TY - JOUR
T1 - The Construction of Collective Experience among Evacuated Japanese Children during World War II
AU - Moore, Aaron William
N1 - Research time, travel costs, and equipment for photographing and archiving manuscripts at the University of Manchester were provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the project ‘Remembering and Recording Education, Childhood, and Youth in Imperial Japan, 1925-1945’.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Studies of childhood in Japan frequently neglect to engage with the texts and images that young people produced, focusing instead on the adult imagination of youth. By looking solely at adults’ conceptions, we miss the importance of other children in forming their peers’ subjectivity. By analyzing the diaries, letters, postcards, yosegaki, and artwork of evacuated children during WWII, this article shows how adults framed the process of language acquisition, but that children contributed to the creation of a shared language for describing their experiences. When children combined language learning with group experience, which was inscribed through collective writing practices, evacuees came to embrace a strong group identity. Grasping the relationship between collective experience, life-writing, and children’s culture is crucial to understanding how children perceived their world. Apart from these methodological considerations, dismissing the documents left behind by evacuees as mere recapitulations of adult discourse does the history of childhood a great disservice.
AB - Studies of childhood in Japan frequently neglect to engage with the texts and images that young people produced, focusing instead on the adult imagination of youth. By looking solely at adults’ conceptions, we miss the importance of other children in forming their peers’ subjectivity. By analyzing the diaries, letters, postcards, yosegaki, and artwork of evacuated children during WWII, this article shows how adults framed the process of language acquisition, but that children contributed to the creation of a shared language for describing their experiences. When children combined language learning with group experience, which was inscribed through collective writing practices, evacuees came to embrace a strong group identity. Grasping the relationship between collective experience, life-writing, and children’s culture is crucial to understanding how children perceived their world. Apart from these methodological considerations, dismissing the documents left behind by evacuees as mere recapitulations of adult discourse does the history of childhood a great disservice.
KW - childhood, evacuation, WWII, life-writing, diaries, letters
M3 - Article
SN - 1037-1397
VL - 36
SP - 339
JO - Japanese Studies
JF - Japanese Studies
IS - 3
ER -