The new image of childhood in Japan during the years 1945-49 and the construction of a Japanese collective memory

The Power of Memory in Modern Japan

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 189-203

  Galan, Christian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITÉ TOULOUSE JEAN JAURÈS   (France)

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EID: 84885155213     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1163/ej.9781905246380.i-382     Document Type: Chapter

References (23)

1. Donald W. Winnicott, Deprivation and Delinquency (London and New York: Tavistock, 1984), p. 25.
2. See, for example, Harold J. Wray, 'A Study in Contrasts: Japanese school textbooks of 1903 and 1941-5', in Monumenta Nipponica, 1973, pp. 69-86;
3. Yamazumi Masami, 'Textbook Revision: The Swing to the Right', in Japan Quarterly 28, 1981, pp. 472-8;
4. Yoshimitsu Khan, Japanese Moral Education Past and Present (Associated University Presses, 1997).
5. On 15 September 1945, under the control of SCAP, the Ministry of Education of the first post-war cabinet drafted a text entitled 'Educational policy for the construction of a new Japan', Shin Nihon kensetsu no kyōiku hōshin. This text banished all nationalist or militaristic ideology from the educational system, to which it attributed new end aims, i.e. to educate people and raise the general level of cultural awareness in order to pave the way to a peaceable and democratic society. Censure of the textbooks was one of the concrete and immediate results of this text.
6. Cf. Miyahara Yoshikazu et al. (eds), Shiryō Nihon gendai kyōiku shi (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1974), pp. 21-3.
7. Karasawa Tomitarō, 'Changes in Japanese Education as Revealed in Textbooks', in Japan Quarterly, 1955, p. 365.
8. Ōe Kenzaburō, 'Jibun no ki' no shita de (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2000-2001), pp. 7-10
9. Winnicott, Deprivation and Delinquency, p. 26.
10. Nogaki Yoshiyuki (ed.), Nihon kodomo no rekishi, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Daiichi Hōki, 1977), p. 43.
11. Winnicott, Deprivation and Delinquency, Editors' introduction, p. 11.
12. Cf. Kuboi Norio, Nihon no shinryaku sensō to Ajia no kodomo (Tokyo: Meiseki Shoten, 1996), pp. 84-8
13. Torigoe Shin, Momotarōno unmei (Tokyo: Minerva Shoten, 2004), pp. 153-6.
14. For the chronology of the events and statistics related to children cf. Shimokawa Kōshi, Kindai kodomo shi nenpyō / Shōwa-Heisei 1926-2000 hen (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2002)
15. 'Kodomotachi no shōwashi' henshū iinkai (ed.), Kodomotachi no Shōwashi (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 2000).
16. August 1949 survey by the Japanese government.
17. July 1949 survey by the Japanese government.
18. Asahi Shinbun, 19 April 1947.
19. Asahi Shinbun, 24 May 1949.
20. On this subject, it is also of great interest to read the very fine 'War tales for children' by Nosaka Akiyuki (Sensō dōwa-shū. Tokyo: Chūkō Bunko, 1980).
21. Joe O'Donnell, Japan 1945 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), p. 73.
22. Yet even this image, which perfectly symbolizes my subject here, is somehow misleading as the school in this photograph at least had walls and a roof, which was certainly not true (far from it) for the vast majority of schools in the period just after the defeat. Rather, the general rule was aozora kyōshitsu, 'open air schools', set up in the rubble or in the fields, with no walls or roof - nor notebooks, textbooks or pencils, for that matter.
23. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat - Japan in the Wake of World War II (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. 62.