著者

加藤 潤

出版者

名古屋女子大学

雑誌

名古屋女子大学紀要 人文・社会編 (ISSN:09152261)

巻号頁・発行日

no.36, pp.p63-72, 1990-03

---

The conception of youth or adolescence can not be defined by only biological or even psychological process (Dornbusch, 1989). But it is rather social or cultural phenomenon (Mead, 1928, Aries, 1960). Especially the period of YOUTH can not be explained without putting it in the context of social change or industrialization process during the ninteenth cnetury in the Western world. Such a sociological research has not been done for the Japanese modernization period. Only the work of KINMONTH (1981) is an outstanding exception. This paper argues that social conception of YOUTH was formed in Meiji Japanese (1868-1912). We specify the time in late Meiji era when intellectuals (Journalists or scholors) found that educated young people were going away from the former value or nation. Educated young people were separated from work place and no longer in the period of childhood. Instead they were in school and oriented to literature, philosophy and themselves. The older generation looked their behaviors as ununderstandable and alarmed that the crisis of national integration was stemming from those young people. But some intellecturals found them from quite different aspect. They discovered the conception of YOUTH in the corupted youth culture and their diffused psychological state and insisted on the importance of schooling as socialization institution. Since then, two incompatible thought on YOUTH has been on the argument among intellecturals until Japan went into militarism. One is to place educated youth in the authorized social moratorium period. The other thought sees young people negative even dangerous and want schools to be total institution in order to keep social integration as it was in early Meiji era.