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REVIEWS
| Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan. By David R. Ambaras (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. xii plus 297 pp. $49.95).
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| This solidly researched, well-written book contributes to our understanding of juvenile delinquency in modern Japan on multiple levels. It is in part a social history, providing enough statistical data and individual case stories to reconstruct a composite picture of the lives of delinquent youth in Tokyo during the first half of the 20th century. It also describes vividly the various youth subcultures that provided both social milieus and cultural identities for young people in urban Japan. |
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The analytical thrust of the book, however, comes from what other people— government officials and middle class commentators, in particular—said about those youths. And they said a lot. Beginning around the turn of the century, Japanese officials and a burgeoning mass media latched on to juvenile delinquency as a "social problem." Newspapers, women's magazines, social science journals, and government white papers generated troubling and titillating images of urban streets teeming with unsupervised children, libidinous young women, gangs of street toughs, and dissolute middle-schools students. In the words of one newspaper exposé, this was "a hidden world, outside the law and undetected by police," one in which youth "learn the ways of evildoing." This interest in deviant youth was not just about middle class voyeurism. Juvenile delinquency served as an arena within which Japanese people voiced concerns over the social and cultural changes that accompanied the country's modernization. Delinquency was framed alternately as the residual influence of Japan's pre-modern past or the direct outgrowth of its modern transformation; in either case, controlling delinquency was about controlling social change and wringing out the deficiencies of Japan's modernity from the national body. |
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