Tekio as Educational Discourse

In 1949, three years into its US-administered Occupation, Japan’s Ministry of Education (MOE) published a new manual for lower-secondary school teachers and administrators, the New Junior High School Handbook. The work echoed the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers’ (SCAP’s) broader goal of educational democratization, defining the purpose of postwar education as “completing each individual’s personhood (jinkaku) and serving as a motive force for the creation of a democratic Japan.”Footnote ¹ In emphasizing education’s role in developing Japanese children’s “personhood,” Occupation-era (1945-1952) authorities indicated their belief that democratization would reshape the very psychology of Japanese youths. In particular, the Handbook emphasized pupil guidance’s role in helping students achieve personal adjustment—itself a concept newly translated using a heretofore obscure clinical psychological term: tekio (適応).Footnote ² Be it students’ academic struggles in school, issues related to career and future life, or simply the desire to “enjoy school life with a feeling of accomplishment,” the Handbook urged postwar schools to address student issues arising from personal tekio and futekio (maladjustment).Footnote ³ It stated:

As a government-produced manual intended for the nation’s postwar educators, the Handbook represented an unmistakable endorsement of tekio-oriented education and elevated trends present from Occupation’s outset. American planners early on identified the reshaping of Japanese psychology as a central Occupation objective. As the training instructors of Occupation’s military government personnel emphasized in 1946, a key obstacle to reform lay in how the Japanese had collectively become a “maladjusted people,” consisting of “the anomalous combination of sensitive intelligence and sadistic brutality … emotionally repressed and at war within [themselves].”Footnote ⁵ When planning for the 1946 US Education Mission to Japan—a delegation of American educators tasked with creating a blueprint for postwar education reform—SCAP similarly identified “Psychology in the Re-education of Japan” as a chief task of the Mission.Footnote ⁶ One Mission team was even designated a “psychological Ways and Means” committee to address postwar Japanese attitudes and “conditions of acceptance.” It subsequently recommended a postwar teacher-education program that emphasized psychological issues, such as students’ “growth and development, learning, mental hygiene and social adjustment.”Footnote ⁷

Education Psychology: The Growth and Development of Humans, postwar Japan’s first teacher-training textbook produced under Occupation supervision, made the importance of psychology in education explicit. Besides likely being the first education work to translate adjustment as “tekio,” it emphasized the need to understand student “maladjustment” when dealing with anti-social classroom behavior and personal self-control. Its follow-up volume devoted an entire section to addressing “socially maladjusted children.”Footnote ⁸ MOE’s 1948 Course of Study Supplement for Elementary School Social Studies similarly identified students’ “proper tekio to the world in which they live” as a key part of accomplishing the “chief goal of social studies …developing characteristics of a praiseworthy citizen.”Footnote ⁹ In 1948, the Broadcasting Corporation of Japan, MOE, and “some of the best psychologists in the Tokyo area,” collaborated on a weekly teacher-training radio show focused on adolescent students’ “Personal and Social Adjustment.”Footnote ¹⁰ As scholar Fujii Hiroyuki has argued, American-modeled adjustment-ism (tekioshugi) became a hallmark of postwar pupil guidance, continuing its influence decades later.Footnote ¹¹

Until now, English-language scholarship of the Japanese Occupation has tended to view American-supervised education reforms through the lens of democratization. The very terms of surrender in the Potsdam Declaration obligated the defeated nation to carry out the “strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people,” implicitly requiring its education system’s overhaul.Footnote ¹² In analyzing the Occupation’s approach to democratization, however, scholars have tended to focus more on the sincerity with which democratic reforms were enacted than on the specific content of these changes.Footnote ¹³ Education historians have explored the interrelated questions of how genuinely occupiers and the occupied supported reforms, and the extent to which these efforts transformed Japanese education in the longer term.Footnote ¹⁴ Such literature often subdivides Occupation into two periods: an initial era of authentic democratic reform between 1945 to 1948, followed by a period of retrenchment—or “Reverse Course”—when American authorities and Japanese conservatives abandoned such efforts for Cold War priorities. Debate has thus focused on the details and proximal causes of these shifts: when, precisely, did the Reverse Course begin? Who led this “Reverse” and why? Was it American occupiers acting on growing anti-communist preoccupations?Footnote ¹⁵ Or was it facilitated by Japanese officials, conservative elites, and lingering “Confucian and samurai values” apathetic about democratizing efforts more generally?Footnote ¹⁶

As the above Handbook quote highlights, however, the content of educational democratization was itself complex and multivalent. Analyzed through the lens of tekio, SCAP’s goal of psychologically democratizing Japan was fundamentally a normative, behavioral project. Not all Japanese educators, moreover, embraced this tekio approach. By examining the responses of both supporters and opponents of tekio-oriented guidance, this study recognizes the extent that educational democratization was historically contested, contingent, and political. Recent Cold War scholarship further suggests that Occupation reformers’ focus on tekio-oriented pupil guidance was not an outlier; US policy circles conceived of Japanese democratization in psychological terms from Occupation’s earliest stages.Footnote ¹⁷ Research by American education historians also highlights how self-consciously psychological, depoliticized, and modernist discourses were contemporaneously articulated in the US, suggesting that Occupation’s elision of student tekio-adjustment with educational democratization was part of a broader transnational trend of the mid-twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁸

Building upon the work of Fujii, this essay explores the historical significance of this tekio-oriented pupil guidance—referred to contemporaneously by the foreign loan-word Gaidansu—within the broader context of postwar Japanese educational democratization. First, to historically contextualize Occupation-era reforms, it describes prewar Japanese guidance practices. It examines prominent indigenous guidance approaches, particularly those collectively known as “life guidance” (seikatsu sido 生活指導), that often drew heavily on German bildung-based discourses emphasizing the philosophical “cultivation” (alternately translated as toya, 陶冶, or kyoyo, 教養) of students’ moral character. Second, this study examines tekio-oriented pupil guidance during the Occupation. After analyzing the distinctive features of one of the era’s most influential US guidance works, Arthur Traxler’s Techniques of Guidance, it explores how this new approach was promoted among Japanese educators. The study also details the different educational constituencies that either supported or resisted Gaidansu discourses. Finally, the work explores how tekio-oriented guidance fared after the Occupation ended—specifically, how adjustment-based democratization continued to influence post-independence Japanese schools.

