Horizons of Youth: Representing Children as Futurity

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

The notion of youth has embodied the hope of a future to come. Particularly in a capitalist society, youth as a social category came to bear the burden of society’s concerns for the future, often at the cost of certain freedoms by indoctrinating them into larger representational concerns. We view media as the primary site for the pedagogy and production of children as subject. Media provides us with a lens toward the horizons of historical possibility in key moments of democracy. This panel seeks to move beyond a culturalist approach that highlights the significance of media representation based on how groups, communities, or events, are portrayed in a particular medium. Rather, we present the dynamism of media by exploring it as an avenue to contest concepts or ideologies through the consumption of its users. We pay special attention to the role of publishing companies and the establishment of industrial capitalism, which shaped the notions of childhood as in Wakako Suzuki's paper. Hyunjng Han's paper discusses how childhood was produced as a new social segmentation in interwar visual culture. Masakazu Matsuoka shows how visual media were used as pedagogical materials to Japanize the young in Syonan-tō during World War II. Finally, Karl Cheng Chua illuminates the potentials and weaknesses of the medium in postwar Japan by examining a narrative of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. The historical approach of these papers provides comparative context to bridge understanding of representations and the social possibilities negotiated by its creators and users.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizers

• Wakako Suzuki, University of California, Los Angeles

• Karl Ian Uy Cheng Chua, Ateneo de Manila University

Chair

• Yuko Shibata, University of Otago

Individual Presentations

• Eisai Shinshi and the Emergence of Child Writers and Readers: Childhood in the Age of a Growing Print Industry - Wakako Suzuki, University of California, Los Angeles

• Memorial Images for Children & Children in Memorial Images—Focused on the 1930s–1940s - Hyunjung Han, Japan Women's University

• Displaying Japan to School Children in Syonan-tō: Illustrations in a Children’s Newspaper in Japanese-Occupied Singapore - Masakazu Matsuoka, Tokyo University of the Arts

• Fiction to Represent Reality: The Post-World War Narratives in Manga - Karl Ian Uy Cheng Chua, Ateneo de Manila University

Discussants

• Koji Toba, Waseda University

• Yuko Shibata, University of Otago