This presentation will introduce a genre of children’s writings called tsuzurikata that has its roots in a pedagogical practice specific to Japan’s modern educational history. Although tsuzurikata first began in the schools, these writings about children’s everyday lives gathered attention beyond educational circles when they became texts for public consumption in the 1930s and 1940s. While children’s writings are generally held to be undeveloped, simple, and far from being worthy of literary value, an astonishing number of writers and cultural figures in the early twentieth century participated in drawing attention to young people’s texts. In no other nation’s history is it possible to find such a vast amount of children’s writings preserved from the early twentieth century forward.

It will be the aim of this presentation to shed light on how the notion of childhood and the child intersected with a series of cultural and artistic sites in the prewar and wartime period. While the modern conceptualization of childhood as a blank slate for developmental growth spurred the usage of the child as the symbol of a nation’s future, my project aims to reveal how the child figure functioned specifically within the literary and cultural scene at this time. By taking up three concrete examples of tsuzurikata that became popular cultural phenomena, including the writings of a working class fourth grade girl named Toyoda Masako, a group of elementary school children sent on an envoy to Manchuria, and ordinary children writing about the home front during war, I will give an interpretation for why children’s writings became so important to a nation’s history and culture.

Ms. Endo is a Ph.D. candidate of University of Chicago (Specialization: Modern Japanese Literature). She has been staying in Japan from November 2006 as a Japanese Studies Fellow for Fiscal Year 2006, and has been conducting research about children’s writing, “Seikatsu Tsuzurikata” during prewar and war period.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

15:30-17:30

English (no interpretation)

If you would like to attend the seminar, please notify Ms. Uchida of Japanese Studies and Intellectual Exchange Dept. Tel: 03-5369-6069, Fax: 03-5369-6041 by Tuesday December 4, 2007 with your name, affiliation, and contact information (tel., fax or e-mail). If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.