Prewar Japan and Life Guidance

The guidance approaches initiated by the Meiji state during the late nineteenth century were directive and authoritarian, blending Confucian moralism with recently imported nationalist discourses from Bismarckian Germany.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1893, the government’s desire to shape the character of Japanese youth led to its first guidance effort: a government-mandated school morality curriculum, later nationalized through government-compiled textbooks.Footnote ²⁰ With Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s, these morality courses deepened their militarism and emperor-worship. One 1939 morality textbook, for example, exhorted students to remember “the spirit of our heroes who have given their lives to the country and the Throne,” further demanding them to do their “utmost to demonstrate [their] loyalty … Fidelity and devotion are the most sacred duties of the Japanese subject.”Footnote ²¹ Outside of class, a curriculum emphasizing rensei—ultra-nationalistic training and indoctrination—increasingly consisted of mock military drills and war support campaigns for the home front.Footnote ²² Sample names of these erstwhile student guidance activities—for example, “The Way of Throwing Away Selfishness to Deepen Devotion”—underscore these initiatives’ totalitarian tone.Footnote ²³

These examples explain why American occupiers generally dismissed prewar education as authoritarian brainwashing.Footnote ²⁴ To better understand Japanese educators’ varied reactions to postwar Gaidansu, however, one must recognize the diversity of prewar guidance discourse. Japan’s period of political liberalization during the interwar period saw the introduction of “citizen courses” (kominka) to secondary schools, adding practical daily-life topics to state morality curricula. While still emphasizing loyalty to the nation, the new courses sought to instruct future Japanese citizens in the “fundamental principles of constitutional self-rule”—such as voting in local elections—while also cultivating well-mannered social conduct and economically productive habits.Footnote ²⁵ Course topics included family-related topics such as maintaining good family relationships, establishing a successful marriage, and creating economically viable households. On the career side, students were encouraged to choose a vocation based on personal ability and market demand, to develop good work habits, and to maintain proper hygiene.Footnote ²⁶ Local governments and nongovernmental organizations also developed guidance programs to meet specific students’ needs. The city of Kobe redefined its guidance priorities away from conventional “academic bildung” (ippanteki toya) to those based on Eduard Spranger’s “vocational bildung” (shokugyoteki toya), emphasizing the use of social surveys and experience-oriented apprenticeships.Footnote ²⁷ The Japan Association of Mental Hygiene likewise promoted “child guidance clinics” focused on supporting “children of low ability,” broadly defined as those with “mental incapacities, abnormal personalities, anxieties and latent mental disease.”Footnote ²⁸ A rare instance where tekio issues were raised in a prewar educational context, the program is noteworthy for being the exception that proved the rule. In contrast to the postwar Handbook which conceived of adjustment issues as quotidian problems emerging from normal school life, this program focused on the clinical pathologies of “outcast” children and those with “impoverished tekio.” Specifically, these clinics were intended to treat “abnormal behaviors”—such as excessively angry outbursts, kleptomania, escapism, cruelty towards smaller children, hyperactivity, and other “warped tendencies”—through the employment of trained psychology specialists and nurses.Footnote ²⁹

Prewar educators also developed their own guidance practices to address students’ daily-life concerns, collectively known as “life guidance.” As Yamamoto Toshiro has argued, life guidance emerged in the 1910s as a liberalistic reaction to state-managed education, and was initially inspired by progressive ideas emphasizing child-centered, student-led practices.Footnote ³⁰ By the 1930s, a small number of researchers, led by education psychologist Tomeoka Kiyoo, formed the Educational Science Research Association, which introduced Japanese educators to such American guidance-related ideas as community service and civics education. Psychometrics pioneers such as Okabe Yataro also promoted American-modeled mental testing to Japanese schools, and approximately thirty personality instruments were reportedly administered during the prewar period.Footnote ³¹

American influences notwithstanding, Japanese life guidance was particularly shaped by the life-oriented pedagogies of continental bildung discourses. Historian Yoichi Kiuchi has documented how German educational ideas shaped prewar Japanese education research, and canonical bildung educators Johann Friedrich Herbart and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, as well as modern theorists Paul Natorp, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Eduard Spranger, remained influential in Japanese schools throughout the period.Footnote ³² As in Imperial Germany, prewar Japan’s adoption of bildung educational models—with its emphasis on philosophical great works and personal cultivation—was not without controversy. H.-J. Hahn has traced the ways bildung’s evolution imbued German education with a de-politicized aestheticism; and education historian Teruhisa Horio has similarly blamed prewar Japan’s embrace of classics-based “culturalism” (kyoyoshugi) for creating a facile intellectualism unable to resist society’s drift toward authoritarianism.Footnote ³³ Indeed, one prewar life guidance discourse, the so-called Home-Town Education Movement, while initially inspired by left-leaning pedagogies and the sociological works of Frédéric Le Play and Patrick Geddes, was reworked during the 1930s to facilitate a heimatkunde curriculum celebrating local histories. It was eventually used by MOE to reinforce students’ patriotism and their participation in various wartime spiritual mobilization campaigns.Footnote ³⁴

As in Germany, however, Japanese renderings of bildung were also complex and evolving.Footnote ³⁵ Japanese educators’ increasing adoption of Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutical, Lebensphilosophie approach facilitated a shift away from classical bildung toward one based on students’ lived experiences. Nowhere was this better embodied than in one of Japan’s largest prewar life guidance movements: the Daily Life Writing Movement (seikatsu tsuzurikata undo; hereafter, DLWM). As its name suggests, DLWM was originally an essay-writing pedagogy movement, becoming particularly popular among rural elementary and higher-elementary school teachers who taught students up through early adolescence. This grassroots, teacher-led movement achieved initial success through a distinctive writing pedagogy, built upon the ideas of children’s writer Suzuki Miekichi, which asked students to write essays based upon their ordinary daily lives.Footnote ³⁶ Particularly among practitioners in northern Japan, DLWM became increasingly informed by a critical realism, with theorists such as Namekawa Michio emphasizing the cultivation within students of a subjective, Diltheyan understanding (Verstehen, or rikai, 理会) of the world that simultaneously sought to grasp “existence as it is” while also “advancing to see existence as ‘it ought to be.’” As Namekawa explained it, through writing education’s contemplation of daily life, students learned both to perceive “the immortal human truths underlying life’s problems and daily life creation” while also learning to “critically see and meticulously interrogate … attitudes that rashly and blindly follow empty, excitable life ideas.”Footnote ³⁷ DLWM’s emphasis on students’ daily lives also had the added benefit of not requiring significant financial resources. Although never large in absolute terms—the total number of teachers actively participating in the nation’s myriad DLWM organizations likely never exceeded much more than ten thousand teachers—it was a grassroots education movement well suited to Japan’s impoverished, Depression-era public schools.Footnote ³⁸

DLWM’s focus on critical realism also increased its emphasis on student empowerment and social consciousness. As the “Proclamation” of principles for a leading national DLWM magazine announced in 1930, by encouraging students to “intently observe” the world around them, DLWM could help them both “establish truly autonomous lives” and grasp “the problems living in society, and the reality of children’s daily lives.”Footnote ³⁹ The increasingly grim “reality” of Depression-era Japan accelerated DLWM teachers’ blending of critical writing pedagogy with critical life guidance. As Sasaki Ko, a northern DLWM leader, explained, a key challenge of life-based education was not simply to “combine life-based topics with learning materials, but rather to be a technique that handles life-based topics as learning material.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Kokubun Ichitaro, an elementary school teacher from the impoverished prefecture of Yamagata, further applied this criticality to life guidance through a practice later known as gainen kudaki (literally translated as “concept smashing”), which used the life-based realism of classroom writing assignments to prompt students to reconsider—to “smash-apart”—their own unexamined preconceptions.Footnote ⁴¹ After lamenting the extent his students parroted “concepts (gainen) taught by morality textbook sages (shushinsho no shoshi),” for example, Kokubun later advocated for an alternative, “honest moral learning” based on the study of students’ lived reality. As part of an overall aim to “build ‘a classroom that does not need lies,’” Kokubun asked his students to list and then reflect upon the many ways they and others already commited falsehoods in daily life.Footnote ⁴² Kato Shushiro, Sasaki’s colleague in Akita prefecture, similarly repurposed his writing classes into practical, guidance-oriented self-help sessions. He began using group assessments of student essays as opportunities for students to engage in “hermeneutical criticism,” a collaborative study process where students shared life problems and offered comments to each other.Footnote ⁴³

