outspoken political stance as analyzed above is not characteristic of all segments of the discussion on bullying. The typical popular book on bullying will actually be anything but dogmatic. Rather, they often list concisely the whole range of causes that have been raised in the public debate so far: from media influence, the school system, the nuclear family, working mothers, professional housewives, and absent fathers to urbanization, value change and various other socio-cultural factors, often not even attempting to integrate all these into one model or to actually prove their causality5. 5

Even in a book that has a more scientific approach than most general readership publications, the author, an expert on clinical psychology and counseling, lists the background to bullying and violence as the following: 1) representations of violence in the media, 2) human distrust stemming from the rise of compensated dating (enjo kôsai), 3) easy access to drugs, 4) media and technology that reduce human contacts,

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Instead, authors offer their choice of solution without further reference to the aforementioned, such as teaching children more empathy (omoiyari), or teaching them respect for individuality, granting them more leisure, talking to children, trusting children, caring more about children, being a model to children and so forth (for example, Egawa 1986, Noda 1995). Yet another type of literature was and is concerned solely with practical advice for children, parents and teachers on how to avoid or cope with bullying. And it goes without saying that especially the second wave of bullying also induced a large number of scientific and empirically grounded works and surveys, and a lot of serious research had been done that examined the bullying problem and its background (Taki in this volume, and the works of Morita Yôji). However, these have been neglected here, as they are not the ones that have shaped public discourse and the general perception of what was going on in Japanese schools. The image of education and the world Japanese children lived in representative of public discourse in the mid-1990s was instead the one shown in the aforementioned books and eyewitness accounts that depicted schools and the human relations there in dramatic terms. Titles and headlines such as “The Archipelago of Bullying” (Ijime Mondai Kenkyûhan 1995) or “The Bullying Society” (for example, Nihon Kodomo o Mamoru Kai 1995, Fukaya 1996, Kamata 1998) were manifold and suggested that, not only was bullying at school reflecting a characteristic/trait of Japanese society, but also a pervasive pattern of student behavior. The fact that neither was bullying limited to Japanese schools nor was it even more extensive than in 5) familial violence against children, 6) loss of free space due to urbanization, 7) easy access to knives and other weapons, 8) educational competition in a meritocratic society, 9) an increased learning load and decreased lesson time, 10) overworked teachers that are difficult to approach, 11) teachers who try to avoid student guidance and similar management tasks and are demotivated and passive, 12) a lack of discipline and learning endurance at home, and 13) the growing number of parents (my italics, A.E.) who neglect or abuse their children, and others. Under the latter heading, the author lists well-educated women who are frustrated at being ‘solely‘ in charge of their children or frustrated at their limited career chances due to having children, and the growing number of working and career-oriented mothers who don’t have time for their children, and for such reasons passively reject or actively mistreat their children. Last but not least, there is the growing number of women who have affairs at the workplace, their values systems undermined by the daily media coverage and fiction on celebrities’ extramarital affairs and divorces (Matsubara 1998: 4–8).

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other modern industrialized societies, though mentioned in media reports, never really became a part of the picture. As Itô Shigeki has pointed out in an opposition movement to scientific attempts to create a definition for this term, the label bullying has come to be used ever more comprehensively and without differentiation; its domain has expanded, a process that may be inherent to social problems. In the light of intensive media coverage, more and more incidents of unpleasant human interaction are perceived as bullying. While heightened public awareness must be evaluated positively, and this development may also provide the chance for victims to speak out and gain due attention, it also has its risks. Such domain expansion may lead to the decontextualization of a phenomenon. In the case of bullying, with its highly emotional impact, a lot of different behaviors or phenomena have been assembled under this term and are no longer examined for their specificities. And while the impression grows that bullying is everywhere and ever worsening, no one ventures to question such assumptions or to differentiate between acceptable and non-acceptable behavior anymore (Itô 1997). If one looks at newer media representations of the status quo at Japanese schools, it is certainly true that bullying has come to be seen as a matter of course.

