Producing Mothers

Anne Allison

In early July 1987,my son had just completed his first three months at a Japanese nursery school (yochien).  When I picked him up the day before summer vacation, his teacher instructed me on how to monitor David’s behavior during the break: keep practicing skills he was learning in school, keep up friendships with other children who attended the same school, and keep up the basic routines and schedules at home that are maintained in school.  Saito-sensei, the teacher, also mentioned that David was being given a calendar that we might use to chart his summer activities.
The calendar was cute, as such items are for Japanese children: brightly colored with anthropomorphized animals brushing their teeth, putting on pajamas, and cleaning up toys.  Accompanying it were stickers displaying different kinds of weather (cloudy, rainy, sunny) and different activities (playing, swimming, biking, tidying up), so that the events of specific days could be recorded.  David and I marked some of his days in this fashion, but we regarded the calendar as more an optional amusement than an everyday routine and did not fill it in consistently.
Six weeks later, on the first day back from summer vacation, Saito-sensei asked me for the calendar.  Confused when I told her it was sill at home, she asked if I hadn’t completed it as had been expected by sing the stickers and adding descriptions to mark what David had done each day during the vacation.  We discovered, in talking, that I had missed the first few minutes of a mothers’ meeting in which these instructions had been explicitly given.  I had therefore misread the calendar’s meaning, interpreting it as a gift rather than an assignment: its intended purpose was to monitor David’s activities while away from school and provide the teacher with a record. I offered an apology for my negligence and Saito accepted it, but she was implicitly chastising, pointing out that her job would be made more difficult now.  Knowing what children did in their hiatus from school helped her to assess the problems they might encounter upon returning.
Even more serious than this missing information was the implication that the schedule and daily regimen of my child over vacation had been lax.  If David spent his break in too loose a fashion, Saito suggested, he would have problems reintegrating into nursery-school life.  Mothers are expected to monitor the lives of students away from school in a manner that is monitored itself by the school authorities through methods such as these calendars.  If and when I child slips, the responsibility lies with the mother.
School, as this incident helped elucidate, is a totalizing (pre)occupation in Japan: an endeavor that is not delimited to the school building or school day but, rather, infiltrates and shapes every aspect of the child’s life. And mother, as my relations with a Japanese nursery school for fifteen months demonstrated almost daily, is the expected implement of this extension of school practices into the child’s home and playtime.

