Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth Century Japan (review)

This book presents new material on several aspects of modern Japanese social, intellectual, and institutional history that have had little or no coverage in English. Jones focuses on “the architects of childhood [who] included child psychologists, family reformers, pediatricians, department store executives, book and magazine editors, state bureaucrats, children’s literature authors, school-teachers, and parents” (p. 3). In addition to the nominal subject of childhood (childrearing) and the “middle class” in twentieth-century Japan, his book deals with issues such as professionalization and the activities of self-appointed experts (“public intellectuals”) and department stores not only in the context of the nominal subject but also as part of the overall development of modern Japan. There is much interesting material on the development of secondary education for girls and the role of these educational institutions in transmitting a particular version of the ryōsai kenbo (“good wife and wise mother”) ideology that is often cited in histories of Japan but seldom explained in anything more than a highly superficial fashion. Moreover, the material on self-appointed male experts advising women on how to rear children goes beyond interesting to border on being amusing.

While Jones appears to have researched his subject thoroughly, there are problems with the presentation of his argument beginning with the term “middle class.” Although some of the “architects” Jones studied did indeed use a Japanese term that can be mechanically rendered as “middle class,” the social strata they sought to foster or instruct was really at the very least only a new (post–Meiji Restoration) “urban new middle class” or perhaps more appropriately what has been called the “professional managerial class” in American sociology. In both text and footnotes, Jones does point to the degree to which the patterns of consumption advocated by his subjects— including the one notable female author taken up, Hani Motoko—could be afforded only by a tiny fraction of the population. But, in so doing, he raises the issue of why stick with the “middle” designation when the patterns described or advocated were not “middle” in their historical context and certainly not “middle” in the context of the contemporary readers or at least not American readers, given the propensity of U.S. politicians to link assembly-line jobs in factories to a “middle class” lifestyle. (Class-conscious British friends find this association of blue-collar factory work and “middle class” rather bizarre.)

Aside from this conceptual issue, the book is a hard read. The overall organization is chronological, although chapters do have a nominal thematic heading. The result is that interesting topics (professionalization, department stores, higher schools for girls, etc.) pop up, then disappear, then pop up only to disappear again. Some chapters are, moreover, overly long. Chapter 4 is 75 pages and chapter 5 is 63 pages. Given that Jones deals with a large number of writers, most of whom will be unfamiliar even to readers reasonably well versed in modern Japanese social history, the organization makes an already dense and dry subject (in which a large part of the discourse is self-appointed experts scoring points against each other and various straw men they set up) that much harder to follow.

While this book is primarily a history of thought, much of what those analyzed were writing about was physical objects, most notably toys, playgrounds, spaces for children in homes, and illustrations, in magazines and books aimed at children. Jones gives some description of these objects and illustrations but the book itself has only one illustration, and that is on the dust jacket, not in the book itself. The narrative descriptions given are inadequate to give the reader any substantial sense of how the toys advocated by the subjects of this study differed from what was otherwise available in the market or that had previously been available. The descriptions given in this book did not allow this reader...