6. Characteristics of the Discussion in the Late 1990s Since around 1998, the bullying phenomenon has again lost some ground in public attention to other, more urgent problems. This time, it is not so much due to a belief that the number of officially registered cases really represents a significant decline. Rather, the public has been shocked by new or renewed problems of a different kind. The characteristic of public discourse on youth problems is that it no longer centers on one problem, but has diversified (cf. Figure 3).

Figure 3: Books Published on Selected Problem Behaviors in Japan, 1980–2000 class breakdown 140

impulsive violent behaviour ('snapping') bullying student violence

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youth crime and deviance

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In 1997 it turned out that it had been a fourteen-year-old who had killed an eleven-year-old and beheaded him (for details see Fujita in this volume). A student who fatally stabbed his teacher for having reprimanded him for being late in 1998, and a string of knife incidents at schools in the aftermath of this case, a sharp rise in the cases of school violence, and a number of crimes committed by middle school students from June 1999 to February 2000 were followed by the murder of a married couple by a high school student in Aichi prefecture, the hijacking of a bus by an unemployed youth in Saga prefecture in March 2000, and other incidents. Under the impression of such a wave of violence and heinous crimes, usually depicted as unforeseeable and without detectable reasons by formerly “normal” youth (Matsubara 1998), the public mood changed from pitying children to being terrified of them. Those voices that called for punishment grew louder (cf. Schwarzenegger and Tokuoka in this volume), and schools and the education system were once again condemned for their presumed failure to teach children moral values and norms. Flashy book titles such as “The Schools are Committing Suicide” (Tsukahara 1997) or “How to Survive Everyday School Life—Without Dying, Without Killing, Without Being Killed” (Miyadai/Fujii 1998), even though they are at the extreme end of the scale, illustrate the kind of “school bashing” that has been prevalent in public discourse in recent years (Fujita in this volume). While the Ministry of Education and other institutions keep pointing to the responsibility of families for socialization and discipline, it seems as if a fundamental public frustration with schools and education, and their resistance to change that has built up over a long time and has been reinforced by every new example of problem behavior, now finds an outlet in heaping all the blame on them.

7. Conclusion Whereas with a long string of problem behaviors Japanese society was first concerned with manifest behavior such as delinquency and outright violence, the public gaze later turned to hidden acts of malice such as bullying or even non-behavior such as school-refusal and withdrawal, and finally to attitudes rather than behavior as expressed in the growing concern for Japanese youths’ lack of dreams and aspirations, apathy and ignorance to the importance of life itself, and their

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assumed inability to tell right from wrong, before being worried about very tangible and visible acts of violence again. Parallel to this attempt to get close up and look “into the heads” of young people, the focus widened to encompass not only a few troublemakers but gradually the whole age group, postulating for each problem that “now it can happen to anyone”, be it bullying, school refusal, suicide, or serious crime. The causes to which youth problems are attributed and accordingly the remedies sought, vary greatly depending on the political and ideological camps as could be expected. The prevalence of certain patterns of explanation and argumentation may grow or fade reflecting the hegemony of these camps. However, across all frames of interpretation, the tone is invariably deeply alarming and pessimistic. Those refuting the virulence of the crisis are few in number and remain largely unheard. Apparently it suits all sides to keep deviance and delinquency forever high on the agenda of public discourse, whatever their statistical ups and downs. In fact, the theme of “youth in crisis” seems to lend itself to emphasizing and legitimizing all sorts of otherwise contested claims. It should not be insinuated, however, that these issues are merely used for other ends and purposes. Those who make use of them are certainly outnumbered by those genuinely concerned. Indeed, an unchanging high level of attention for and constant public debate on youth and youth problems may be a worthwhile model for other societies that face swift social changes and challenges. However, we should be aware of the fact that, in spite of being envied for low rates of youth crime and a largely conforming, “socially functioning” young generation, Japanese society prefers to always assume and be prepared for the worst. Keeping this in mind could make it a little easier to make sense of the disparate pictures mentioned in the beginning.