Kyoiku Mama: The Everyday Instiller of Everyday Education

In this paper, I examine the relationship between two institutions, school and motherhood in Japan, to see how this intersection is shaped by school ideology and practices and how it is experienced by mothers.  Broadly I am interested in the syndrome of the kyoiku mama (education mother): the type of mother so committed to furthering the education of her child that she does everything from sharpening pencils, making midnight snacks, and pouring tea for a studying child to consulting with teachers, investigating the range of schools, tutors, and juku (cram schools) available, and even attending class herself in subjects where her child is deficient.  Kyoiku mama is a term both of respect and reprobation: it conveys respect for mothers who are successful in seeing children through the competitive Japanese school system and reprobation for the pressure they consequently exert on children whose days, nights, and energies are consumed by study.  Mamagon or “mother godzilla” is another term encoding only the second half of the kyoiku mama relation, condemning mothers who relentlessly police their children’s study habits.
Here my focus is not on the entirety of the kyoiku mama phenomenon, a phenomenon that has arisen since WWII in the era of economic rebuilding, national mobilization of the school system, and urban demographics that have encouraged close mother-child relations, in which women supervise the education of their children, often single-handedly in the absence of hardworking husbands.  My aim rather is to look at one phase of the lyoiku mama life cycle: a mother’s role when her child enters nursery school. I investigate the interrelationships between school and mother in producing the behavior of “education motherhood” and pursue two questions: How does the school manage, shape and monitor a woman’s behavior in her role as mother, and how do women experience the expectations places on them by the school system and the educational demands of Japan’s super-competitively school society.
I have chosen the nursery school as the site for these investigations despite the arguments made by such scholars of Japanese education as Lois Peak.  Peak minimizes the importance of the mother’s role in the socialization of children to school, asserting that “Japanese believe that the home and the school are so dissimilar that it is difficult for the family to teach the behavior the child will need in the classroom.  In Peak’s view, the school provides the atmosphere for shudan seikatsu (group life), which is the key structure to such institutions as the Japanese workplace.  She argues that shudan seikatsu could never be replicated at home because children are central to family life and mothers indulge them as spoiled dependents.  Being spoiled causes the children to engage in amae, a behavior inimical to that expected of students.  Home, and specifically the child-mother relationship, is therefore not only inconsistent with the interpersonal dynamics of school, but also must be actively transcended and displaced in the school environment.
Emphasizing that nursery school is oriented far less to academics in Japan and far more towards the adoption of group dynamics that will be the foundation of all future educational and social endeavors for the child, Peak further discounts the role of the mother.  Her implicit assumption is that the energies of kyoiku mama-hood are activated primarily at the time of entrance exams taken by less than one percent of nursery school children entering elementary school and by only about six percent of the children entering junior high school. Since the vast majority of Japanese youth do not sit for entrance exams taken before the age of fifteen, Peak claims that these earlier exams are far less important in the educational lives of Japanese children than is often assumed.  Accordingly, she asserts that mothers play a significantly lesser in socializing children to school life than the institution of the school itself.
Norma Field has argued a different position in a recent paper on the infiltration of school life into the sphere of what should, or once did, constitute play for children in Japan.  Presenting statistics on the high rates of stress-induced diseases in elementary school children and noting that half of all fourth through sixth graders attend cram school that lasts often until nine o’clock at night, Field depicts the rigors of a study regime that begins long before the age of fifteen and the children’s first entrance exams. Field emphasizes the habituation of text taking that even young children are subjected to as preparation for the major tests they will take upon entrance to high school and college.  Every skill and subject they are taught involves barrages of tests, exercises that instill in the child an “atomized mechanistic mode” of acquiring knowledge through cramming.  The effect, writes Field, is to inscribe a purpose and regimen into every activity, even play is organized to mold the child into a good student.
In contrast to Peak, Field believes that it is the anticipation of entrance exams that determines how Japanese children are treated, instructed and managed at even the early stages of their educational careers.  Field argues that children are expected to perform as early as “age zero” (she cites the popular books of Iibuka Masaru who urges mother to educate children even in utero) an expectation that seeps into all domains of a child’s life. Concluding that childhood has disappeared in contemporary Japan, Field notes the absence of any activity, relationship or domain that offers a reprieve to the child from the pressures to perform.  Performance thus becomes interminable. The realm of m other and home become not an antidote to school, as Peak suggests for every stage except that of taking entrance exams, but rather the very mechanism for extending study management into realms outside school.