By challenging entrenched assumptions, however, DLWM’s approach could take on an iconoclastic, political edge. Movement practitioners, especially those from famine-ravaged northern Honshu, showed increasing frustration with liberal (i.e. American-influenced) educators whom they saw as complacent elites.Footnote ⁴⁴ Sasaki, for example, criticized other contemporary approaches for “only deciding to see [children’s] lives as a kind of ‘fun’”; he proposed instead an education based on a “life philosophy (seimei tetsugaku) exclusively focused on the humbler classes.”Footnote ⁴⁵ As the Sasaki-led Northern Japan National Language Education Alliance asserted in its 1935 founding declaration, DLWM guidance activities sought nothing less than the very salvation of their students. In contrast to the passive approaches of liberal educators, DLWM called for a more active cultivation of student autonomy and empowered life attitudes:

DLWM’s radicalness did not go unnoticed. Among American-influenced academics, DLWM’s philosophical pretensions and self-righteousness smacked of amateurism. The abovementioned American-education popularizer Tomeoka Kiyoo, for example, chided DLWM teachers for using educational approaches that amounted to little more than “art appreciation” and “sentimentalism,” thereby risking society-wide derision.Footnote ⁴⁷ The biggest opponent of DLWM, however, proved to be the Japanese state. The shift to total war in the early 1940s made DLWM’s critical approach unacceptable. Between one hundred and three hundred DLWM teachers—including Sasaki, Kokubun, and Kato—were said to have been arrested. For Sasaki, the harsh conditions of imprisonment aggravated his tuberculosis, eventually taking his life in 1944 at the age of thirty-seven.Footnote ⁴⁸

Implementing Gaidansu

Historian Masako Shibata has argued that—in contrast to the skeptical responses of West Germans—postwar Japanese educators generally supported American-initiated reforms.Footnote ⁴⁹ While this portrayal might be broadly true, the path to Japanese acceptance was neither straightforward nor inevitable. Until the end of 1946—as SCAP preoccupied itself with removing prewar militarism from schools—MOE entrusted reform to prominent Japanese scholars who continued interpreting educational democratization along bildung-ian lines.Footnote ⁵⁰ The resulting 1946 New Education Policies, while encouraging educators to commit to “thorough democratization” based on Lincoln’s dictum of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” nonetheless emphasized an approach prioritizing students’ and teachers' philosophical capabilities.Footnote ⁵¹ Economic and moral learning would prove insufficient, the proposal explained, if not accompanied by a “philosophical cultivation” (tetsugakuteki kyoyo) that enabled students to coordinate different kinds of knowledge, think more deeply, and realize Japan’s future as a “peaceful nation of culture”:

MOE’s earliest postwar guidance handbook likewise echoed prewar DLWM practices. Teachers were informed that “education must do everything to know children’s and students' unvarnished reality,” and to help them “imagine” new life “ideals” in response. It also highlighted the need for critical thinking. “In order to help students’ life in society properly develop,” the 1946 manual explained, “one needs to help [students] see their societal lives accurately, while also cultivating within them a mind that will carefully examine it.”Footnote ⁵³

Occupied Japan did eventually adopt explicitly American education models, but it was due to SCAP’s insistence on realizing US Education Mission recommendations, and the wave of American education specialists that its General Headquarters (GHQ) hired in late 1946 to implement such recommendations. When the consultants arrived in Japan that autumn, their reformist efforts were facilitated in three important ways. First, they had unprecedented influence over their Japanese counterparts in government. For example, the Occupation established a curricular “steering committee,” composed of GHQ advisers and MOE officials. Meeting three times a week or more, the committee systematized American supervision of the nation’s educational policy and curriculum-making process. Although they were technically advisers, these representatives of SCAP wielded de facto power to issue, as Theodore Cohen has more generally characterized it, “noncommands with the force of commands” to their Japanese counterparts. Through SCAP’s use of censorship and its ability to ration printing paper, GHQ officials could also influence what education materials were read by the public.Footnote ⁵⁴

Second, reform was supported by unprecedented enforcement resources: it was literally backed by an army, specifically, the Eighth Army’s Military Government Teams. Composed of a few dozen personnel per prefecture, these forces ensured local compliance with GHQ educational initiatives. Starting in 1946, these teams conducted detailed inspections of all Japanese schools, further facilitating reform’s implementation. Through a comprehensive survey eventually totaling sixteen pages, Japanese principals were required to report to Occupation authorities on their school’s progress on various aspects of educational reform. This included informing them of the number of teachers that had attained postwar teacher certification; read the abovementioned teacher's textbook, Educational Psychology; attended Occupation-promoted reeducation conferences; and listened to SCAP-supervised, education-related radio programming. Regarding pupil guidance specifically, these inspections asked schools about their efforts to create cumulative student records, their use of “special guidance procedures” designed to “better record … pupil’s all-round development,” and their implementation of signature democratic homeroom activities such as student government and school newspapers.Footnote ⁵⁵ Because these military government teams had recently supervised the purge of local ultranationalist educators—which directly or indirectly led to over one hundred thousand prewar teachers leaving education—these interactions were also likely informed by power asymmetries that made it difficult for Japanese educators to refuse American guidance and advice.Footnote ⁵⁶

Lastly, the newly arrived education specialists were able to enact significant change through the power of their professional reputations. Often distinguished US educators themselves, they brought an educational credibility that uniformed Occupation personnel had heretofore lacked. Helen Heffernan, for example, the consultant tasked with providing advice on elementary education reform and the abovementioned teacher textbook, Education Psychology, was both California’s long-serving commissioner of rural and elementary education, and a nationally known liberal educator.Footnote ⁵⁷ Arthur Loomis, GHQ’s educational administration specialist and eventual head of its Education Division, had previously served as director of research for Denver Public Schools and principal of the University of Chicago’s affiliate high school.Footnote ⁵⁸ Howard Bell, adviser for Japan’s postwar social studies curriculum and its civics textbook, Primer of Democracy, was an American Council on Education (ACE) researcher who had authored well-known works on juvenile delinquency and vocational guidance.Footnote ⁵⁹ Lastly, Verna Carley, former Stanford University faculty member and supervisor of GHQ teacher-training efforts, was a published academic on secondary school guidance issues. As eventual director of the Institute for Educational Leadership (IFEL)—an Occupation-sponsored training program for Japanese educators and administrators—she also oversaw a program that taught over 9,300 participants in American educational best practices.Footnote ⁶⁰ Overall, these specialists, as well as dozens of other SCAP-affiliated education officials, interacted with at least eighty thousand Japanese educators at scores of Occupation-supported symposiums, conferences, and teacher workshops nationwide.Footnote ⁶¹

