The serious business of fitting a boy into the circumspect patterns of adult Japanese life does not really begin till after he has been in school for two or three years. Up to that time he has been taught physical control, and when he was obstreperous, his naughtiness has been ‘cured’ and his attention distracted. He has been unobtrusively admonished and he has been teased. But he has been allowed to be willful, even to the extent of using violence against his mother. His little ego has been fostered. Not much changes when he first goes to school. The first three grades are co-educational and the teacher, whether a man or a woman, pets the children and is one of them. More emphasis at home and in school, however, is laid on the dangers of getting into ‘embarrassing’ situations. Children are still too young for ‘shame,’ but they must be taught to avoid being ‘embarrassed.’ The boy in the story who cried ‘Wolf, wolf’ when there was no wolf, for instance, ‘fooled people. If you do anything of this kind, people do not trust you and that is an embarrassing fact.’ Many Japanese say that it was their schoolmates who laughed at them first when they made mistakes – not their teachers or their parents. The job of their elders, indeed, is not, at this point, themselves to use ridicule on the children, but gradually to integrate the fact of ridicule with the moral lesson of living up to giri-to-the-world. Obligations which were, when the children were six, the loving devotion of a faithful dog – the story of the good dog’s on, quoted earlier, is from the six-year-olds’ reader – now gradually become a whole series of restraints. ‘If you do this, if you do that,’ their elders say, ‘the world will laugh at you.’ The rules are particularistic and situational and a great many of them concern what we should call etiquette. They require subordinating one’s own will to the ever-increasing duties to neighbors, to family and to country. The child must restrain himself, he must recognize his indebtedness. He passes gradually to the status of a debtor who must walk circumspectly if he is ever to pay back what he owes.
This change of status is communicated to the growing boy by a new and serious extension of the pattern of babyhood teasing. By the time he is eight or nine his family may in sober truth reject him. If his teacher reports that he has been disobedient or disrespectful and gives him a black mark in deportment, his family turn against him. If he is criticized for some mischief by the storekeeper, ‘the family name has been disgraced.’ His family are a solid phalanx of accusation. Two Japanese I have known were told by their fathers before they were ten not to come home again and were too shamed to go to relatives. They had been punished by their teachers in the schoolroom. In both cases they lived in outhouses, where their mothers found them and finally arranged for their return. Boys in later elementary school are sometimes confined to the house for kinshin, ‘repentance,’ and must occupy themselves with that Japanese obsession, the writing of diaries. In any case the family shows that now it looks upon the boy as their representative in the world and they proceed against him because he has incurred criticism. He has not lived up to his giri-to-the-world. He cannot look to his family for support. Nor can he look to his age group. His schoolmates ostracize him for offenses and he has to apologize and make promises before he is readmitted.