This project will produce an innovative study of emotion in children’s fiction which relates to the March 2011 triple disaster in Fukushima (henceforth “3.11”). Representations of trauma in children’s literature are particularly important amid an increasingly precarious and catastrophic world. Fictions and picture books – as opposed to actual accounts or reports – offer young people imaginative models, not only for how to comprehend and cope with personal adversity, but also to empathise with other people’s difficulties.

Much 3.11 children’s fiction raises awareness of environmental dangers but, as literature which explores trauma, it also focuses on feelings and empathy. Like other trauma literature, 3.11 fiction and picture books for young people incorporate highly emotive literary and artistic effects, not only to act as a witness to the pain of others, but also to endorse (or censure) particular forms of behaviour and expression. These aspects of conduct and expression remain an under-explored element of 3.11 children’s fiction, particularly in the ways the texts encourage young people to understand not only their own feelings, but to empathise with others. Empathy has an important ethical and social significance in that it enables understanding and builds connections with others. As trauma theorist Cathy Caruth (1995: 11) suggests, fictional narratives are crucial in aiding the understanding of otherwise incomprehensible experiences, both individual and cultural.

Fiction enables the transmission of different traumatic ordeals and encourages people who have not personally experienced such a trauma to empathise with other people’s suffering. The means by which such ordeals are represented in children’s literature have important social and ethical implications relating to how young people are being socialised and provide crucial insights into a seminal acculturation process.

There are three distinct projects that I plan to work on during the proposed period of stay in Japan.

Project 1: To complete a single-authored book manuscript, by checking and confirming the last minutes questions and information.

The book is contracted to Routledge (London), entitled Education in changing Japan: Social inequality, transnationalism and multiculturalisms. It provides an updated comprehensive account of schooling in contemporary Japan, and is intended to replace my previous book, Education in Contemporary Japan: Diversity and Inequality (1999, Cambridge University Press, with M. Tsuchiya) which has remained the most frequently cited book on Japanese education. Its Malay language version was published with several subsequent reprints, and is used widely at teacher education institutions in Malay speaking countries.

My task during the proposed period is to collect and confirm the most up to date information at the last stage of manuscript writing. The manuscript will be almost complete before my arrival in Japan. From my previous experience I have found that being in Japan in the final phase of manuscript writing to be highly productive and convenient, since I can quickly and easily check with and contact relevant sources. This is done at university libraries, public libraries, and educational institutions, as well as through consultation with my academic colleagues (e.g., Prof Koji Maeda at Waseda Univesity; Prof Kokichi Shimizu at Osaka University; Prof Yuko Yamanouchi at Kansai University; Prof Kaoru Hounoki at Kobe University) and relevant educational practitioners and policy makers.

Project 2: To interview 22 women for my ongoing longitudinal project on growing up in Japan, and to make progress towards a publication of a monograph on “middle adulthood and children 2000-2015”.

This longitudinal anthropological project examines the lives of working class women in Kobe from their high school years until present. It started as a school ethnography in 1989 which examined how Year 12 students decided on, and obtained, their first permanent jobs. This resulted in a book, School to work transition in Japan (1993, Multilingual Matters). It then followed a group of 22 young women (out of the original 100 students) over the next 12 years, and produced a book, Young women in Japan: Transitions to adulthood (2009, London: Routledge). The book won an “Outstanding Academic Title of the Year 2010” award from the American Library Association. For this book, I benefitted from a Japan Foundation Fellowship (taken at Kobe University in 2006). The proposed project forms a part of the third phase of this longitudinal study which I am working on currently. My plan for the December 2015 – January 2016 period is to interview the 22 women. They will be recorded for further analysis in combination with the previously collected data. The interviews will cover such topics as employment, marriage, family and other relationships, and will be the basis of the third monograph of the longitudinal project.

Project 3: To conduct preliminary research on the politics of education about eating

Shokuiku (education about eating) became a legitimate part of the school curriculum as a result of the Shokuiku Kihon Hô (Basic Law on Education about Eating, 2006), although similar activities had been included at some schools prior to this. This project examines: (i) how and why compulsory school lunches (kyûshoku) were introduced immediately after the Second World War and developed into the present form, in the context of political and social imperatives; (ii) how and why the government formulated the Shokuiku Kihon Hô in response to demands from primary industry producers, educational practitioners and other groups; and (iii) how education about eating has been interpreted and implemented at schools.

My task during the proposed period will be to interview educational and health practitioners, and to collect primary and secondary sources.