Besides implementing specific US Education Mission recommendations, these GHQ consultants introduced Japanese educators to the latest in US pupil guidance. Scholars have noted the extent Arthur Traxler’s 1945 Techniques of Guidance: Tests, Records and Counseling in a Guidance Program influenced postwar Japan, and the work simultaneously represented and apotheosized several trends of mid-century American-guidance discourse.Footnote ⁶² As the Educational Records Bureau’s (ERB) associate director of research, Traxler was a proponent of guidance-related student data collection and mental testing, reflecting that organization’s own position as a provider of guidance record and standardized testing services.Footnote ⁶³ Techniques’ outsized influence on Occupation-era guidance thus complemented and deepened the psychological emphasis of US Education Mission recommendations. While contemporary American-guidance writers recognized the importance of psychological adjustment in guidance, Techniques elevated it to a preeminent concern. As Techniques’ editor H. H. Remmers explained in its introduction, the many components of guidance programs “have, as their only reason for being, the more adequate adjustment of the individual to the society in which he must live and work.” Echoed Traxler: “Guidance enables each individual to understand his abilities and interests, to develop them … and finally to reach a state of complete and mature self-guidance as a desirable citizen of a democratic social order.”Footnote ⁶⁴ To Occupation authorities tasked with implementing democratic guidance models, Techniques’ linking of personal adjustment with “democratic social order” likely proved attractive. As Traxler noted elsewhere in Techniques, “The only effective training for citizenship in a democracy is practice in democratic living… . [The student] must be led to evolve for himself in a satisfactory level of living and … maintain a balance between his own welfare and that of the group.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Techniques’ influence on postwar Gaidansu had practical implications. First, the work valorized educational measurement, specifically the analytic power of “a new psychology” and, more concretely, “the application of mathematics and measurement techniques to psychological problems … [that often] assume the appearance of the normal, bell-shaped curve.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Whereas earlier guidance writers took a circumspect approach to mental testing, Traxler devoted many pages detailing and positively evaluating individual instruments such as Robert Bernreuter’s Personality Inventory, the Adjustment Inventory of H. M. Bell, and L. L. Thurstone’s Social Attitude Test.Footnote ⁶⁷ Second, Traxler promoted the use of cumulative records, namely individual files that collected and aggregated students’ personal information in order to facilitate guidance interventions. To ensure a sufficient supply of student data to teachers, Techniques recommended a wide array of “anecdotal records,” “behavioral descriptions,” and “personality rating scales.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Traxler was not unique in advocating for comprehensive student data collection in guidance, but his zeal in calling for “complete objectivity”—to be as “cold and impartial as an X-ray photograph” as he characterized it—was remarkable. Through systematic guidance observations, he explained, schools could “improve the adjustment of the pupils when the anecdotes show that better adjustment is needed.” As Traxler asserted early on in Techniques, effective guidance depended, “upon a realization that we must first marshal the facts about our students, that we … make personnel work a kind of science,” and ultimately, that it should “enable the school to know its pupils.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Finally, Traxler’s repeated professions of scientific objectivity notwithstanding, the actual student traits that guidance would evaluate were distinctly normative. In the sample behavioral description forms Techniques reprinted, character traits focused on students’ sociability and diligence, including a sense of responsibility and dependability, social influence, open mindedness, concern for society, seriousness of purpose, work habits, self-assurance in social situations, control of emotions, and “social adjustability.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Perhaps most importantly, Techniques assigned regular classroom teachers a central role in pupil guidance. Traxler argued that teachers’ daily interactions with students already made them de facto guidance counselors capable of providing “treatment” in many instances:

As Techniques concluded later in the same section, “there are many matters of personal and social adjustment in which teachers may aid pupils who seek their advice.” Though recognizing that “obscure and technical” cases do at times require the “assistance of experts,” Traxler believed that most aspects of pupil guidance could be conducted without special counseling qualifications. To this end, Techniques provided readers with a detailed explanation of the case-study method: a sequential guidance process based on the comprehensive collection of student information, a diagnosis of a student’s problem based on that information, and the subsequent treatment of students through guidance interventions. The work additionally gave would-be guidance counselors tips on how to deal with students’ adjustment issues.Footnote ⁷² As Traxler reassured readers, even with “little professional training for counseling, they can be very helpful to individual pupils … with the overt, immediate problems of adjustment [emphasis in original].”Footnote ⁷³ As the above-quoted New Junior High School Handbook echoed in 1949—the same year that Techniques was translated into Japanese—tekio-focused guidance was about ordinary teachers intervening in students’ everyday life problems. And Traxler offered Japanese schools the additional hope that such guidance would require little extra training to implement.

By promoting Traxler’s Techniques, the Occupation signaled a sea change in how it would conceive of educational democratization. Contrasted with early postwar discourses, democracy would no longer be a philosophical project emphasizing profound thinking but a psychological one valorizing well-adjusted behavior. Techniques’ focus on the “practice in democratic living,” with its blending of pupil guidance and citizenship education, was reiterated throughout the Occupation. Speaking to an Occupation-sponsored teacher reeducation conference in 1948, for example, prewar measurement pioneer Okabe Yataro argued that the strength of American education lay in its embrace of the “democratic mode of life” and for “the importance placed on problems related to mental hygiene and … removing obstacles inhibiting the development [of students].” One year later, Okabe supervised a MOE-produced secondary school pupil guidance handbook similarly emphasizing the development of students’ personhood and citizenship through guidance methods alternately intended to “keep normal students normal,” “avoid the emergence of tekio deficiencies,” and “remedy futekio at its early stages.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The Howard Bell-supported national civics textbook, Primer of Democracy, likewise reinforced this approach by exhorting Japanese secondary school students to view democracy not as “mere ideas and theory, but as a way of thinking, of behaving, and of life, for everyone to coexist within society.” In this new rendering of educational democratization, democracy became equated with collaborative and participatory behaviors—“a horizontal morality”—enabling the smooth functioning of a larger group.Footnote ⁷⁵ Primer asserted that learning democracy was like learning baseball: “No matter how much one studies the rules or eagerly watches professional games … in order to become skillful, one absolutely must play it oneself.” To “play” postwar democracy, Primer advised students to engage in a collaborative “membership with society, realizing their humane rights of daily living, while also developing their unique personalities and assuming assigned responsibilities.” Such activities, the passage stated in its normative conclusion, led to “a bright and happy daily life at school … and by extension, the proper way of living in a broader society.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Gaidansu also embraced Traxler’s advocacy of comprehensive student data collection and measurement. As noted above, guidance surveys and American-inspired personality tests were not unknown in prewar Japan. However, life guidance movements such as DLWM primarily used them in a subjective fashion to encourage student self-reflection.Footnote ⁷⁷ By contrast, postwar Japanese guidance teachers were asked to measure student characteristics objectively and comprehensively so as to increase educational efficiency and effectiveness. As the MOE official Baba Shiro argued in 1948, because the US embraced W. W. Charters’s and Franklin Bobbitt’s “Scientific Movement of Education,” it overcame the “speculative and abstract methods” of the past, and managed to “empirically investigate the ‘minimum essentials’ of student social needs for knowledge, skills and attitudes … thereby establishing education on a more objective basis.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Similarly, a US Occupation official explained in 1949 that, in order to establish “general educational, social, emotional and vocational tekio,” it was first necessary for schools to create a “personality balance sheet” of each pupil so as to “objectively record a student’s strengths and weaknesses … and make clear …their individual physical, mental, and social capacities.”Footnote ⁷⁹