Making performance continuous and insinuating it into the child’s daily life is an effect of Japan’s gakureki shakai (academic pedigree society).  The careers of adults (even women who assume roles as mothers) depend almost entirely on the colleges they attend, which depend upon the passing of entrance exams before college and high school, which depends in turn on the schools they attend as children. 
No matter how one assesses the gakureki shakai – as the foundation of Japan’s economic prowess built up from the ashes of wartime defeat or the great price extracted from Japanese citizens for living in an economically sec ure but competitive society – few dispute its dominance in that society or the consequences for those who are unwilling or unable to meet it demands.  Children learn at an early age the connection between their success as students and their future success as adults in the networks of work and social status.  My arguments here is that mothers play a pivotal role in both embedding into the child the continuous study and performance patterns of gakureki shakai and offer the child a measure of emotional security and intimacy with which to survive these demands.
My position takes something from the arguments made by both Lois Peak and Norma Field: from Peak, the notion that mothers and home give children special attention that schools can and will not, and from Field, the notion that daily study routines that exceed the dimension of school and entrance exams mobilize children into the regime of a gakureki shakai.  The position of mothers vis-a-vis the educational imperatives aimed at their children is, in my view, therefore contradictory; mothers impose a behavioral regimen onto the child consistent with that of school but outside its parameters, yet they also cushion the child from this regimentation with nurturance and comfort.  Mothers are not un aware of these contradictions and often decide the anxiety and resentment they fell at being compelled (by school, society’s demands, and husbands or mothers-in-law) to push their children into habits of study and performance that they then try to make easier with treats, indulgences, and creative pleasures. One effect of this double-edged mothering, for both mother and child, is to make desirable that which is obligatory: to encase the tasks of learning and performing in acts of love and play so pleasant that they disguise and thereby instill the tasks at hand.

The Discipline of Summer Vacation

Diverse media strategically advise mothers how to cultivate desirable behaviors in children. Newspaper columns, special television programs, books mothers’ magazines, articles in children’s magazines and comics, and handouts from school with directives or hints for mothers all convey messages that display a high degree of ideological consistency. One of the most basic premises of all this mother-focused discourse, no matter what the age or level of the child, is that mothers need to direct the child’s energies in ways that will make learning at school easier and more productive.
An article entitled “Summer Discipline Strategies for Hurrying a Child’s Independence” appeared in a popular mothers’ magazine in August 1987.  This “independence” (jintsu) is not the ability or inclination to chart one’s own course and act without the help of others, but rather the ability to internalize certain habits of self-maintenance that are expected of students.  My reading of this article coincided with the end of summer vacation and the reprimand I received from David’s teacher for failing to complete his summer calendar. Interested, I found the discussion consistent with the emphasis Saito-sensei had placed on maintaining the “flow” of school life during vacation to avoid disrupting a ‘rhythm” of patterns and routines needed while school is in session.  Curious that this very consistency with school was encoded in the word “independence,” I began to understand that the meaning of this concept is heavily shaped by the demands and constraints of Japan’s schooled society and addresses those behaviors needed in order to survive and succeed in it. In short, “independence” so often advocated in discussion about raising and training children in Japan, means the development of patterns, skills, and attitudes that enable the child to adopt and perform successfully the labors of school (and later work).
Significantly, the word “discipline” (shitsuke) in the article refers not only to children but also to their mothers. A mother is supposed to instill discipline in h er child by exhibiting it herself.  Significantly as well is the fact that theprime authority in “Summer Discipline Strategies” is a nursery school teacher, precisely the figure who monitors the child’s relationship to school and mediates this relationship with the mother on an everyday basis when school is in session.  The tone of this teacher’s voice in the text is a subtly reprimanding as was Saito sensei’s when speaking to me of the calendar.  The first point that Ariga-sensei makes is that “the independence of life rhythms begins by gaining strength in breakfast”.  Acknowledging that it is easy to slip into a more relaxed pattern over vacation, Ariga-sensei warms against this tendency.

