ABSTRACT
At first gloss, the issue of child abuse might appear slightly out of place in a book on ‘youth problems’. Do the victims of child abuse fall into the category of ‘youth’? Stoetzel (1955: 65) pointed out in his post-war examination of Japanese youth that, although there was an abundance of words for children in Japanese, they tended to be very specific in their scope. He suggested that kodomo covered the years from birth to age six, shōnen referred to boys and girls from six to about 15, and seinen meant those from 15 to adulthood, ostensibly at 20, but in some usages not until marriage. In the case of child abuse in Japan, the most commonly used word is jidō, which is generally taken to refer to children of elementary-school age (6–12), as opposed to seItō, which refers to those of secondary school age (12–18). In the case of the returnee schoolchildren discussed in Chapter 2, we saw that the bureaucratic term shijo was used, which is the combination of the Chinese characters for ‘child’ and ‘woman’. The nuances of all of these terms are of course always contested, but overall in Japan there is a sense that the biggest difference is between adults and non-adults, with entry into the workforce being seen as the minimum prerequisite for entry into adulthood. All non-adults have historically been seen as in need of protection and as extensions of the adults who are responsible for them.
