Discipline e repressione del corpo nelle scuole medie giapponesi alla metà degli Anni '80

The middle years of the 1980s are probably the period in which Japanese high school students were object to the harshest restraint since prewar years. This paper analyses the social control directed at constraining high school children's use of time, space and the body in constructional terms, as a form of discipline in Foucault's sense. The problem of school control is addressed in relation to the basic Confucian ethics and to the general principles of Confucian education. It is the aim of this paper to show that, during the 1980s, the Japanese high school system failed in both its role of proxy for the socialization agencies of the traditional village (namely the family and the peers) and as an enculturation agency for the transmission of ethical values. In turn, such a double failure is attributed to the fact that the Japanese school system could not overcame traditional, non-confucian views of the child as an entity of nature, incapable of autonomous judgement and of self-control.