There are many cases of children losing the rhythm of nursery school life over summer vacation.  The children will ask if they can stay up later because it is vacation, and the mothers will permit a new bedtime.  But doesn’t this cut a new pattern? If children stay up late they’ll also sleep in later….Pretty soon a chain has set in and the life rhythm has been broken. And if this continues for forty days, once September comes these children will be drowsy all morning long.

Her solution is for mothers to establish “fun” routines in the morning. Mother and child should participate together in morning exercises transmitted on a local radio station and share a hearty breakfast, over which they can linger and communicate as they rarely have time to do on a school morning.
Ariga-sensei warns against laxness. Recognizing that mothers welcome summer vacation partially because they do not have to make the elaborate lunches (obento) that their children take to school, she says “This feeling of liberation has a connection to being neglectful and careless”.  Criticizing mothers who make big dinners but scant breakfasts or who combine breakfast with lunch, she asserts that breakfast is “the source of children’s energy, and if a mother neglects this she is taking something from her child’s energy level”.  “Give breakfast meaning by communicating with your child,” Ariga urges, and then outlines an entire list of techniques for routinizing the vacation days of both mother and child. In her advice, the two most important guidelines are scheduling activities in an orderly fashion over the break and maintaining a consistency between these summer routines and those of school.  Accordingly she urges mothers to maintain friendships that their children have established at school by arranging play dates with these friends.  Ariga acknowledges that mothers may be seeking a ‘liberation’ from such activities, which can take place almost daily during the school year and consume vast amounts of the mothers’ energy and time.  “But a woman must think of what’s good for her child rather than what’s relaxing for her,” she says.  Children take pleasure in their friendships with others. Further, these interpersonal ties are what constitute the “ningenkankei” or human relationships of any social group in Japan, including the shudan seikatsu first introduced at nursery school.,  Consequently, play dates during vacation are of critical importance for the children and a critical responsibility for the mothers.
Other behaviors that she addresses as desirable for establishing a child’s “independence” include learning to pick up one’s toys after play, wash hands after being outside, gargle, make friends, keep clean, and eat nutritious food.  For each of these desired goals, the teacher offers strategies for their inculcation such as getting a child who has poor eating habits to help out in selecting and preparing the ingredients for healthy meals.  The suggestions are often ingenious and elaborate, such as the ‘trick’ Ariga used herself with a son who liked trucks but hated washing hands.  She made a path out of masking tape from the door of their house to the bathroom so he could continue to drive his trucks from outside to the sink, where the chore of handwashing became coupled to and transformed by a play that he liked.  Ariga points out that this technique worked far better than simply ordering the child to clean his hands.

In the same vein, she encourages mothers to do whatever is necessary to make a particular chore or routine pleasurable and fun for the child. If gargling is to be started the next day, for example, she suggests that mothers go out and buy a cute new cup with which to begin and associate the process.  Such a technique is preferable to merely ordering a child because the former by making a routine feel good is more effective.  Mothers should underscore this feel good quality by articulating it in words to the child: “When you wash your hands, it feels good doesn’t it?” Finally, Ariga-sensei speaks of transforming one’s house so that it mimics important features of the classroom.  The rationale is that spatial and physical consistency will facilitate the habituation of certain routines for the child.  “There is a way to make the habits followed at nursery school continue in the home. In short, let’s make the conditions the same in the bathroom (for example) as at school.  Put towels at the same height.  This makes a big difference. Children who see this will follow the same habits as at school.”

By the end of this article, I was exhausted by merely imagining the various strategies recommended by Ariga-sensei. I wondered to what degree such suggestions were taken seriously by Japanese mothers. How fully might they be implemented on a daily basis, and how much were they formed by expectations on the part of nursery school officials?