8. References Abe, Jedi (1995): “Ijime” kô—hahaoya no teguchi (Reflections on “Bullying”—the Methods of Mothers). Voice Mar. 1995, pp. 142–44. Asahi Shinbun Feb. 28, 1995: Shirîzu rekishi ninshiki o tou: “Ijime to sensô” o kangaeru (Series on Historical Awareness: Reflections on “Bullying and War”). Doi, Takeo/Watanabe, Shôichi (1995): Ijime to netami. Sengo minshushugi no otoshigo. What We Have Lost After World War II. (Bullying and envy. The Side Effects of Postwar Democracy). Tôkyô: PHP Kenkyûjo.

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Egawa, Binsei (1986): Ijime kara manabu—nozomashii ningen kankei no ikusei (Lessons from Bullying—Fostering Desirable Human Relationships). Tôkyô: Dai Nihon Tosho. Endô, Toyokichi (1986): Ijime kara no dasshutsu (Escape from Bullying). Tôkyô: Nihon Hôsô Shuppan Kyôkai. Erbe, Annette (1998): Bringing Violence at Japanese Schools into Focus. In: Trommsdorff, Gisela, Friedlmeier, Wolfgang, and Hans-Joachim Kornadt (eds.): Japan in Transition. Social and Psychological Aspects. Lengerich et al.: Pabst Science Publishers, pp. 231–242. —— (1999): Schikane, Gewalt und Schulverweigerung an japanischen Schulen. Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Bullying, Violence and School Refusal at Japanese Schools. An Inventory). Materialien zu Jugend und Devianz in Japan Bd. 4, hg. v. Gesine Foljanty-Jost. Halle: Martin-Luther-Universität Halle Wittenberg. Foljanty-Jost, Gesine/Rössner, Dieter (eds.) (1997): Gewalt unter Jugendlichen in Deutschland und Japan: Ursachen und Bekämpfung (Juvenile Violence in Germany and Japan: Causes and Countermeasures). Unter Mitarbeit von Britta Bannenberg und Annette Erbe. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Foljanty-Jost, Gesine (ed.) (2000): Schule, Schüler und Gewalt: Beiträge zu Deutschland, Japan, China und der Mongolei (Schools, Students and Violence: Reports on Germany, Japan, China and Mongolia). München: Iudicium. Fukaya, Kazuko (1996): “Ijime sekai” no kodomotachi—kyôshitsu no shin’en (Children of a “Bullying World”—The Abyss in the Classroom). Tôkyô: Kaneko Shobô. Hafeneger, Benno (1995): Jugendbilder. Zwischen Hoffnung, Kontrolle, Erziehung und Dialog (Images of Youth. Between Hope, Control, Education and Dialogue). Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Hirota, Teruyuki (1998): “Kodomo no genzai” o dô miru ka (How Should we Examine Children and Childhood in Contemporary Japan?). Kyôiku shakaigaku kenkyû, vol. 63, pp. 5–23. Horio, Teruhisa (1997): Gendai shakai to kyôiku (Contemporary Society and Education). Tôkyô: Iwanami. Ijime Mondai Kenkyûhan (1995): Ijime rettô: Heisei ijime jitsurei fairu (The Bullying Archipelago: a Case File of Bullying in the Heisei Era). Tôkyô: Shinkôsha. Inamura, Hiroshi (1995): Kodomo no jisatsu ryûkô to masukomi hôdô no kanren (Children’s Suicide Fashions and their Relation to Mass Media Reports). In: Inamura, Hiroshi; Yukio Saitô (eds.) Ijime jisatsu. Gendai no esupuri, bessatsu, May 1995. Tôkyô: Ibundô, pp. 80–85. Ishihara, Shintarô (1996): Hitori de teikô suru shika nai (Fighting Back alone is the only Way). In: Tokushû Heisei “ijime” hakusho: shi ni isogu kodomotachi, Voice May 1996, pp. 72–73. Itô, Shigeki (1997): “Ijime wa konzetsu sarenakereba naranai”—zenhitei no jubaku to katarushisu (“Bullying has to be Rooted out Completely”—the Spell and Catharsis of Total Negation). In: Imazu, Kôjirô; Hida, Daijirô (eds.), Kyôiku gensetsu o dô yomu ka. Tôkyô: Shin’yôsha, pp. 207–31. Kato, Akihiko (1998): Structure of Social and Political Consciousness in the 1990s: On the Social Psychological Causes of the Negative Image of the Times. Unpublished manuscript (paper presented at the 5 Meeting of the German-Japanese Society for Social Sciences, Waseda University, Sept. 1998.

