| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

David R. Ambaras. Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan. (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 297. $49.95.

According to its author, this work "treats the policing of urban youth as a crucial arena for the development of new state structures and new forms of social power ... in modern Japan." It is about "juvenile delinquency," construed "not as an objective social fact but a phenomenon constructed through particular modes of representation, analysis, and treatment in relation to power" (p. 2). Conflating "delinquency" with "deviance," David R. Ambaras acknowledges from the outset that early modern writers on childhood "provided no systematic analysis of juvenile deviance" but that there was a general notion by 1900 of what constituted furyō ("no-good") behavior in young people (p. 3). Focusing on the period from 1895 to 1945, Ambaras explores how the national education, employment, and military systems all tried to cope with perceived problems of adolescent misbehavior and to shape youth into docile, patriotic citizens within an expanding empire. He describes how training programs linked to the military-industrial complex gradually augmented and eclipsed the primary education system as venues for social and political conditioning, and how Japan's wartime regime from some point, "like its counterparts in Nazi Germany, the United States, and elsewhere" used "policies of 'enforced homogeneity' to foster national unity, overcome social conflict, and thus maximize social efficiency and productivity" (p. 7).

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