National spaces and identities— Who controls Saturday?

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One of the most visible features of time-holding, and government/industry cooperation in Japan is the continuation of the six-day school week and six-day work week. Saturdays in Japan are not days when families gather for their own recreation, or where children play in public parks (assuming these are available). Saturdays are work days and school days, although the Saturday curriculum is somewhat less demanding than the other days. However, this practice of late seems less and less in step with the government’s own proclaimed goal of creating a “leisure society,” and is also out of step with other nations that Japan desires to have as its international partners (e.g., the G7 nations). And so, for more than a decade, the Ministry of Education (monbusho) has agonized over how to solve this problem; in its own words:

“Introduction of the five-day school week requires substantial changes to an educational framework that is firmly established in society. The impact that these changes will have on schools, families, and communities must therefore be considered comprehensively.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture accordingly established the Consultative Committee for Research and Surveys Regarding New School Management and Related Matters Necessitated by Social Change. This panel, organized within the Ministry, consisted of people from various fields. It conducted in-depth studies of the issues involved and in February 1992 issued a report on its deliberations, in which it expressed the view that a smooth transition to the five-day school week could best be achieved by first introducing a monthly five-day school week and then proceeding to the next stage after resolving any problems that might arise during the initial phase. In line with this recommendation, the Ministry introduced a monthly five-day school week, with schools closed on the second Saturday of the month. The new system was implemented in the second term of the 1992 school year.” (monbusho homepage: JAPANESE GOVERNMENT POLICIES IN EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND CULTURE 1994, PART I, Chapter 2).

The Ministry’s admonition that its own six-day school week is so “firmly established” in society that the consequences of simply switching to a five-day week required monumental pre-consideration might also be seen as its own reluctance to give up control over Saturday. The Ministry itself created the six-day school week earlier in this century. And a simple decision to close schools on Saturdays is certainly within its purview.

“Introduction of the five-day school week involves the structural reform of school education, which will affect the public in various ways. Therefore it is necessary to seek the understanding not only of schools, families, and communities but also of various other sectors of society. The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture is taking this aspect into account in its approach to the task”
(monbusho webpage:
JAPANESE GOVERNMENT POLICIES IN EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND CULTURE 1994, PART I, Chapter 2).

Its own solution to this problem, the release of students on only one Saturday a month beginning in pilot schools in 1992, has probably created more problems than an outright abolishment of Saturday schooling would have, because it put the parents of these children into a conflict between their roles as parents and guardians and their continuing duties in their jobs: and without sufficient justification for them to demand changes in their work schedule to accommodate their need to stay at home on Saturdays. And so, many children were left home from school on Saturdays without parental supervision, and some of parents of these children have asked that the schools resume classes on every Saturday. This predictable negative reaction permits the ministry’s ill-conceived implementation of what should be a straightforward reform to serve as an alibi for those who seek to maintain the government/industry hold on Saturdays.

In its defense, the Ministry has conducted surveys of the opinions of students, teachers, and parents, and recorded (to its own satisfaction) a general confusion about the move to a five-day week. As it provided the multiple-choice answers it wished to hear, these surveys have predictable outcomes, and are useful to the Ministry in defense of its decisions.

BELOW: one of the Ministry’s charts, based on its own survey, from the Monbusho homepage.

Instead of coordinating the release of Saturdays as public holidays from work and school with the other ministries that exert “administrative guidance” over Japan’s industries with the aim of fostering a space where this reform would lead to an actual increase in free time for families in Japan, the Ministry of Education couched this reform as a potential threat to the established “life rhythm” of Japanese children. And so, while the institutions that hold onto Saturday in Japan and Kyoto have little obvious difficulty in cooperating to maintain this, they are stymied when it comes to cooperating in relinquishing this control.

The problem created by place-holding, space-holding, and time-holding is that this preempts alternative practices in these places, spaces and times. With public places, times, and discursive spaces already filled by the spectacular production of the state, counter-practices are pushed into the margins.

“Guided by an aesthetic, desensitized approach to politics, Mussolini conceived the world as a canvas upon which to create a work of art, a masterpiece completely neglectful of human values. I would argue that fascism’s conception of aesthetic politics here reveals its truly totalitarian nature”
(Falasca-Zamponi [in press], 13).

And when the state brings to bear multiple resources—when it controls mass media outlets and levels of bureaucratic interventions into individual lives—then a ubiquitous hegemonic narrative becomes possible, and space and time may congeal into a single nationalized space/time. This collapse into a singularity of narrative and national interest (as managed by the state) is today mostly attributed to modern totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy—or Pre-War Japan. Under these circumstances the state so colored public space and time that counter-practices could find no neutral ground from which to articulate alternative visions. There were no alternatives but sedition.

“More than any other type of role, hierarchal roles depend on the shielding of backstage rehearsals, practice, and relaxations....Judges, lawyers, and political leaders similarly try to shield their backstage areas. The greater the ability to hide the time and effort needed to maintain a high status role or rest from it, the greater one's seeming power and omnipotence”
(Meyerowitz 1985, 64-5).

During its post-war recovery, under the governance of essentially the same institutions that held power before the war, but stripped of its military preoccupations (although its defense budget belies this lack of military power), Japan did little to alter this form of governmentality, which, after all, had taken it to the brink of global military power. Fronting its new pacifist constitution to the world, the nation turned to economic renewal as its primary task. But internally, despite the various openings that the American occupation, demilitarization, land reform, and the new constitution provided, the state-nation, centered, as before, in its bureaucratic institutions, consolidated its position as the source of authorizing power on the topic of things Japanese.