by DAVID H. SLATER
A bike like the one Tomo first used. He eventually began using a small motorcycle when he increased his hours after graduation.
This article is a modified and developed version of a chapter from Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Socialization and Strategies, edited by Ishida Hiroshi and David H. Slater, Routledge 2009. For a brief outline of the book’s arguments, please see Note 1A at the end of the article.
Introduction: The “New Working Class” of Urban Japan
Tomo was a first-year and Keiko a third-year student at Musashino Metropolitan High School,1 a working-class high school in western Tokyo. I have known them since the early 1990’s, when I began working at their school. Two snapshots from those first years illustrate some features of family background, survival strategies, and career trajectories. These are features that they share with many working-class youth all over Japan, especially in the urban areas where public schools are more finely ranked and the labor market is larger, but also more unstable and precarious. Part I of sketches how class and culture are interrelated within the context of Japanese secondary education. Part II focuses on the ways different class groups navigate the transition from middle to high school. Part III focuses on the sorts of orientations, goals, and strategies that characterize school culture at Musashino High, a place where working-class culture takes institutionalized form through practice. The final part traces these young people’s trajectories into the bottom rungs of the service labor market and into their new status as “freeter.”
Tomo’s mother is pleading with her son’s teacher, trying to do what she can to keep her son in high school despite his having been caught smoking, again. Tomo was very involved in his middle school homeroom and club activities, at least until the end. Now, having failed to get into any school other than Musashino, he is in school but demoralized. He has been caught smoking twice before and suspended once for half a day. His tone varies from simmering resentment to feigned unconcern. He points out that there are almost three smoking cases a day at this school, so his getting caught only twice in the first year is not so bad, “on the mathematical average.” While bright, at Musashino High Tomo has stopped following most of the lessons and is beginning to think that maybe he is not “cut out for” school. His mother asks his teacher about his participation in the baseball team, a widely accepted index of school integration, especially for a student struggling academically. The teacher turns to Tomo, who replies deadpan: “Didn’t you know? Everyone has quit because all the teacher wants to do is drill.” (This is true—the baseball team does not have enough players to field a team.) His mother has reassured him that if he would just come to school, he could graduate and then maybe play baseball when he gets a job. Tomo’s reply to his mother is a sarcastic indictment: “You mean, so I can get a job like Dad?” The teacher asks Tomo’s mother about her husband’s job at the discount electrical shop in the area. She mumbles something, but in fact, she does not know what sort of work Tomo’s father is doing these days because, after he was laid off from what was a temporary job anyway, he has not lived with them for many months.
Like many working-class youths who end up at Musashino, Tomo is somewhat bewildered at how he got to this place or where to go from here. The same is true for his mother. There is no suspicion of anti-education culture in their household or neighborhood, and his mother fully expects Tomo to graduate and get a job. She believes in school as a way to secure a job and a future. She makes another appeal: “But Sensei, as his homeroom teacher, how do you think it is best for Tomo to return to the regular flow of the class,” a question that rests on the assumption that success in high school relies on, or at least begins with, one’s contribution to the school as a moral community. The teacher labors under no such illusions, as he takes out the school rulebook to show Tomo and his mother the chart that clearly show the punishment for missing classes or breaking rules—three suspensions and then withdrawal.2 Flustered, his mother protests that this is premature. “Tomo is kicked out already?” The teacher shakes his head and calmly replies, “I just wanted you to know how students move through the school.” All three of them stare blankly at the chart in the rule book.
Keiko was a senior when I first interviewed her formally, and like most students who make it to their final year at Musashino, if they have learned anything, it is the art of survival by withdrawal from the school as a social and emotional center (a lesson the struggling Tomo had never learned by the time he dropped out). She is averaging just above 30% on her term tests from two classes, but as she points out, there is really nothing to worry about:
School is fine. I stay out of the headlights of the teachers and I guess I am not rude, and also, I have good looks. Let’s face it, I could be a fashion model if I were not in school. I might be a model, afterwards. Anyway, they don’t want to fail me. They don’t really want to think about me at all. Sometimes, a teacher will wake me up in class, and ask why I am so tired, and I say “homework.” This is funny to them, big laugh because everyone knows that no one is doing much homework here, but what can they say? I can pass these tests, if I take them enough times.
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