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Kamata, Satoshi (1998): Ijime shakai no kodomotachi (Children of the Bullying Society). Kôdansha bunkô. Tôkyô: Kôdansha. Kawakami, Ryôichi (1997): Jiyû no kakudai ga sara ni ijime o zôka saseru—gakkô no wakugumi no naka de antei o (Expansion of Liberty leads to further Increase in Bullying—Towards Stability in the Framework of Schools). Nihon no ronten 1997 (Issues of Debate in Japan 1997), Tôkyô: Bungei Shunju, pp. 562–65. Matsubara, Tatsuya (1998): Futsû no ko ga furuu bôryoku. Ijime, bôryoku no shinri to yobô, shidôhô (The Violence that Ordinary Children Commit. The Psychology of Bullying and Violence, their Prevention and Guidance Methods). Tôkyô: Kyôiku Kaihatsu Kenkyûjo. Matsumoto, Ken’ichi (1996): Minshu kyôiku wa iranai (We don’t need Democratic Education). In: Tokushû Heisei “ijime” hakusho: shi ni isogu kodomotachi, Voice May 1996, pp. 81–83. Metzler, Manuel (1999): Devianz auf Japanisch. Wissenschaftliche Hintergründe des Verständnisses von Norm und Abweichung (Deviance in Japanese. Scientific Background of an Understanding of Norm and Deviation). Japanstudien. Jahrbuch des Deutschen Instituts für Japanstudien, Vol. 11. München: Iudicium Verlag, pp. 165–191. Miyadai, Shinji/Fujii, Seiji (1998): Gakkôteki nichijô o ikinuke—shinazu, kurosazu, kurosarezu (How to Survive Everyday School Life—without Dying, without Killing, without Being Killed). Tôkyô: Kyôiku Shiryô Shuppankai. Monbushô (1984): Jidô no yûjin kankei o meguru shidôjo no shomondai (Various Problems of Guidance Occuring in Connection with Student Friendships). Tôkyô: Monbushô. Nihon Kodomo o Mamoru Kai (Japanese Society for the Protection of Children) (ed.) (1995): “Ijime shakai” o yomitoku: Kodomo ni totte sengo 50 nen to wa nan datta no ka (Kodomo hakusho) (Making Sense of the “Bullying Society”: What did the 50 years of Postwar Mean for Children? (White paper on children)). Tôkyô: Sôdo Bunka. Nishibe, Susumu (1996): Keiren suru hyumanizumu (A Convulsive Humanism). In: Tokushû Heisei “ijime” hakusho: shi ni isogu kodomotachi, Voice May 1996, pp. 88–97. Nishio, Kanji (1996): Tenkô no susume (A Recommendation for Changing Schools). In: Tokushû Heisei “ijime” hakusho: shi ni isogu kodomotachi, Voice May 1996, pp. 77–79. Noda, Aiko (ed.) (1995): Kodomo o ijime kara sukuu tame ni (To Save Children from Bullying). Tôkyô: Nihon hyôronsha. Oda, Susumu (1995): “Jinken” ga Ôkôchi o koroshita (“Human Rights” killed Ôkôchi). Shinchô 45 + 2/1995, pp. 44–51. Schoolland, Ken (1990): Shogun’s Ghost: The Dark Side of Japanese Education. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Sekai Feb. 10, 1986: Shinpojiumu “Taibatsu, ijime” no gen’in to kaiketsu (Symposium: Causes of and Solutions for “Corporal Punishment and Bullying”). Tokuoka, Hideo (2002): Jugendpolitik und Jugendprobleme in Japan. Maßnahmen und ihre Auswirkungen im Wandel (Youth Policy and Youth Problems in Japan. Changing Countermeasures and their Effects). In: Kreitz-Sandberg, Susanne (ed.): Jugend in Japan und Deutschland. Soziale Integration im Vergleich. München: Iudicium, pp. 227–246.