As I had already discovered, nursery schools (as somewhat distinct from day-care centers) expect a very committed and extensive involvement from others to assist children to adopt and adapt to the routines of nursery-school life.  Nursery school policy implicitly assigns to mothers the role explicitly articulated by Ariga: mothers must make habitual and desirable such routines as eating one’s lunch, cooperating with others, following a teachers rules, and keeping clean. The purpose is to make the integration into school easier for children.  The place, space, authority and practices of school life are given a prior and superordinate position. Mothers are to make this goal realizable and assimilatable for children. In doing so, they act as culturally constructed mothers and self-sacrificing managers of home, family and children.  In other words, an ideology of motherhood is linked to and adopted by an ideology of education and productive performance instituted through a school system.  I now turn to the subject of how a nursery school issues both recommended strategies and compulsory directives that presuppose as well as construct this mother school link.

Productive Mergences: Mother’s Love and School’s Discipline

In April 1987, my family moved to a middle-class neighborhood thirty minutes from downtown Tokyo.  I would be conducting a postdoctoral research project in this setting on the interrelationships between domesticity and motherhood, examining how women assigned to the domestic sphere manage and are managed by this role.  My main interest was not the gendered division of labor per se: the fact that work as a career is still constructed as primarily a male role and domesticity is still constructed as primarily a female role, even as women enter the ranks of the labor force in ever-increasing numbers and a new antidiscrimination law forbids the hiring and promotion of workers on the basis of gender. Rather, given that the domestic sphere has continued to be feminized in this stage of industrialization and late capitalism in Japan, I was interested in how this domestic feminization is both shaped by institutional relations and managed and experienced by a class of women positions most clearly with domesticity – married mothers who are not working outside the home.
Putting my son in a local nursery provided fortuitous for my research.  I made contacts that developed into interviewee groups, and equally important, I became involved myself in the institutional environment of a nursery school.  From this position I could observe and participate in the routines of motherhood centrally organized and directed by the school. I learned how crucially determined and organized mothers’ lives are by the school system their children enter and also how creative and tireless most mothers are in carrying out this school-ordered labor in the home.  Here I draw on the data and experience I acquired in the context of “Yamaguchi Yochien” as a mother-anthropologist in 1987 to 1988 to discuss what I perceived to be a dialectical relationship between home (mother ) and school.
I intend to be neither totalistic noe exhaustive in my presentation. Yamaguchi Yochien is a private school in a middle-class neighborhood that caters to families with stay-at-home- mothers.  The mother-school-child dynamics would be realized differently in day-care centers, which cater to mothers who work outside the home.  Although my remarks are specific to this school and environment, the ideological behaviors and expectations for mothers are duplicated in principle if not exactly in the same forms, elsewhere in Japan.
Before being accepted into Yamaguchi Yochien, every child must undergo and interview at the school along with the child’s parents.  On the day of out appointed interview, the principal (enchosensei) greeted us, spoke briefly about the school and then called David’s teacher (Saito sensei) into the room.  Almost immediately Saito sensei turned to me, rather than my husband and pointed to the booklet entitled “Guidebook for Entering School (Nyuen no Shiori) which was a the top of a huge pile of introductory materials. Skipping the first page (Goals to aim for before entering school” a list of skills and behaviors a child should have mastered before entering school), Saito turned  to page two and the heading “Things to Prepare at Home”.  Included here were four categories: things used in transit from home to school, such as shoes, boots, overcoats, and raincoats; meal-related items, such as a cup, napkin, chopsticks, bento-box (bento are lunches contained in the box) and bento-bag (the bag in which to put the bento-box); classroom-oriented items, such as a hand towel, a bag to carry back and forth from school, a bag for inside shoes, a bag for gym clothes and a smock to wear inside school; and dusters.  During the time we spent talking Saito focused on two subjects: the things I needed to make for David before he started school and the places on his belongings where I needed to attach his name labels (listed on page six under the heading “Method of Attaching badges) Saito sensei was animated as she spoke – friendly, welcoming, and engaged.  The matters of which she spoke, however, were almost exclusively ones of regimentation: how the children’s clothing and belongings must conform to school standards and how (implicitly) this conformity must be carried out by and through the mother,
At home I re-opened the pages of the guide book that Saito sensei had so insistently pointed out and realized the enormity of the tasks at hand.  Not only were there a number of specific items to purchase, make or affix labels to , but many of these were specified further in terms of dimensions or materials.  For the hand towels (otefuki), we were advised to use towel material but make it in the size of a handkerchief, thirty centimeters from tip to tip, with a hoop at one end for hanging.  We needed to make four hand towels, two for everyday use and two for reserve.  I would up buying two towels and remaking them into the school otefuki because I could find no such item with the required details in the shops.  Later other mothers said the some of the nursery-school paraphernalia is indeed available for purchase but that a “good mother” will still make as much as she can on her own.
Another item, the tesage –according to the guidebook, the bag used to “carry all those things that the school-dispensed satchel (kaban) cannot” proved to be the most complicated object and an arduous task for me, since I lacked a sewing machine and other mothers to advise me on how closely to heed the specifications in the guidebook.  The bag was to be thirty centimeters high forty centimeters long, five centimeters in depth (so that it can stand upright) have a handle and be made of a thick piece of cloth.  Mothers were advised to “please make and easy-to-use thing with your own hands.  Similarly the bag for gym clothes (taisogibukuro) was to be thirty centimeters long, twenty five centimeters wide and have a drawstring that pulls to one side.  The bag for indoor shoes (uebakibukuro) was requested without specific dimensions, as were the meal items and the two dusters (used to clean the room- an activity that all children are expected to participate in). Smocks as I learned fortuneately in time, could be purchased at theschool; for those making them by hand the design and positioning and number of pockets were designated. Labels needed to be attached to or written on all these items.  What should be written (class and names in somce cases, just name in others) where precisely it should be affixed (lower left corner on bags, lower right corner on any piece of clothing and in the middle on the towels and indoor shoes), and what size it should be (eight by four and a half centimeters for gym shoes) were clerly spelled out.