This data-intensive approach to guidance was systematized into national policy in 1948 with the issuance of MOE School-Related Directive #510: “Concerning the Handling and Goals of Elementary School Student Records.” This ministerial notice advised Japanese schools to create individual guidance records for every one of the nation’s students, emphasizing the way such documents would “record students’ comprehensive and continuous development, and thereby form an essential part of guidance.” MOE instructed educators on the specifics of student data collection, suggesting both the kind of information to gather and the ways to organize them. In line with contemporary American practices, subsequent record forms asked teachers to observe and evaluate students’ behavior using a combination of five-level character-trait ratings, freer-form narrative comments, and standardized test scores. Rating descriptors were also created to systematize teachers' scoring of students’ character-traits.Footnote ⁸⁰ As in Traxler’s work, evaluated personality traits were normative, though more explicitly so. Educators were informed that the recommended traits were “especially chosen for being desirable behaviors for a democratic society and related to [a student’s] level of social tekio.” Among the twenty-two traits suggested, particular attention was paid to students’ interpersonal and work skills, including friendliness, respect for others, ability to accept other viewpoints, cooperativeness, responsibility, eagerness to work, self-control, moral sense (defined as “hating mistaken conduct and siding with proper conduct”), leadership, cheerfulness, good manners, and good personal hygiene. To better grasp students’ emotional state, teachers were asked to observe students’ daily conduct and provide concrete examples of their behaviors—such as how they cared for school pets or cleaned classrooms—when making comments in their guidance records.Footnote ⁸¹ One year later, the Okabe-led MOE pupil guidance handbook reinforced this approach by devoting 170 pages—or almost half of its content—to detailing the different ways to collect student data, be it through standardized tests, student-assignments, teacher observations and behavioral summaries, or interviews and case-study-related records. As the New Junior High School Handbook reminded teachers that same year, in order to achieve a pupil’s ultimate “readjustment” (saitekio), “knowing a student remained an inescapable condition for guiding a student,” and required multiple means of observation and evaluation to do so.Footnote ⁸²

Lastly, Gaidansu introduced American-style homerooms to Japan. Although prewar schools had also assigned teachers to guide individual classrooms (the so-called tannin system), postwar homerooms were reshaped along American lines. One widely used homeroom guidance manual, Tominaga Tadashi’s Management of Homerooms, was itself the product of a six-month IFEL collaboration with Redwood City, California's principal, A. Clarence Argo, and its curriculum director, Earl Peckham. The work alternately emphasized postwar homerooms’ usefulness in providing “an important function for democratic school living,” as well as noting US education’s broader potential for developing students’ “practical ability to advance cooperative group living.”Footnote ⁸³ In an apparent attack on lingering postwar bildung, Tominaga called for a “Copernican-like revolution” of Deweyan, pupil-centered education to replace outdated “Herbartian theories” and abstract, “ivory-tower pedagogies.” Concretely, Management of Homerooms cited the US Educational Policy Commission’s Education for All American Youth as a benchmark reference to help teachers develop students’ “occupational preparation,” “civic competence,” and “personal development.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The Occupation further facilitated the spread of the American homeroom model by allocating scarce printing paper to mass-publish homeroom activity workbooks for students. Reflecting Gaidansu’s tekio priorities, these textbooks emphasized the importance of homeroom group activities, with one noting how they helped “rectify” students’ “anti-social attitudes” and “careless work habits,” and cultivated “friendships,” a “sense of responsibility,” and a “co-operative spirit.” The same workbook also included a discussion about “the American way of life”—revealingly defined as “another way of saying ‘the democratic way of life’”—and how Japanese people could achieve something analogous in the future.Footnote ⁸⁵

Supporting Gaidansu

How did Japanese educators respond to American-modeled Gaidansu? Officials within the MOE bureaucracy generally embraced the new paradigm. As illustrated by the 1951 Course of Study for Elementary School Social Studies, MOE came to support tekio-oriented education by the end of Occupation. Three of the curriculum’s five learning goals focused on students’ tekio, be it their adjustment to “group life,” “the natural environment,” or the nation’s “social systems, institutions and customs.”Footnote ⁸⁶ MOE’s embrace of tekio, moreover, was not simply late-Occupation “Reverse Course” conservatism. MOE’s earliest support of tekio-oriented guidance began in late 1946, with the arrival of American education consultant Helen Heffernan and the yearlong working relationship she established with her MOE liaison, Isaka Yukio. According to Isaka, Heffernan served as his “mentor,” providing him with a thousand pages of educational materials, as well as instructions filling three thick college notebooks. Together, they developed a new social studies curriculum for Japanese elementary schools.Footnote ⁸⁷ Professionally, their collaboration likely benefited Isaka, as the prestige of working with an educator of Heffernan’s stature allowed him—an educational psychologist by training—to distinguish himself from the generalist, Tokyo University Law Faculty alumni who had heretofore dominated ministerial bureaucracies.

Isaka’s support of tekio-focused guidance was made obvious in his 1947 monograph, New Elementary School Teacher. Dedicating the work to Heffernan, Isaka introduced her to Japanese readers in a way that was revealing. Rather than characterize Heffernan by her well-known accomplishments as a California state education commissioner, respected curriculum developer, or champion of progressive education, the MOE technocrat instead portrayed her as an “outstanding American education psychologist,” later expanding on this point by noting how such “new education psychology viewpoints” would help Japan replace “the abstract … education theories” of prewar pedagogies. Isaka was particularly drawn to the new approach’s empirical aspects, praising it for embracing “modern science,” for its “outstanding research survey activities,” and for “illuminating the causes of human futekio … through the discipline of psychopathology.” He also emphasized the importance of schools’ psychological and normative functions. While acknowledging their need “to advance children’s intelligent behaviors for becoming good citizens and … believing in democracy,” he underscored that “a school’s overall education plan must contribute to a student’s strong mental health” and, by extension, develop “efficacious, satisfied, happy and socially considered behavior,” based on students’ ability to “freely tekio to themselves and to the world.”Footnote ⁸⁸

When Heffernan returned to the US in early 1948, the thirty-five-year-old Isaka only deepened his commitment to tekio-focused guidance. In the inaugural issue of the pupil guidance journal Gaidansu Research, which Isaka cofounded and edited, he emphasized the importance of psychological data gathering, arguing that through the “special techniques” of guidance measurement and assessment, educators could “detect, avoid and remove various kinds of futekio.” Footnote ⁸⁹ Echoing Traxler, Isaka also highlighted Gaidansu’s scientific nature by emphasizing how “behavior is a mathematical function of an individual and environment;” he further insisted upon the “foundational” role cumulative student records should play in guidance activities.Footnote ⁹⁰ As Isaka explained, schools required greater understanding of pupils’ psychologies and thus needed to engage in “investigations” of students in newly expansive—and invasive—ways:

Few data-gathering techniques seemed to escape Isaka’s admiration. Noting how some US guidance records even documented the distance from which a student could hear a clock ticking, Isaka marveled over how such attention to details “lead to practical guidance clues,” concluding that “in America too, simple observations of students are recorded and considered important; everything about the student can be noticed, and if everything can be seen, one can understand a child more deeply.”Footnote ⁹² Isaka was not the only MOE official who embraced this psychological, self-consciously scientific vision of guidance. Baba Shiro's praise for American educational measurement has already been noted, and another MOE official, Gaidansu Research cofounder Miki Yasumasa, promoted new student information-gathering approaches by leading school guidance workshops across the nation. Miki also advocated for mental hygiene in guidance, specifically calling for a new “social maturity scale” that could measure student personal development and facilitate increased child self-sufficiency.Footnote ⁹³

Gaidansu also attracted support from leading postwar academics beyond the abovementioned Okabe. Yoda Arata, a well-known prewar education psychologist, founded Child Psychology, itself an important postwar journal for introducing contemporary American-guidance practices. In 1948 alone, the journal published three special issues on “The Guidance of Problem Children,” “Mental Hygiene,” and “Tekio Psychology.” An article in “The Guidance of Problem Children” issue, for example, argued for the need to better understand “whether a child’s behavior conformed to the tekio norms of daily social life,” and introduced the Detroit Scale for the Diagnosis of Behavior Problems as one way to do so. As it concluded, by “enthusiastically, precisely and scientifically grasping the psychological characteristics of children … [one would] be able to provide the appropriate environmental conditions fit for guiding a child’s social futekio.”Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1951, Yoda further provided Japanese educators with a detailed case-study-like example of how to treat student kleptomania, integrating diverse sources of student personal data with a step-by-step guidance counseling process.Footnote ⁹⁵

No postwar academic supporter of Gaidansu, however, would prove more consequential than Miyasaka Tetsufumi. Graduating from the humanities faculty of Tokyo University in 1941, Miyasaka’s life resembled Isaka’s in that both started off as outsiders in their respective professional worlds. Possessing neither Yoda’s quantitative skills nor the exegetical abilities of a prewar neo-Kantian education philosopher, Miyasaka’s early career researching Zen Buddhist education saw his prospects limited to a faculty position at a non-elite private university. His superior English proficiency, however, allowed him to reinvent himself as an expert in American education when he published a work on US homerooms in the late 1940s.Footnote ⁹⁶ His fortunes further improved in 1950, when he was hired as a lecturer at the Occupation-supported IFEL. The experience allowed him to work alongside the director of guidance for Los Angeles City Schools, Elizabeth Woods, and soon thereafter he became an IFEL course director.Footnote ⁹⁷ His work with Woods also provided him the opportunity to translate a Los Angeles School District teaching pamphlet on democratic education, Practicing the Democratic Way in School. Retitled The Democratic Guidance of Life in School in Japanese, the pamphlet’s loose translation of the original title both explicitly linked guidance to democratization and foreshadowed Miyasaka’s later penchant for repackaging American educational ideas in terms (i.e., guidance of life) more readily identifiable to Japanese audiences. At the same time, Miyasaka’s translation conveyed contemporary American-guidance ideas. The work emphasized the idea that democracy was not “simply … something to debate over and read in books,” but rather a thing “that must be lived,” and something “that must be supported mentally.” As with the “democratic mode of life” approach emphasized in other Occupation-era works, Miyasaka’s translation emphasized socialization to group living, recognizing that “democratic living must satisfy the needs of each student while helping them conform to the needs of society.” Lastly, the work emphasized student mental health, exhorting teachers to “find the reasons for students’ futekio, and then guide them to overcome such difficulties themselves.” It later introduced readers to the California Test of Personality, a diagnostic test said to detect “anti-social responses.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The Occupation also managed to garner support from less prominent education academics. In 1947, faculty members drawn primarily from Tokyo-area normal schools and specializing in education psychology were “enthusiastically supported and guided by” Verna Carley to form the Research Association for the Development of Teachers. Initially a study group that discussed contemporary educational issues, the association emerged as an early promoter of American-style anecdotal records, behavioral inventories, and sociograms, a technique for visualizing students’ interpersonal relationships.Footnote ⁹⁹ In 1948, the group published its own pupil guidance textbook. As with other Occupation-era works, the textbook emphasized the importance of student socialization, reiterating to educators the need to “reduce the number of persons with concerning levels of social incompatibility and individual futekio.” Furthermore, it called for the comprehensive collection of student data. Because one of its central guidance principles was “needing first to understand students’ individual reality,” it underscored the importance of “‘observing’ children or adolescents through various kinds of surveys, research, tests, and educational psychology insights.” The work also introduced teachers to guidance records created by the ACE, provided advice on how to conduct “tekio guidance,” and suggested ways to facilitate the implementation of the case-study method.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Japanese educators farther removed from the Tokyo-based GHQ also supported tekio-oriented guidance, although the results were sometimes head-scratching. Machii Hikoshiro, an English teacher at the Nagasaki Maritime Higher School, for example, reinvented himself as an expert in American educational psychology. With apparently limited formal training in the discipline, he nonetheless ingratiated himself into the postwar Nagasaki Prefectural Government and gained a reputation for “developing and pioneering tekio guidance techniques.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Machii’s first book on the subject, itself requested by Nagasaki’s US-staffed Military Government Team, detailed his research team’s efforts in counseling early-stage futekio among area school children. It relied heavily—and seemingly incongruously—on advertisement and management psychologist H. W. Hepner’s mass-market work, Psychology Applied in Life and Work.Footnote ¹⁰² A follow-up work, encouraged by a prefectural government “unbearably delighted” by his earlier efforts, and impressed by his “use of modern scientific techniques and general brilliance in educational activities,” introduced Machii’s own psychometric instrument, the Nagasaki Prefectural Diagnostic General Mental Abilities Test (abbreviated as the “NDM Test”). Although ostensibly an intelligence test, it also purported to be able to measure personality tendencies along the twin axes of “tendency towards compromise-impulsiveness” and “nervousness-relaxedness.” Machii insisted that test results aligned to Wilhelm Wundt’s Hippocratic personality categories of the sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic. In terms of practice, Machii promoted the case study method and the adjustment-oriented counseling approaches of E. G. Williamson.Footnote ¹⁰³ The NDM Test appears to have not lasted much past Occupation, but Machii’s own career continued its upward trend. By the 1960s, he had left western Kyushu and continued his psychological work as a faculty member at a Tokyo-area university.