Japanese law is going “pop”. Since the turn of the century, Japanese popular culture, especially prime-time television, has dedicated more time to legal themes, characters and settings. Lawyers, overwhelmingly women, are the heroes in both dramatic and comedic television series. Court-room battles are the scene for plot developments. Practising lawyers are the new celebrities, joining actors and singers on the light-entertainment talk-show circuit.

The increasing preoccupation in Japanese popular culture with law is no accident. It coincides with a series of major structural reforms to the Japanese legal system triggered by the policy recommendations by the Justice System Reform Council in 2001 (‘Recommendations of the Justice System Reform Council — For a Justice System to Support Japan in the 21st Century”). The reform agenda was ambitious: tripling the population of lawyers, judges and public prosecutors; re-conceiving legal education from generalist undergraduate degrees to specialist legal training at dedicated post-graduate law schools; dismantling ex ante administrative action in favour of ex post judicial relief; and allowing the participation of ordinary citizens in criminal cases. Major areas of law have been re-written. Company law is now enshrined in a new statute. Administrative law now grants stronger legal remedies for citizens in their relationship with the state. Employment is undergoing deregulation.

The success (or otherwise) of these reform efforts has already captured a significant corpus of research. But, to date, little work has examined the extent to which they have changed Japanese attitudes towards law: that is, whether or not — and, if so, how — Japanese people themselves think and feel differently about the law. This is surprising. After all, Japanese legal consciousness has been a longstanding controversy in the comparative law literature. For more than four decades, scholars have debated the extent to which law matters in Japan. Both Japanese and non-Japanese experts, legal and non-legal scholars alike, have sought to explain whether or not – and, if so, how – legal rules, legal processes, legal professionals and other legal actors play important roles in structuring and ordering society.

The purpose of this fellowship research proposal is to re-open and re-fresh this debate. Government reforms to civil justice make it timely to do so. And new methodologies are needed to rejuvenate the scholarly conversation for the new century. Quantitative data, after all, only tells part of the story. For one, reliable statistics on litigation in Japan (or, indeed, elsewhere) are hard to come by and even more difficult to compare meaningfully across time or jurisdictions. For another, quantitative data cannot answer qualitative questions. Litigiousness, after all, is a socio-cultural issue; it interrogates the extent to which people are conscious of the law and prepared to engage formal legal processes.

Enter popular culture. As Friedman (1989) argues, popular culture is a useful clue into how law functions in society, especially for capturing citizens’ perspectives on the desirability of invoking formal law to frame rights and settle disputes. This research proposal seeks to use Japanese popular culture as both a source of data (specifically, prime-time television shows) and as a research method (namely, a narrative analysis of the themes and concerns in these media texts).

This is a new direction in Japanese Studies. Research on modern Japan tends to be bi-furcated. One group focuses on Japan's ‘hard power’ — its economic institutions, international diplomacy, military and defence policy, legal system or domestic politics. Another group focuses on its ‘soft power’ — its cartoons (manga), animated films (anime), J-pop music and computer games. This research fellowship is distinctive because it ties together these two research threads. Rather than seeing ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power in separate terms, the premise of this research fellowship is that they are two equally important levers responsible for configuring the modern Japanese state. Like hardware and software, ‘hard’ structural reforms and ‘soft’ cultural norms work together — or compete with one another — in ways that shape the future of Japanese society.

The deployment of popular culture to excavate attitudes about Japanese law is not without its methodological risks. At issue is whether works of fiction are useful to investigate socio-legal reality. To be sure, popular culture is not a ‘mirror’ of the actual operation of the law (a realist question); however, it is a ‘window’ into how people feel about it (a constructivist question). This is because it taps into a reservoir of mass mentality. Although primarily works of imagination that engage the aesthetic and emotional senses of the audience, popular culture is only consumed if it resonates with the general population. The characters must be credible; the plots must replicate real, lived experience; and the settings must be immediately familiar. It is this verisimilitude – or truth-like quality – that strongly suggests that popular culture, as sub-art, parallels developments in society. Popular culture, therefore, does not lack empirical existence. It is not ‘just fiction’. Rather, viewers emotionally attach and psychologically commit to its stories because there is a cognitive interface between the producers of popular culture and the memories, experiences, desires and aspirations of its consumers. To be sure, consumers are not passive recipients of popular cultural messages, and producers may seek to subvert accepted social conventions in their productions or transmit their own ideological preferences. Nevertheless, the cognitive interface between them operates to recursively enact and reproduce social relations.