Part Three | Japan in the Early 21st Century: New Actors, New Institutions
The new students: Schooling in crisis
I. On to Part Three: Beyond mainstream Japan
A. Lessons of the “lost decades”: Does Japan face terminal decline?
B. Is Japan moving from the structured diversity of the mainstream to a new structured inequality of “winners” and “losers”?
C. “Students, Slackers, Singles, Seniors, Strangers, and Sojourners”: How are new actors making new institutions?
D. Japan’s 21st-century demography as cause and effect
II. The challenges in secondary education
A. Why well-intentioned reform policies fail: Peter Cave on the differences of elementary school and junior high school pedagogies
B. The breakdown of the brokered school-to-work transition: Tomo, Keiko, and the “left-behinds” of Musashino High (David Slater)
C. From “school credentials” to “learning capital” (Kariya)
III. The challenges in tertiary education
A. Changing demographics and economics
B. The crisis of private universities–and the boom in technical institutes
C. Private evasions of public high school: “Bright flight” (Kariya & Rosenbaum 1999)
D. Restructuring the universities
IV. Youth delinquency, deviance, and despair: Does Japan face a moral panic?
A. Three forms of mainstream school delinquency
- “in-school violence” (kōnai boryoku 校内暴力)
- “bullying” (ijime いじめ)
- “refusal to go to school” (tōkōkyohi 登校拒否)
B. Withdrawing from post-mainstream society: The case of the hikikomori
Media constructions, social reality, and psychological distress
C. Is anything new?
- The “Sun Tribe” (Taiyō-zoku 太陽族) of the 1950s
- The student radicals of the 1960s
- The “Speed Tribes” (bōsō-zoku 暴走族) of the 1970s
- The “Bamboo-Sprouts Tribe” (takenoko-zoku 竹の子族) and the “New Breed” (shinjinrui 新人類) of the 1980s
- The otaku and kogyaru of the 1990s
D. Is this a crime wave or a “moral panic”—or just preemptive rhetoric?