Local Spaces and Identities— body schooling

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“Numerous factors in Japan constrain the emergence of democracy and egalitarianism as both the “real” and the “official” organizing principles in social relations. A key factor, as noted earlier, is that elites in Japan, who as status superiors enjoy the largest share of prerogatives, clearly have little to gain from actively promoting and legitimizing a social ideology that does not favor their interests
(Pharr 1990, 27).”

Counter-public discourses in every modern nation must compete with messages provided to the public from the state. From kindergarten through high school, Kyoto’s youth spend more waking hours in state-controlled institutions¹ than they do at home (and their waking time at home is often dominated by the homework they receive). Public schools in Japan, as in other contemporary nation-states, are sites for an education that trains the body while it informs the imagination. They promote a collective “memory” for the state through what Connerton (1989) calls “inscribing” and “incorporating” practices. These practices range from micro-body disciplines to collective group experiences. Connerton’s comments on handwriting are a good example for Japanese schools where many hours are spent on calligraphy:

“The teacher will place the pupils in the posture that they should maintain when writing, and will correct it either by sign or otherwise, when they change this position. La Salle is here proposing a training in rigorous docility, a kind of minuscule gymnastics. The essential point is that what is being prescribed and learnt is an incorporating practice. It also happens to be a practice of inscription; but that is a contingent feature of the practice in question, for, fundamentally, what is being learned is an act of incorporation” (1989, 77-78).

“Myth does not deny things, on the contrary its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact”
(Barthes 1982, 132).

Teaching and learning a “rigorous docility²” is not necessarily restricted to those topics that involve “minuscule gymnastics.” Lessons about proper behavior and national history may also be taught in this fashion. This docile body is subjected to what Foucault called the “technico-political register, which was constituted by a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school and the hospital, for controlling or correcting the operations of the body” (1979 [1975], 136). But regulations and carceral and other institutions are only one side of the operation of this register.

Governments—when they centrally control public education and public media—can also supply a steady input into the popular imagination, and inform social expectations about how the bodies of citizens³ should behave in public. But again, the interest in state control over the physical bodies of its populations is developed to a much higher level under conditions of state-nation modernity (see: State-nation modernity), where it forms a center of internal state policy.

“As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 29)

The states of state-nations make little effort to hide the fact of their interests in this area, and actively promote the role of public education as a source for “moral education.” Such lessons are coupled with an historical narrative—the myth of the nation— that provides them with a naturalized rationale. In Kyoto, a national school curriculum is followed locally, a curriculum designed to promote, “the shared quality of being Japanese” (Dowling 1997).

According to the current Chairman of Monbusho’s (The Ministry of Education’s) Curriculum Council, Mr. Miura Shumon, promoting enough of this shared quality requires that all the children in the nation be processed by the same mold: “Miura believes that ‘compulsory education is much like a processing plant where boys and girls are all hammered into identical little citizens of their nation,’ but adds that ‘any nation advanced enough to have a compulsory education system will attempt to force its children into a single mold’” (Dowling 1997).

“In the eyes of many Japanese, the alienated behavior of Koreans supported the belief that Koreans were unwelcome intruders incapable of being assimilated into Japanese society. The stereotype of a Korean was related to “badness,” not only moral but even in respect to physical comportment. Even today, it is not uncommon to find a grandmother scolding her grandchild by saying, ‘Don’t sit like “Chosenjin” do.’ There is no question that the Koreans comported themselves in a rougher and more overtly aggressive manner than was customary for the more obsequious and diffident lower-class Japanese. They aroused both fear and contempt among the Japanese, who were accustomed to docility on the part of subordinates.”
(Lee and DeVos 1981, 41)

The desired outcome of this molding is a ubiquitous, shared⁴ “Japaneseness.” “Miura sees this shared quality of being Japanese as ‘a distinctively Japanese consciousness, a sense of identity which distinguishes Japan from other countries’ being shared spatially throughout all Japanese territory, and also temporally throughout the whole of Japanese history” (Dowling 1997). Here Miura is expressing the position that Japan is a “homogeneous society” (See: the politics and semantics of homogeneity).

What is really shared is the molding practice itself, and the resulting sameness—which is attributed by its planners to a long history of homogeneous Japanese culture and heredity—is in fact much more the outcome of several years of (old-time) Foucaultian discipline. In other words, if Monbusho used the same technique while switching “molds” (changing the content), the result would be a shared “Japaneseness” of an entirely different form.

This ability to slide in new content with the same practice was practically demonstrated before and after the war, when the pre-war discourse of nationalized, imperial Shinto religion as the basis for national unity was simply recast into a discourse of the state itself, through its many ministries (now officially, but not entirely separated from Shinto) in partnership with the large keiretsu corporations (also simply recoded from the pre-War zaibatsu conglomerates), as the dutiful father of the Japanese national family.

“Dentsu does more than any single corporation, anywhere in the world, to mould popular culture, both directly and through hordes of subcontractors. It also orchestrates major events such as expos and visits from the pope. It is highly active politically, about which more in a moment. Dentsu is directly responsible for one-third of all advertising on Japanese TV, and virtually monopolises the scheduling of sponsors during primetime hours, not to mention the control it exerts through its many subsidiaries and subcontracting firms. Some 120 film production companies and more than 400 subcontracting graphic arts studios are under its wing. Advertisers wishing to insert commercials in television programmes between 7 and 11 p.m. have almost no choice but to go via Dentsu, because it controls their selection and much of the programme material”
(van Wolferen 1990, 176).

Apart from the schools and the government run media (and that which is government controlled in less direct ways), state inputs into “moral” or civic education can also be coupled to legal constraints. Admonitions against drug use, for example, are enforced through the criminal courts. (Courts might also be available for arguments against the interest of the state, but this has not been the case in Japan. [See: The courts].)

Even so, state inputs into the complex, ongoing identification that individuals make with their compatriots are never complete. The tendency to promote the activities of the state as totalizing ignores the many openings that are available for counter or oblique expressions, even in a state-nation. The capitalist market remolds young adults with its own blitz of nation-wide products and lifestyle identity features. So the final stamp of the “Japaneseness” mold belongs not to Monbusho, but to Dentsu: the world’s largest “advertising” agency (and much more than that).

¹One more word about school. The importance of schooling as the only possible avenue for social/economic upward mobility in Kyoto cannot be overstressed. Discipline in the public schools, in addition to the grades on tests, is tracked by a record that follows the student through to the university application (and perhaps even to potential employers, although I am not certain about this). This record of daily decorum and attitude is kept by teachers and is not available for inspection by the student or the student’s parents. Japanese courts have so far upheld this secrecy.

²The notion of “docile bodies” was earlier developed by Foucault: “La Mettrie's L'Homme-machine is both a materialist reduction of the soul and a general theory of dressage, at the centre of which reigns the notion of 'docility', which joins the analysable body to the manipulable body. A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (1979 [1975], 136).

³ We have to look closely at how these inputs are received, and we also have to remember that mass public education within modern liberal democracies (Aronowitz 1993, 91)is also charged with equipping individuals to better counter even the arguments of the state.

⁴Adult Japanese in Kyoto have told me that the shared experience of being in the mold—of going through the Japanese school system—is the most powerful experience of their lives. And school friends of the same year are the ones that can become life-long friends. Conversely, students who have gone abroad to study, or who study in Korean schools in Japan fail to acquire sufficient “Japaneseness.”