Although Machii’s peripatetic career was unusual, it paralleled the professional trajectories of better-known Gaidansu supporters. MOE officials Isaka, Baba, and Miki, as well as academics Miyasaka and Yoda all emerged as leading figures in postwar Japanese education. Isaka and Baba became full professors at Tokyo Education University (now Tsukuba University), while Miki, Yoda, and Miyasaka joined Okabe to become education professors at the nation’s flagship university, Tokyo University. During the 1960s, Miki and Yoda both served as the Dean of the Education Faculty, while Miyasaka became principal of its affiliate school.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Far from being punished for supporting Occupation-era Gaidansu, these supporters of American practice apparently leveraged their experiences to rise within Japan’s most elite education faculties, and in turn, they influenced future generations of government officials and educational leaders.

Resisting Gaidansu

Not all Japanese educators welcomed American Gaidansu. Occupation purges of “militarist” teachers in 1946 likely muted conservative critics of reform; but skepticism toward Occupation policies grew among left-wing educators. Such resistance did not oppose educational democratization per se, but rather the content of tekio-focused democracy. Indeed, even some Japanese champions of prewar American progressivism remained lukewarm toward the new guidance. Dalton Plan translator Akai Yonekichi, for example, advocated a surprisingly bildung-ian vision of guidance in 1949, arguing for “personality guidance” that prioritized “the cultivation of ‘truth’ and ‘courage’ [emphases in original] to meet the demands of creating a future democratic society.” Akai also advocated for guidance emphasizing autonomy over adjustment, noting how “it is important to have children understand the unvarnished reality of their life environment,” so that they will eventually “cultivate true virtue and behavior … and become strengthened as people.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Even the prewar education psychologist Kido Mantaro insisted on guidance that was more analytical than therapeutic. He argued that the guidance of “problem children” remained an issue “initially best analyzed through phenomenological means.” Because children’s bad behavior had to “necessarily be understood as a problem of society,” Kido reasoned, it was best to first grasp the underlying phenomena of a child’s daily life. Only after understanding such realities, he concluded, could one determine whether guidance solutions should “apply the methods of the sociological, psychological, or psychopathological.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Educators more directly associated with prewar bildung were even more antipathetic towards Gaidansu. Hiroshima Higher Normal School—led by Osada Arata, a prominent prewar Pestalozzi and Natorp scholar—subverted American homeroom models into more classically bildung-ian practices.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The 1950 Hiroshima Integrated Homeroom Plan, produced by the university’s affiliated secondary school, for example, fretted over the risk of postwar homerooms becoming “fundamentally unconsidered, unoriginal, randomly translated, and fashion-chasing.” Although affirming the Occupation’s goal of preparing students to become “good members of a democratic society,” the Plan elsewhere reiterated Ludwig Feuerbach’s quip that, “‘since time immemorial, no academic discipline has made fools of humans … as much as psychology’” and cautioned against an overreliance on “survey data that … ‘entangles the people.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Hiroshima Affiliate’s homeroom departed from American models in two important ways. First, it introduced a Great Books-oriented curriculum referred to as “Reading Guidance.” Inspired by dramatist Romain Rolland’s dictum that “in order to discover and examine oneself, one reads oneself through literature,” the Plan asked students to regularly read materials from the school library, with its “Catalog of World Literary Masterpieces”—a collection of canonical works including those of Kant, Hegel, Dilthey, Nietzsche, and Heidegger—figuring prominently. Through Reading Guidance, student socialization was intended to happen spontaneously through students’ direct engagement with the ideas contained in the readings themselves rather than through counseling interventions per se. As the Plan suggested, through students’ active participation in book discussions, the curriculum could alternately “develop students’ individual personality,” “provide practice in social attitudes and group life,” and “realize their cultivation (kyoyo) as full members of society.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The philosophical nature of the Plan was further reinforced through a second homeroom activity, “Historical Guidance,” which it described as nothing short of the “most important and most disregarded part of our nation’s postwar education.” Historical Guidance sought to create within Japanese classrooms a hybrid Germano-Platonic Kulturestaat capable of both “unifying a nation’s people” and instilling democratic ideals. In so doing, the Plan conceived of “democratization” differently from SCAP, emphasizing civic courage over social adjustment. Noting Rousseau’s warning that democratic countries were prone to collapse, it highlighted Historical Guidance’s ability to help students “expel their needless fear toward social change … reconsider their attitudes toward progress … and become more comfortable in participating in public life.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ In terms of classes allocated to guidance activities, Hiroshima Affiliate gave Reading and Historical Guidance a privileged place in the curriculum, with students engaging in the two activities more often than such American homeroom mainstays as “Personality,” “Vocational,” and “Leisure” guidance. Only “Health” and “Sociability” guidance were offered more. Even the seemingly tekio-centered topic of “Sociability Guidance” paid surprisingly little attention to psychological issues. Instead, it asked students to analyze problems arising from past societies, emphasizing the need “to pay special consideration to the development of our nation’s feudal society exclusively based on hierarchical relationships.” Its curriculum sought to cultivate students’ “spirit of self-governance,” “spirit of social service,” and “attitudes of international citizenship.”Footnote ¹¹¹

Gaidansu’s most vociferous critics, however, often came from a reconstituted Daily Life Writing Movement. Whereas Hiroshima Affiliate resurrected a classics-based bildung, DLWM reintroduced its own Lebensphilosophie-oriented life guidance. DLWM practitioners were troubled by what they saw as a lack of criticality in postwar tekio-focused discourse. Writing in late 1947, for example, the prewar DLWM leader and “concept smashing” pedagogue Kokubun Ichitaro excoriated the SCAP-supervised Course of Study for its overly “technical” approach. He expressed reservations about its understanding of democratization, specifically taking issue with its tendency to “see children from the standpoint of psychology … not as children living right in the middle of a [postwar] democratic revolution.” Highlighting its absence of “Pestalozzian … educational love,” he lamented how a “Course of Study lacking in love … reduced teachers to mere technicians of education … unable to have passion and creativity, and by extension, unable to inspire in students autonomy, self-control, creativity, cooperativeness, or the ability to think logically and critically.” To Kokubun, such an approach also undercut educational democratization’s ability to develop critical thinking and the “true, clear love of a modern citizenry” capable of “liberating” students from feudal economic relationships and “Asian paternalistic views of children.”Footnote ¹¹² Namekawa Michio, the prewar DLWM theorist, likewise expressed doubts about Gaidansu, specifically noting how its “psychologistic view of children” imbued it with an “excessive emphasis” on the tekio of children to age-determined developmental stages. He instead highlighted a “life-centered approach” that recognized “the reality of children not simply as psychological beings … but also as social beings.”Footnote ¹¹³ Although ostensibly locating his ideas within the SCAP-sponsored community school model of Edward Olsen, Namekawa recast it in philosophical terms. His guidance goals emphasized “humankind’s happiness” (as opposed to the happiness of individuals) and sought to help students along the bildung-ian lines of living life well through “becoming societal members of high character [and] loving learning by uncompromisingly searching for truth.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

