ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between two institutions, school and motherhood, in terms of how this intersection shaped by school ideology and practices and how experienced by women who are mothers. In 1987 an article by Yoshimura Takashi entitled “Strategies for Summer Discipline That Facilitate the Independence of Children” appeared in a popular mothers’ magazine. Strategic advice for mothers on how to cultivate behaviors in children that are, by implication, desirable is found across diverse media. The chapter discusses the genericism of the “education mother” syndrome and to question how real mothers, in the context of a Buddhist nursery school in a middle-class Tokyo neighborhhod in the late 1980s, are expected and compelled to assist their children in adapting to school. Many mothers worried as well about the parent-teacher conferences and about the home visitation—a visit the teacher makes to the home of each student in part to assess the home environment.