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Tsukahara, Masahiko (1997): Gakkô wa jisatsu suru (Schools are Committing Suicide). Tôkyô: Shinjusha. White, Merry (1987): The Japanese Educational Challenge. A Commitment to Children. New York and Tokyo: Kodansha International. Yagi, Kôsuke (1986): “Ijime” no imi (The Meaning of “Bullying”). Serial in 7 parts, Mainichi Shinbun Osaka evening editions, Jan. 1–March 13, 1986. Yamamoto, Atsufumi (1996): Fukuoka Shirojima chû ijime jisatsu jiken—nani ga kaiketsu shita ka. (The Bullying Suicide Incident of Shirojima Middle School in Fukuoka—What solved it?). Gekkan shônen ikusei 1996/6, pp. 8–13. Yamamoto, Yûji (1996): Gensetsuteki jissen to âtikyurêshon—ijime gensetsu no hensei o rei ni (Discursive Practice and Articulation: An Analysis of Discursive Formations of “Ijime”). Kyôiku shakaigaku kenkyû, Vol. 59, pp. 69–88.

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CHANGES IN VALUES AND LIFE ORIENTATION AMONG JAPANESE YOUTH Atsushi Kadowaki

1. Introduction The twentieth century was marked by the emergence of huge nations with unprecedented economic and military power based on developments in science and technology. It was a period in which military power was an accepted means of invading and dominating other countries, culminating in two world wars and, in the ultimate act of violence, the deployment of nuclear weapons against humanity. Even today, the economic and military race among countries continues unabated. With more than six billion human beings on earth at the beginning of the twenty-first century, humankind is confronted by many difficult problems and has reached a critical crossroad in human history. The twenty-first century will be plagued by numerous challenges, including the increasing global population, food shortages, the exhaustion of underground resources, environmental pollution due to the consumption of fossil fuels, and ongoing racial and regional conflict. Our failure to solve these problems in the twentieth century increases the pressure on our children to find solutions and to redefine society. In order for mankind to survive in the face of these problems, our existing values and lifestyles must evolve from those espoused in the twentieth century. It cannot be taken for granted that the young generation can discover such new values and manage their society based on lifestyles that embrace these values. In the context of this critical outlook, this paper presents the results of the following three surveys. 1. “Survey of the Life and Values of Youth in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area” (abbreviated as the “Tokyo Youth Survey”), a survey of approximately 2,000 male and female youth aged between 15 and 29

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years living in the Tokyo metropolitan area. The Bureau of Citizens and Cultural Affairs, Metropolitan Tokyo from 1976 to 1997 conducted this tri-annual survey, when it was discontinued due to financial constraints. This report is based on the results of all eight surveys (Tôkyô-to Seikatsu Bunka-kyoku 1976–1997). 2. “World Youth Survey,” a survey of male and female youth aged between 18 and 24 years from various countries. The Youth Affairs Administration, Management and Coordination Agency have conducted this survey every five years since 1975. The countries polled vary from one survey to the next. This report is based on the results of the Fifth World Youth Survey, which was conducted in 1995 in 10 countries (Japan, England, Germany, France, Sweden, South Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Brazil and Russia) (Sômu-chô 1996). 3. “Basic Survey of Youth in Japan” (abbreviated as the “Japan Youth Survey”), a survey conducted every five years with males and females aged between 9 and 24 years and parents with children aged between 9 and 15 years in Japan conducted by the Management and Coordination Agency. This study reports the results of the second survey conducted in 2000 (Naikaku-fu 2001).