As is apparent to the reader, a mother’s involvement at this preliminary stage of ‘readying’ the child for school is already extensive and heavily prescribed.  Why precisely, the involvement and preparation are so elaborate and why the elaboration comes in part by the school’s desire to homogenize the children making their dress and belongings uniform and in part by the school’s desire to impose order, any order, on the children as their entry into a new disciplinary regime.  That this initial regimentation takes place in the arena of the personal –things worn on bodies and things that accompany bodies from home to school – signals an ordering of the child as a level that is not only everyday and ordinary but also individual.  As Foucault has written , social order is inscribed on a person’s body so too is the new order of the educational regime written into the very things that come into closest bodily contact with the child: shoes, gym clothes, shoulder bags.  The accoutrements, as much as the school routine, render wholesale and continuous transformation of the child into student.  As Aida Yuji has written about the Japanese worker: ”Certainly, looked at from the outsider’s perspective, work doesn’t remain with the finely demarcated hours of worktime.  When actual worktime is over, people (in the West) become private persons.  But in Japan work is not compressed into the eight hours of actual work time as it is in America.  For the whole 24 hours a day a worker cannot forget that he is a worker.”
The ideology of identity merging with work at Aida articulates for the adult Japanese male is similar and thus continuous to that of a child’s identity being merged with school.  This mergence begins with nursery school and is operationalized by the mother.  She labors “with her own hands” to supplement and encourage a school order in the domain of the home that the child is leaving for the first time.  It is not surprising ten that transitional objects figure highly in the retinue of “things to prepare at home,” objects that bring home into school as much as they bring school into home. It is also not surprising that these transitional objects are transportational: the plethora of bags that contain those essentials of nursery school life that move continuously between home and school.  Every afternoon she must look inside the tesage and the kaban (school issued yellow bag) for memos and dirty clothes that she must launder overnight.  Every morning she must refill
With for the day’s schooling. And at the weeks’ end on Saturday, she must launder smocks and handtowels and was and scrub the indoor shoes (uebaki).
Each day the mother must perform two other domestic jobs.  The first is sending the child off in a clean and ironed uniform, which usually means ironing the jacket and pants or skirt of the uniform and laundering as well as ironing a white shirt.  The second is making the obento, which are highly elaborate meals of five to six small courses that mothers spend as  such as forty-five minutes preparing on the four lunch days of the week.  These obento, like the child’s uniform and equipment, are tended to at home under the supervision of the school.
The school supervises the obento in three ways.  First, explicit rules and recommendations are made in speeches by the principal, talks with the teacher, and handouts and memos that are sent home from school.  Such recommendations include that certain easy-to-eat foods be favored in the beginning, harder to eat foods be added gradually, no sweets or drinks ever be allowed, only chopsticks and furoshiki be used by third-year students, heatable aluminum bento-boxed be used during winter months, foods the child dislikes be added to eliminate “food fussiness” and obento be nutritiously balanced.  Second, obento must be eaten in their entirty and in a timely fashion by the child.  When children cannot perform this task, they are given assistance, encouragement or reprimands by the teacher, and their mothers are consulted, as I was for almost the entire first two months of David’s attendance at Yamaguchi Yochien, to make an obento that their children can consume.  Theirs, lunch is a ritualistic event with different stages: washing hands, singing the lunch song, giving thanks to Buddha and one’s parents, pouring tea (done by the two ‘class helpers” for the day), laying out the obento, eating, putting the obento sway, throwing away trash, and cleaning hands.  This ritual blends person discipline and collective life (shudan sekiatsu) so that everyone is expected not only to eat correctly but also to eat correctly as a member of the group.
The mother’s role is to make an obento that the child can easily, willingly and happily eat.  The mothers I knew (including myself, much to my own distraction and bemusement at times) would consequently expend great energy and time crafting an artistically appealing as well as nutritiously balanced meal for the child.  The result is something like this: a box with its three sections filled with two pieces of different kinds of tempura; a fruit salad of three strawberries, two grapes and one banana cut into the shape of a caterpillar and a smooth bed of rice embroidered by a thin line of seaweed finely crushed.  There might be a small flag of Norway stuck into the rice, an aluminum muffin cup with two small hamburgers stuck together to make a bear. And two small containers: one with sauce for the tempura and one with ketchup.  The bento box would be put into a bento-bag; the utensils would be put into either a kaban or the tesage and taken out by the child at school, who, it is hoped would et with gusto and contentment.  When this doesn’t happen, the teacher reports back to the mother to offer hints or warning.  In David’s case, Saito-sensei came to our house for an invited dinner with four obento cookbooks – one for each season – with the suggestion that I study these for the help I obviously needed.)
Schools expect mothers to interface home and school in other ways as well.  At Yamaguchi Yochien, mothers were expected to attend mothers’ meetings about every six weeks, meet with the principal about three times a year, participate in the daily “farewell ritual” when children, teachers, and parents all line up to say good-bye to each other, and be involved in the school’s three big annual events  We were asked to instill and monitor proper behavior at home, make our children sociable by arranging frequent play dates with other Yamaguchi Yochien children, and maintain certain scheduled, routines and activities consistent with those at school and conducive to developing specific skills.
Prior to summer vacation, Yamaguchi Yochien’s version of “Summer Discipline Strategies” ws issued both verbally by the teacher and in two written directives.  One directive, entitled “Promises for Summer Vacation” used child-oriented language accompanied by pictures.  The other entitled: “The Way to Spend (sugoshikata) Summer Vacation” was directed to the mothers. The child’s guideline, printed on heavy paper and obviously intended to be hung on a wall, listed a series of ‘let’s” suggestions: “Let’s get up early (there is a picture of a clock that reads 7:00) Let’s go to bed early (the clock reads 8:00) Let’s not forget our greetings. Let’s brush our teeth after eating. Let’s not over eat or over drink cold things. Let’s take a nap. Let’s return home at 5:00, Let’s pick up.  Let’s wear a hat in the sun.  Let’s not run out in front of cars. Let’s play outside.”  The handout to mothers listed sixteen specific behaviors to ensure that children upheld including keeping an early bedtime, restricting snacks between meals, participating in radio exercises, brushing teeth after eating, obeying trafffic rules, picking up one’s belongings, and continuing to practice joining hands before and after meals.  The phrase used under the subheading for behaviors concerned with health was: Let’s live according to correct rules (kisoku tadashii seikatsu o shimasho). “Correctness” was clearly an ideal that the school did not want to leave to chance or individual interpretation.

