Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan.

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).

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.

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 expose, 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.

Juvenile delinquency was not unusual in this regard. Early 20th-century commentators identified countless social problems--everything from rural decline to "modern girls" and jazz music--that were similarly freighted with larger anxieties about Japan's modern identity. What made youth delinquence unusual was the extent to which it fueled the development of institutions. Much of Ambaras' book is devoted to tracing the proliferation of laws and agencies and campaigns designed to address this recently defined problem of delinquency. Believing that delinquents' behavior could be reformed through environmental controls, the government established reformatories to teach delinquent youth discipline, cooperation, hygiene and other middle-class virtues. It created a juvenile court system to deal specifically with youth offenders--a departure from the Tokugawa era, when the state did not, by and large, make distinctions between youth and adult criminals. It established "youth continuation schools" and vocational guidance programs to extend the state's socializing influence to post-elementary school youth who otherwise would have directly entered the urban work force. Ambaras also illuminates the close institutional ties among these various programs and agencies. Collectively, he argues, they formed a "dense net of surveillance" which authorities used to police and regulate the activities of Japanese youth. Reformists endeavored to extend the reach of this net into every setting of youth life, particularly the home, the school, and the workplace.

One of Ambaras' main points about this network of surveillance is that it took shape largely through the combined efforts of reformist bureaucrats and middle class activists. Government support was crucial, as were the police, but what made this network so intrusive was that it was embedded within the fabric of society. Community leaders, businesses, social scientists, Christian and Buddhist organizations, and women's groups were eagerly mobilized to "protect" youth through surveillance and regulation. The guiding rationale behind this project was defined less by reactionary, moralistic killjoys than by the modernist ambition to manage, and ultimately perfect, society through the application of science and reason. Reformists' ideological orientations varied widely, but Ambaras downplays the significance of these differences. He argues that most reformists--along with the police and authoritarian elements within the government--shared the goal of "rendering surveillance ubiquitous" as a means of combating the problem of delinquency.

The turn towards militarism, fascism, and aggressive colonial expansion in the 1930s did not, Ambaras maintains, bring about a fundamental shift in the country's approach to juvenile delinquency. The effort to identify continuities between the 1920s and the 1930s has been a major historiographical movement during the last two decades or so, and Ambaras' research powerfully reaffirms this perspective. After all-out war with China began in 1937, the goal of taming and mobilizing delinquent youth became more urgent, and the rhetoric behind the campaign to curb youth delinquency became infused with a martial, nationalistic tone. Ambaras contends, however, that the modernist, middle-class thrust to the juvenile protection movement persisted, and that wartime era witnessed merely an acceleration of previous trends--namely, an "intensification of surveillance" and an "expansion of the space in which youth could be disciplined." In his epilogue, Ambaras again argues for continuity, showing how these prewar and wartime strategies for combating youth delinquency continued to prevail throughout the postwar period.

Ambaras' book demonstrates close familiarity with comparative scholarship on juvenile delinquency in Europe and America. He is careful to show how the Japanese approach to this issue drew from a shared body of ideas and institutions that were circulating globally during the early 20th century. Ambaras thus rightly shifts the reader's attention away from the nativist rhetoric of many prewar and wartime Japanese commentators and towards the shared intellectual and institutional territory of modernity. Nonetheless, his research also provides much grist for considering what was different about Japanese efforts to combat juvenile delinquency. One apparent difference--though perhaps Germany and Italy are similar to Japan in this regard--concerns the extraordinarily cooperative relationship between civil society and the state. Ambaras shows convincingly--depressingly so--how eagerly the institutions of civil society in Japan allied with the state to manage and surveil youth--and, when the political climate turned rightward, how readily they were mobilized towards decidedly illiberal (though modernist, not traditionalist) goals. In an effort to extract policy applications from this study, one might ask crudely: Was there some deficiency in Japan's civil society that made it susceptible to such developments and, as a result, fueled the repressive, fascist policies of wartime Japan? And if so, what was that deficiency? It is not within the scope of Bad Youth to address such questions, but this important, trenchant book will serve as a valuable resource for those seeking to do so without reverting to notions of Japanese exceptionalism.

Brian Platt

George Mason University