2. Comparison of Satisfaction with Life and Evaluation of One’s Country According to the Japan Youth Survey conducted in October 2000, more than 63% of the youth responded that they are satisfied with their current lives. On the other hand, the number of young people who responded that they are not satisfied with the current state of politics and the social system was 67 % and 62%, respectively. Table 1 shows the degree of dissatisfaction with life expressed by Japanese youth compared with that of youth from other countries, based on the results of the World Youth Survey.

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CHANGES IN VALUE AND LIFE ORIENTATION

Russia

Brazil

Thailand

Philippines

S. Korea

Sweden

France

Germany

USA

Japan

Item

England

Table 1: Level of Youth Satisfaction with Various Aspects of Life (in %)

Family life

45.1 50.9 58.1 52.9 60.0 67.2 37.7 63.2 80.3 77.8 44.4

School life

31.1 51.7 49.2 34.0 36.2 48.8 29.9 68.5 83.4 59.5 43.0

Work life

16.2 45.5 48.4 49.6 50.9 46.9 27.4 48.6 55.2 60.1 36.4

Friendships

64.1 70.6 79.5 64.2 73.0 80.1 64.2 77.5 89.0 77.5 60.7

Town/village of residence*

36.8 54.1 56.7 24.8 48.5 56.6 20.1 81.2 76.3 64.7 52.2

Nation*

43.5 43.1 31.4 44.6 23.5 64.6 19.0 36.9 62.7 21.3 5.1

Happiness*

37.6 48.8 29.3 31.7 38.4 60.2 33.0 66.0 61.5 44.1 27.1

Notes: 1) The ratio for items marked with * was calculated as follows: “Town/village of residence”: the ratio of subjects who responded “I like the town/village where I live” on a scale of 1–5; “Nation”: the ratio of subjects who responded with “Satisfactory” or “Slightly satisfactory” on a scale of 1–4; “Happiness”: the ratio of subjects who responded “I am happy” on a scale of 1–4. 2) The ratios for all other items (that is, not marked with *) represent the ratio of subjects who responded “Satisfactory” on a scale of 1–4. Source: Fujita 1996: 14.

Based on an analysis of these results, Fujita (1996) has classified the following groups: a) High-level group 1 (traditional-type society): Thailand, Philippines and Brazil b) Low-level group 1 (transitional-type society): Russia c) Low-level group 2 (economy-driven society): Japan, South Korea and Germany

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ATSUSHI KADOWAKI

d) Middle-level group (advanced market-type society): United States, England and France e) High-level group 2 (welfare-type society): Sweden The following conclusions can be drawn from this data: 1. The level of youth satisfaction is higher in countries such as Thailand, Philippines and Brazil where the transition to an industrial society, which emphasizes scientific technology and the economy, is occurring slowly and where the family, local area, school and workplace are still “community-based”. 2. The level of youth satisfaction is lowest in countries such as Russia whose economic market is poorly developed, despite progress in industrialization. 3. The level of youth satisfaction increases in proportion to the degree of industrialization and development of the economic market. 4. The level of youth satisfaction is even higher in countries such as Sweden, which have curbed the tendency towards excessive industrialization and market development and prioritized social welfare. Table 2 shows a comparison by country of the level of youth dissatisfaction towards their own country.