Women’s Experiences as Education Mothers

To my Western sensibilities, Yamaguchi Yochien was engaging in overkill; too much of our lives was being advised or supervised by the school system. Or , to put this differently, how “correctly” my son was adjusting and conforming to the nursery-school regimen had become too dominant a concern in both my life and my relationship with David.  As the hypothetical Westerner referred to by Aida in the quote above I come from a social order where the boundaries between school, work and home are more clearly demarcated and where domestic activities such as preparing a child’s lunch and arranging play dates are considered personal and out side the school’s authority.  How, I wondered do Japanese mothers experience these expectations, demands and regulations placed on them by the school system in Japan?  To what degree do they heed those demands and how do they conceptualize the various relations and implications involved?
The data I use here are preliminary. I have selected responses from only a few of the thirty-five women I interviewed intensively and extensively over fifteen months; the full interviews will form the basis of a much long manuscript on Japanese mothers.  These interviews and the discussion I had with mothers in an endless and endlessly changing pay date network of children who visited each other’s houses almost every afternoon after school revealed that few of the Japanese women I encountered expressed any overt criticism of the various directives put out by Yamaguchi Yochien.  Some would welcome a non-lunch day because of the respite this gave them from obento and some would complain occasionally of the constant laundering and scrubbing of their child’s white shirts and white indoor shoes. Most of the women spoke of their daily schedules as “full”, “busy” and “active” and mentioned having little free time to do anything unrelated to child or home.  They said their bedtimes usually coincided with those of their children (typically 9:00) because women were too exhausted to stay up any later.  However, all this activity, incurred in part by the demanding routines of a child’s nursery life was rarely bemoaned or thought to be too heavy or excessive a price to pay for having a child attend nursery school.  These women thought that they  should be involved in their children’s education, that this was their responsibility and not that of their husbands and that the school had the authority to dictate and monitor quite specific behaviors for both tem and their children.
Most of the women with whom I spoke felt that by staying at home, they gave their children a decided advantage in two ways.  Their presence and support at home made going to school easier and happier for the children and made then nursery school experience as valuable as possible in furthering the children’s academic careers.  These women viewed nursery school as a first step toward later learning, even if nursery school is not significantly academic itself.  And because nursery school is important for the child’s educational development, a mother’s  love, support and energies in the school domain were deemed important.  In these discussions, women revealed what I have called earlier a contradiction in the role of so-called education mother: that a mother must both ensure that a child conforms to educational rigors and routines and also offer a cushion or prop withwhich to survive them.  A few did however, specify particular events, practices or behaviors at Yamaguchi Yochien that concerned them and caused them to question how they, as mothers, should respond appropriately.
Noguchi, for example, told me that her son was experiencing stress over the upcoming Sports Day.  A skill that he would have to perform on the day and that was being practiced daily at school was difficult for him, and his deficiency had been pointed out by the teacher.  As a result, the child was now asking to stay home from school, which Noguchi had allowed one day, but did not want to permit routinely.  She finally gave him the option of dropping out of school, since he was still four and only at the first year level, she figured he could re-enter the next year.  But he child  chose not to drop out because he did not want to stop seeing his school friends.  Given that the boy would be remaining at school, Noguchi saw no solution to his problem over Sports Day except for him to endure it.  Consulting with the teacher was unthinkable to Noguchi for she feared that the teacher would regard her comments as criticism and act even less charitably toward the child.
Other mothers mentioned similar reactions to specific policies or specific teachers at Yamaguchi Yochien.  One day at Noguchi’s house, four other others with children in David’s class were gathered, and all except one expressed similar concerns about the upcoming Sports Day and the role Saito sensei was playing in it.  Two other children were experiencing stress like Noguchi’s child.  The mothers’ interpretation was that Saito sensei was working all the children too hard and was being particularly hard on those children who were not mastering the required skills quickly enough.  Some of these children were being criticized in front of other children, which is harsh punishment in a school system where the peer group is so central.  Noguchi recounted another story about Saito sensei who had been the teacher of her first son, now aged ten.  He too had been deficient in a Sports Day activity; in the weeks of training leading up to the event, he had been routinely criticized both in front of the other children and the mother.  On the day itself, Noguchi tried to greet Saito and hearing again of her son’s failings, bowed deeply, along with her husband, for all the grief they had caused the teacher.  Angry about Saito’s continued criticism, the Noguchis felt that they nevertheless could take no action because any complaint to the principal would be reported back to Saito and be likely to make her more, rather than less, harsh on the boy.  As for their son, the event deeply scarred him and , convinced that he lacked any aptitude whatsoever, he refused to participate in any group sports or physical education in the school for years.
Other mothers mentioned other behaviors, policies, or attitudes on the part of teachers that concerned them. Several were troubled by the school-wide tendency to let children work out their own problems even if this meant that certain children were getting bullied by others.  A handful of mothers complained about Saito’s tendency to play favorites.  Three mothers in particular said that she was too harsh on their children: too critical and demanding and not as overtly nice and friendly as she was to other children.  However, non of the mothers citing specific problems with Yamaguchi Yochien indicated that they would take the matter up with either the teacher or principal. Their preference was to endure the situation by giving their children extra love at home or in one case, considering transferring the child to a different school at the end of the school year.  The common attitude was that encountering problems, hurdles or difficulties at school is, to some degree, expected and to some degree, must be regarded as a kind of challenge for the children.  Hence, although thee women were troubled by certain aspects of the school situation and concerned about their children’s wellbeing, none were willing to either confront the school authorities or let their children stay home from school. The bottom line seemed to be not whether their children were always having a good or easy time at school, but whether school was adequately preparing them for later life (specifically , later school life).  And on this score the mothers seemed in general agreement that Yamaguchi Yochien was a good school.
