In the Shadows: Sexuality, Pedagogy, and Gender among Japanese Teenagers (review)

With so little written in English in an academic genre on youth sexuality and sex education in Japan, Genaro Castro-Vázquez’s book In the Shadows: Sexuality, Pedagogy, and Gender among Japanese Teenagers should stand as an important and timely contribution to our understanding of this field. Yet, while reading the introduction and first two chapters, disappointment and then incredulity took hold; surely this had not been vetted by a reputable publisher? Poorly written, marred by overgeneralizations, contradictions, and a number of factual errors, from a reading of these early chapters there appeared to be absolutely nothing to recommend to the reader with an interest in this field whether broadly defined in terms of Japanese studies or more narrowly defined in terms of gender and sexuality studies or public health, the author’s own field.

The book began to redeem itself to a certain degree as the author moved on to present the findings of two small-scale studies, one concerning gender identity and sexuality among Japanese male high school students (chapters 3 and 5) and the other on the reactions and evaluations of a high school teacher and his students to four 50-minute sex education interventions (chapter 6). Such is the dearth of research on the subject, especially in a non-Japanese medium, that the modest insights that can be gleaned from the three relevant chapters may make this book worthy for purchase by university librarians with generous acquisitions budgets. For those scholars and students with more modest funds, however, parts of chapters 3, 5, and 6 appeared originally in three academic journals (Journal of Gender Studies, Sexualities, and Sex Education),¹ and thus it may be prudent to seek these out first for there is little else to recommend about this book beyond this content. As an aside, it says much about the editing process at Lexington Books that chapters 3, 5, and 6 are more polished and error-free than the remainder of the volume.

So what precisely is it about the book that leads me to present it in such a harsh light? Setting aside for the moment the poor standard of the writing, the biggest problem is that this book does not sustain itself as a piece of extended writing. In the three chapters mentioned above, the author has something to say about male sexuality (but little about female sexuality) and the fumbling attempts at sex education in Japanese schools that is pertinent and interesting, but this does not make a book. In fact, it is apparent from the introduction that the author has no clear idea of what the book aims to achieve or what precise questions it hopes to address. We are told that “This book provides educators with a sexuality education course for Japanese senior high school students based on sexual cultures and actual needs from a gender perspective” (p. 3). Nowhere in the book is a sex education course outlined, unless the four 50-minute interventions covered briefly in chapter 6 fulfill this criterion. Having created a sex education program for junior high school students two years ago with Japanese colleagues, I would argue that what appears here is no more than a taste and certainly does not amount to a “course.” Perhaps more to the point, if this book is aimed at sex education teachers in the Japanese system, as claimed, why has it been written in English?

The lack of a clear argument can be seen in the early chapters particularly. These appear to be fillers to make a couple of short journal-length articles into a full-length book. Chapter 1 focuses on the Japanese education system generally “in order to understand how and where sex education takes place in Japanese schools” (p. 7). Sadly, much of what has been written could be found in any introductory text on Japanese society and written in a way much easier to digest. With glaring...