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  • Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan
  • Simon Partner
Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan. By David R. Ambaras. University of California Press, 2005. 297 pages. Hardcover $49.95/€32.50.

We were all young once, and most of us have experienced the gruff disapproval of our elders, perhaps even the institutional repression of our natural aspiration to chart our own course in life, independent of the prescriptions of a society whose cruelties and follies the young can all too clearly see. To some extent, then, the generational politics described in this splendid book are familiar to all of us—are, indeed, a universal feature of human societies. The challenge that David Ambaras has undertaken is to fashion a historical narrative of the specific circumstances of this "politics of everyday life" in modern Japan and to relate them to the massive economic, demographic, and imperialist transformations of the first half of the twentieth century.

For the most part, he succeeds admirably. The author makes a compelling case for the emergence over the fifty-year period from 1895 to 1945 of a web of increasingly coercive institutions of supervision and control over the lives of young Japanese, intended to assimilate them as productive members of the imperialist nation-state and the industrial capitalist economy. At the same time, Ambaras never allows us to forget the cultural relativity of ideologically charged terms such as delinquency, welfare, morality, and citizenship—most of which were weapons in the hands of the reformers, bureaucrats, and intellectuals who dominated the emerging strategies of control.

Underlying Ambaras's approach is a sensitive empathy for the lives, aspirations, and world-view of the downtrodden, voiceless, and often abused youths who inhabit and enliven the pages of the book. Take the case of Okada Kiku, a teenager who had dropped out of school in second grade, worked since she was nine, and suffered repeated beatings at the hands of her parents, who wanted her to hand over more of her meager income and stop spending it on her own entertainment. In response, Kiku had shaved off all her hair and quit work in protest. Social caseworkers diagnosed her as mentally retarded. Nevertheless, they persuaded her to return to work and to hand over more of her wages to her parents, in exchange for a dubious promise of gentler treatment in future. As Ambaras points out, "her own agency and desires had no place in an analysis that emphasized her lack of intelligence and her susceptibility to temptation" (p. 113). Among its other achievements, this book succeeds in restoring a small amount of agency to Kiku and others who, like her, were placed by evangelical reformers under the controlling arm of the modern administrative state.

Ambaras stakes a high claim for the importance of this project. The middle-class reformers and bureaucrats who created the increasingly complex web of control, supervision, and training believed it was "the key to creating a healthy society that could face the challenges of modernity, and thus the key to fortifying Japan's position as an industrial, imperial power in a fiercely competitive international order" (p. 193). There may be a degree of hyperbole here, but Ambaras emphasizes the significance of this enterprise to Japan's modern transformation. The minds and bodies of young Japanese were a battleground, it seems, between the freedom and independence embodied in the Tokugawa tradition of freewheeling kabukimono gangs and the increasingly totalizing demands of modern culture. [End Page 372]

One might quibble with this argument. Between the economic needs of families and the heavy demands of employers and gang bosses, it is questionable how much autonomous space youths in the Tokugawa era really enjoyed. On the other hand, in spite of the best efforts of twentieth-century bureaucrats and educators to create an "ideal social order orbiting the three poles of home, school, and work" (p. 63), the book offers much vivid evidence of the continuing assertion of youthful autonomy throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This is, indeed, one of the book's great strengths. David Ambaras is far too good...

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