| Class Cultures is an ethnographic portrait of the way one of the lowest-level public high schools in Tokyo structures students' experience and prepares them for low-level jobs. The school's placement at the bottom of the finely ranked public school order allows my study to address central questions in the anthropology of Japan and the anthropology of education: how do material differences associated with capitalist economies take symbolic form in non-Western contexts; is it possible to speak of distinct “class cultures” emerging among different horizontal segments of Japanese society, and if so, how are they to be studied?; In Japan, despite persistent patterns of intergenerational inequality, there is no robust and oppositional “working-class” culture that represents a viable alternative to middle-class life. I argue that through the observation of the patterns of school practice and the structure of authority institutionalized in the low-level school, it is possible to see class-specific goals, strategies and dispositions that together constitute a distinct “class culture” in ways that never surface to the level of conscious reflection or political action.; The public high school in Tokyo is a privileged site for such research because it is the first class-specific mass institution that most Japanese experience and is most closely correlated to future life chances. While keeping in mind that Japanese education calls upon a distinctive set of historically constituted cultural forms to organize and legitimate schooling, my efforts have been to see how these cultural forms are differentially distributed and deployed across the range of school ranks that have developed in most urban centers of Japan. What we find at bottom-level schools is that the moral community of the school has deteriorated to the point where it is no longer able to secure students' commitment to education, generate stable patterns of institutional practice, or support teachers' claims to institutional authority. This study documents the “drying up” of this moral community as students drift away from the school as their primary source of social identity and as Japan Teachers Union representatives struggle with an increasingly hostile administration over the control and discipline of both teachers and students. |