Dissatisfied + Slightly dissatisfied Dissatisfied

Russia

Brazil

53.4 55.4 67.7 52.8 75.5 34.1 79.6 63.1 37.1 78.3 92.6

15.9 30.3 46.9 21.0 29.2 11.4 31.5 49.3 Slightly dissatisfied

Thailand

Philippines

S. Korea

Sweden

France

Germany

England

USA

Japan

Table 2: Youth Dissatisfaction Towards their Respective Countries (in %)

5.4

62.6 71.6

37.5 25.1 20.8 31.8 46.3 22.7 48.1 13.8 31.7 15.7 21.0

Source: Fujita 1996: 31.

CHANGES IN VALUE AND LIFE ORIENTATION

79

In Russia where the lowest level of youth satisfaction towards their country was reported, the level of dissatisfaction is highest. In Thailand and Sweden where a high level of youth satisfaction was reported, on the other hand, the level of dissatisfaction is low. In Brazil, Philippines, England and France where the level of youth satisfaction towards their own country is relatively high, however, the level of dissatisfaction is high. These results suggest that there is not necessarily a positive correlation between the level of satisfaction towards everyday life and the evaluation of the present state of one’s country. Therefore, we shall examine what the youth in the countries surveyed perceive to be the problems in their respective countries. The results are shown in Table 3. These results show that the ratio of respondents who perceive problems in their own country is smallest in Japan. Compared to Thailand and Sweden where the youth reported a high level of satisfaction with their lives and a low level of dissatisfaction towards their own country, few young Japanese perceive problems with the way things are. This finding suggests that young Japanese have a lower level of interest in society than youth of other countries. We have reviewed the current status of young Japanese with respect to the level of satisfaction with their lives and interest in society in comparison with that of youth of other countries, based on the results of the World Youth Survey. It is apparent that although the Japanese youth are relatively satisfied with their everyday lives, they are still less satisfied with their lives than the youth of other countries. On the other hand, it was shown that young Japanese are not especially dissatisfied with their country. Of the countries surveyed, the Japanese ratio of respondents who perceive problems with their own country is the smallest. Next, we shall trace the changes in the social attitudes of young Japanese over the past 20 years based on the results of the Tokyo Youth Survey.

USA

England

Germany

France

Sweden

S. Korea

Philippines

Brazil

Russia

Importance attached to status/family lineage

20.5

32.6

30.2

19.5

15.5

11.9

71.8

27.1

9.8

20.0

22.9

Sex/racial discrimination

24.0

71.9

54.4

44.8

44.1

36.1

23.7

21.6

16.0

30.6

10.5

Gap in educational background

53.8

49.5

33.6

47.2

34.3

24.5

75.9

38.1

33.3

25.1

27.9

Too wide gap between rich and poor

15.7

58.4

63.0

39.5

62.9

29.6

68.2

52.9

60.6

58.3

46.8

Disturbance of public order/morals

8.0

44.9

49.2

24.0

21.4

31.2

40.0

52.7

46.4

44.2

57.9

Difficulty in finding work/high unemployment

12.3

61.0

82.5

51.0

85.0

83.3

48.3

60.5

42.1

47.8

43.6

The “right” actions are not taken

35.6

48.2

45.2

46.8

35.2

28.3

55.4

41.1

15.0

42.2

35.7

Diligence does not pay

30.3

46.2

38.8

25.9

54.3

48.2

53.8

28.8

23.7

47.1

40.8

Opinions of the youth are not reflected

22.0

51.0

42.1

35.4

36.7

48.4

21.6

30.0

43.9

24.6

32.7

Social welfare is inadequate

50.4

47.8

57.8

40.2

21.1

34.7

64.4

20.2

39.5

39.2

37.3

Apathy towards environmental destruction

50.9

59.4

55.5

53.6

49.6

51.3

42.2

54.1

42.6

33.0

44.2

Note: Since the ratio of those who responded that “People in an organization can only perform their duty in a mechanistic manner” was low (

Juvenile Delinquency in Japan: Reconsidering the

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