ABSTRACT
For the families of modern Japan, the ideal child was (and still is) a striving student, a boy or girl spending days and nights studying at a desk in order to attain superior grades and examination scores. That being said, the pursuit of this cultural ideal has often yielded a less than ideal experience of childhood for many Japanese children. In contemporary Japan, popular terms such as shiken jigoku (examination hell) and monsutaa parento (monster parent), not to mention the persistence of stress-induced diseases such as high blood pressure among children, capture the unhealthy intensity of childhood striving and the familial obsession with educational success (see Field 1995).
