All Japanese children have toys. Fathers and mothers and all the circle of friends and relatives make or buy dolls and all their appurtenances for the children, and among poorer people they cost practically nothing. Little children play housekeeping, weddings, and festivals with them, after arguing out just what the ‘right’ grown-up procedures are, and sometimes submitting to mother a disputed point. When there are quarrels, it is likely that the mother will invoke noblesse oblige and ask the older child to give in to the younger one. The common phrase is, ‘Why not lose to win?’ She means, and the three-year-old quickly comes to understand her, that if the older child gives up his toy to the younger one the baby will soon be satisfied and turn to something else; then the admonished child will have won his toy back even though he relinquished it. Or she means that by accepting an unpopular r?le in the master-servants game the children are proposing, he will nevertheless ‘win’ the fun they can have. ‘To lose to win’ becomes a sequence greatly respected in Japanese life even when people are grown-up.
Besides the techniques of admonition and teasing, distracting the child and turning his mind away from its object has an honored place in child-rearing. Even the constant giving of candies is generally thought of as part of the technique of distraction. As the child gets nearer to school age techniques of ‘curing’ are used. If a little boy has tantrums or is disobedient or noisy his mother may take him to a Shinto or Buddhist shrine. The mother’s attitude is, ‘We will go to get help.’ It is often quite a jaunt and the curing priest talks seriously with the boy, asking his day of birth and his troubles. He retires to pray and comes back to pronounce the cure, sometimes removing the naughtiness in the form of a worm or an insect. He purifies him and sends him home freed. ‘It lasts for a while,’ Japanese say. Even the most severe punishment Japanese children ever get is regarded as ‘medicine.’ This is the burning of a little cone of powder, the moxa, upon the child’s skin. It leaves a lifelong scar. Cauterization by moxa is an old, widespread Eastern Asiatic medicine, and it was traditionally used to cure many aches and pains in Japan too. It can also cure tantrums and obstinacy. A little boy of six or seven may be ‘cured’ in this way by his mother or his grandmother. It may even be used twice in a difficult case but very seldom indeed is a child given the moxa treatment for naughtiness a third time. It is not a punishment in the sense that ‘I’ll spank you if you do that’ is a punishment. But it hurts far worse than spanking, and the child learns that he cannot be naughty with impunity.
Besides these means of dealing with obstreperous children, there are conventions for teaching necessary physical skills. There is great emphasis on the instructor’s putting children with his own hands physically through the motions. The child should be passive. Before the child is two years old, the father folds its legs for it in the correct sitting position, legs folded back and instep to the floor. The child finds it difficult at first not to fall over backward, especially since an indispensable part of the sitting training is the emphasis on immobility. He must not fidget or shift position. The way to learn, they say, is to relax and be passive, and this passivity is underscored by the father’s placing of his legs. Sitting is not the only physical position to be learned. There is also sleeping. Modesty in a woman’s sleeping position is as strong in Japan as modesty about being seen naked is in the United States. Though the Japanese did not feel shame in nudity in the bath until the government tried to introduce it during their campaign to win the approval of foreigners, their feeling about sleeping positions is very strong. The girl child must learn to sleep straight with her legs together, though the boy has greater freedom. It is one of the first rules which separate the training of boys and girls. Like almost all other requirements in Japan, it is stricter in upper classes than in lower, and Mrs. Sugimoto says of her own samurai upbringing: ‘From the time I can remember I was always careful about lying quiet on my little wooden pillow at night ... Samurai daughters were taught never to lose control of mind or body – even in sleep. Boys might stretch themselves into the character dai, carelessly outspread; but girls must curve into the modest, dignified character kinoji, which means ‘‘spirit of control.”’ Women have told me how their mothers or nurses arranged their limbs for them when they put them to bed at night.