On the issue of school authority, no mother explicitly complained of the school being too intrusive or assertive in its monitoring of a mother’s role in her child’s education.  Occasionally, however, a woman would give an example of how she had been criticized for some failing.  One woman who worked in her mother-in-law’s rice store was reprimanded for not spending enough time with her child, a criticism that was given in the context of reporting the child’s problems in picking up a certain skill (jumping rope).  Other women were urged to exert greater efforts in getting their children to perform some behavior.  Often women simply reported their conversations with teachers – conversations that could occur almost daily after picking children up at school. The women expressed concern that their children weren’t mastering some skill,, seemingly agreeing with the teacher’s assessments both of the children’s progress and the mothers’ duty to help a child develop school-related skills such as  jumping rope, eating lunch, washing hands, gargling, paying attention, and chinning on the uneven bars.  Sometimes mothers appeared tense and nervous about continuing negative reports from teachers.  Many mothers worried about the parent-teacher conferences (held approximately one month prior to the end of school) and about the home visitation, a visit the teacher makes to the home of each student in part to assess the home environment.
A number of my friends received rather negative reports of their children during the parent-techer conferences.  One mother was told that her daughter was effectively incompetent in every task, skill, and behavior expected of children her age.  An example given was that she filed to draw triangles the “correct” way.  When this woman (Tanaka) pointed out that Sachiko drew triangles at home all the time, she was told that her drawing order was incorrect.  Privately my friend laughed, telling me that she found the teacher’s worldview too rigid and her assessment of the girl ridiculous. Yet she did not tell the teacher this, nor did another friend whose son received a similarly bleak report that the mother also, in private, did not accept.  In the case o Tanaka, she was concerned enough about the disjuncture between her pedagogical values and those of the teacher and school that she considered placing Sachiko in a university “feeder” school for first grade.  This “escalator” system ensures that children, after completing the initial entrance exam to get it, will be passed until their graduate from high school.  Tanaka hoped that pedagogy in such an atmosphere would be less rigid and a student’s progress less rigidly assessed.
Some women expressed grave reservations about the educational system and its competitive effect on contemporary Japan.  Iide said that she didn’t think Japanese mothers had a choice: “Even if we have worries, we need to make our children study.”  She admitted that her husband’s view was different, that he didn’t care if their children attended university or not so long as they were happy and managed to make a living for themselves.  But Iide disagreed with him, “We have no choice (shigatta ga nai). All mothers in Japan need to ‘hang in there’ (gambaru) and make their children do the same.
Another woman (Mori) in the same interview group expressed a different position.
         Even if we get our children to study hard, well, that’s the image of us Japanese, right?  A home where men are absent because they re working and mothers and children only concentrate on studying.  My worry is that we are just producing kids who fit into the mold.  In school it is stressed that there is one right way to do things.  So we and the school keep enforcing this idea, the one-pattern idea.  Plus we have to keep teaching our children to follow authority and be subordinate to their superiors.  They must learn how to agree with what others say and do: to go around saying hai hai (yes, yes) all the time.
Mori stated that she would not send her children to cram school in the future and merely wants education to be a process that enables her children to live healthy, self-reliant lives.  “In this society, since one can’t go very far without education, I hope they do okay in school. (But) I just want them to be average and able to face anything because they are boys.  Even if they don’t make it into a company, they can become bakers. As long as they work hard (gambaru) and have a good nature.”
The other women in Mori’s group were sympathetic to her position and many other women I spoke with were similarly worried distraught or anxious about the school system and the challenges in their children’s future. Most, however, expressed resignation in the face of a system that they were sure would determine their children’s future whether they liked it or not. Given this situation, most also spoke of how they tried to make the chores of earning and adjusting to school regimen as pleasurable and endurable as possible.  In this context, they referred to “skinship” (a westernized word): the importance of spending as much time with children as possible, which was linked to an understanding that school is an ordeal for a child.  A mother’s love and labors were thus connected to the difficulties a child faces in entering and attending school.  The love is a type of compensation as well as incentive for the labor.  I came to see that school is not expected to be ,nor criticized for not being, a particularly happy time for children.  School is about working hard, learning to adjust, and traversing a system of hurdles that is often unkind but inevitable.  Thus the highly elaborate obento; the beautiful tesage; the constant efforts to arrange and host play dates; and the endless devices used to get children to gargle, wash hands, greet others, learn to count, recognize characters, take turns, brush teeth, and practice skills being taught at school – all these are ways of both expressing maternal love and assisting a child to fulfill school’s performance demands.
Although some women, as I have noted, could articulate conscious concerns and doubts about the school system, few women questioned the role they were expected to play in encouraging their children to perform.  Only one woman clearly expressed personal doubts about the energies she expended that effectively entrapped her children within the performance circuit. She knew she was acting right as a mother, she said, but these motherly acts of sitting next to her older boy as he studied and making sure her younger son learned  how to adjust to nursery school only pulled these boys deeper into a school system she was not sure was so right.  This woman, a model of the type of peppy and resourceful mother who completes every domestic chore with elaboration and turns every learning task into a game or adventure, had fallen, she confessed, into the throes of a deep depression.

 
Conclusions

My aim in this chapter has been to challenge the generalization of the “education mother” syndrome and to question how real mothers, in the context of a Buddhist nursery school in a middle-class Tokyo neighborhood in the late 1980s, are expected and compelled to assist their children in adapting to school.  Unlike those scholars who argue that the educational role played by mothers comes at a later stage in their children’s schooling, I show that the institution of a school itself demands a much earlier involvement that expects mothers to carry an educational agenda into the very patterns and routines of daily life.  It is at this level of daily life that children are situated into a performance structure and ethos that complements and thereby extends performativity learned at school.  The mother, who much incorporate this continuous education into the vacations, playtime, and home is often burdened with feelings of anxiety and doubt.  The role of kyoiku mama by this assessment, is thus neither simple nor generated solely by or even primarily by mothers themselves.  Rather it is a relationship between mothers, children and a school system that has been situated within the political and economic relations of Japan’s postindustrial labor market.  As Norma /field suggests, children are being programmed at ever earlier ages to assume a posture of productivity that will continue into later life. Mothers, I would suggest, are being programmed into and by the same model.

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