Child's Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan

Abstract

The burgeoning field of the history of emotions has continued to develop in scholarship out of Europe and the United States over the last decades. One fascinating segment of this field describes children’s emotions, or emotions directed towards children in history. However, within such emerging research, there is much less consideration of Asia, and Japan specifically, and this is the gap addressed by this new book, <i>Child’s Play</i>. In this collection, Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall perform the somewhat complicated task of ‘combing’ periods of Japanese history in order to highlight issues such as how children were distinguished from adults in Japan and how the study of children and childhood may be analysed in this particular context for emotion, affect, and sensibility. At first glance the scope of the collection appears wide and the subject matter eclectic. Essays muse on wide ranging issues including, for example, the social position of male acolytes in medieval Japanese Buddhist monasteries, boys’ androgynous qualities, and male–male love affairs; the identification of conceptions of childhood for Taisho period designers of furniture in Japan; or the intricacies of the ideological dynamics of the Asia Pacific War, including ways children’s individual emotions were suppressed and the so-called ‘emotional capital’ of children was utilized in propaganda. Such topics and more, revolving around the concept of childhood and the history of emotions are examined from the perspective of Japanese history, albeit for the most part in recent periods. In short, the editors aim to make understandable the relationship of various identifiable phenomena to our understanding of the history of children and childhood and experiences of affect.