DLWM’s critical, liberation-oriented approach to educational democratization was also reflected in the volatile union politics of Occupied Japan. In the DLWM hotbed of Akita prefecture, the teachers’ union—itself initially encouraged by prewar DLWM leader Kato Shushiro—planned a strike in 1948 that sought to introduce radical guidance practices into schools. Under union head and prewar DLWM practitioner Hanaoka Taiun, strike organizers called upon members to seize control of public schools and implement practices encouraging student political activism. In a March 1948 union communication, for example, strike leaders proposed organizing students into after-school “Child Pupil Assemblies,” meant to discuss Akita’s “education revival” and to eventually present the results of such deliberations to government authorities.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Such discussions could include debates over union strike demands, such as the switch to a five-day school week from a six-day week, with the union suggesting deliberation points such as:

Whether such proposed activities were laudable examples of democratic guidance in action or the inappropriate overreach of zealous union members remain debatable. Regardless, from the union’s retelling of events, local US Occupation forces appeared cognizant of their actions’ radicalness: Akita’s Military Government Team repeatedly summoned union leaders to their offices and tried to force them into calling off the strike. Despite what Hanaoka retrospectively characterized as a fight “against American-Occupation, anti-communist, pretend-democratic authoritarianism,” the union ultimately abandoned its administrative seizure of schools. The strike itself ended after one week.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The Akita teachers’ strike of 1948 was the closest Occupation forces and DLWM practitioners came to blows, but it highlighted underlying tensions in their contrasting understandings of educational democratization. DLWM adherents also engaged in peaceful and arguably more effective resistance through their support of the best-selling education work of the Occupation-era, Mountain Echo School (Yamabiko Gakko). This collection of student-written essays from northern Japan’s Yamagata prefecture, supervised by junior high school teacher and Kokubun protégé, Muchaku Seikyo, reintroduced the nation to DLWM’s unique brand of life guidance. It sold around one hundred thousand copies and was adapted into a 1952 movie.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Replete with unflinching portrayals of flawed Occupation-era agrarian policies and institutions, the students’ essays showed postwar educators an alternative guidance approach emphasizing a critical social consciousness.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As education scholar Miyahara Seiichi enthused in 1951, DLWM’s approach helped students “begin to acquire a subject-autonomy (shutaiteki na tachiba)” capable of both “analyzing the dark realities” of their lives and “boldly confronting the issues of their village with their eyes and hearts.”Footnote ¹²⁰

As the early 1950s progressed, DLWM’s emphasis on “dark realities” assumed broader significance as intellectuals such as Kazuko and Shunsuke Tsurumi promoted DLWM’s practices among cultural organizations affiliated with left-leaning political movements.Footnote ¹²¹ American military authorities might have prevailed in the Akita teachers’ strike, but DLWM leaders ultimately exacted a modicum of revenge. Kokubun’s leadership position both in the Japan Teachers Union and the left-leaning—and pointedly named—Japan Society for Democratic Education gave him a platform to criticize the “psychologism” and “social function” orientation of the SCAP-introduced social studies curriculum. Such a sustained attack by a leading radical educator likely emboldened others to dismiss Occupation’s progressive approaches. Ultimately, many of GHQ’s progressive curricular initiatives became derided among left-wing educators as facile “crawl-around experientialism” (haimawaru keikenshugi), and were widely abandoned after Occupation ended.Footnote ¹²²

Japanese Guidance Post-Independence

The above criticisms notwithstanding, most Japanese educators remained committed to many aspects of American-style guidance. Indeed, the nation’s first mass-produced post-independence guidance handbooks, the 1952 Practical Guidance series, confirmed that little would change. In the introduction to the series’ elementary school edition, for example, Isaka Yukio reiterated Gaidansu’s psychological emphasis, arguing that guidance’s goal of “bettering personal and social tekio” led to “happy individuals and capable members of society.”Footnote ¹²³ In the introduction to the series’ junior high school edition, Miyasaka Tetsufumi likewise requoted Arthur Jones’s definition of guidance as “the support of students … in their making of wise choices, adjustments (tekio) and interpretations,” and valorized Gaidansu’s “scientific” methods and “gathering of objective personal data.”Footnote ¹²⁴

As the post-independence era progressed, Japanese guidance’s intensive use of student personal data and the case-study approach became normalized. In 1954, to better understand the prevalence of rural students’ supposed lack of sociability, for example, MOE conducted a nationwide study of “backwoods children” (hekichi jido) that sought to address supposed deficits in their interpersonal skills. The project continued GHQ-promoted guidance practices—including the use of personal surveys, classroom observations and cumulative guidance records—to better understand students’ sense of inferiority, passiveness, and artlessness.Footnote ¹²⁵ A 1956 MOE-funded study of “violent and friendless children” similarly reaffirmed the psychological focus of pupil guidance. Through a collection of case-study interventions, it articulated a guidance approach “based on analyzing the causes of child futekio” and the use of “psychological therapies feasible in an education context.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Specifically, the project sought to better grasp student maladjustment through such data-gathering means as physical, intelligence, and personality tests; psychiatric diagnostic instruments (such as the Rorschach test); school-administered home-life surveys; sociograms; and the use of counseling interviews.Footnote ¹²⁷

Tekio-focused guidance also benefited from a curricular change often seen as the very betrayal of Occupation-era educational democratization: the reintroduction of morality education.Footnote ¹²⁸ The 1958 Course of Study, of which the new morality education was a part, consolidated Occupation-era pupil guidance’s place in the curriculum through mandating a school-level “guidance plan” that would “harmonize … progressively and systematically” existing guidance activities (i.e., extracurricular activities such as student government, clubs, and school events, as well as homeroom-taught morality classes) with academic classes. The new Course of Study’s morality-education section further elaborated that the new curriculum would “serve as one link in the school’s guidance plan for all educational activities … ensuring a close connection between them, and necessitating a guidance that augments, deepens, and integrates … pupil development.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Substantively, morality education continued valorizing the normative, tekio-focused character traits emphasized during Occupation. The curriculum sought to develop productive, well-socialized citizens with such characteristics as tidiness; perseverance; a sense of responsibility; respectfulness; humility; a willingness to understand other viewpoints; an ability to recognize one’s own mistakes; a desire to be happy; and an intent to participate in democratic society by “working to raise the level of group life through mutual trust, and by upholding collective decisions and agreements.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Indeed, Arthur Loomis, former GHQ Education Division head, positively evaluated this new morality education by seeing it as encouraging “a creative attitude in life,” “good character and … habitual right conduct,” and “the moral attitudes needed for the good citizens of a modern democratic country.”Footnote ¹³¹

By contrast, the critical guidance practices of the postwar DLWM witnessed limits to their popularity. A new generation of DLWM guidance writers who emerged in the later 1950s, such as western Japan’s Kenjiro Konishi and Yoshio Toi, generally shied away from radical social criticism and concentrated on practical issues such as school bullying and academic attainment.Footnote ¹³² Ironically, Miyasaka Tetsufumi, the abovementioned IFEL collaborator and translator of Los Angeles School curricular materials, emerged in the late 1950s as the leader of post-independence life guidance. He became both the cofounder of Japan’s leading life guidance organization, the National Life Guidance Research Council, and editor of the organization’s journal. Although Miyasaka was also politically left-leaning—he also opposed the new morality education curriculum—his professional experiences and work with GHQ made him both theoretically and practically less iconoclastic than DLWM leaders such as Kokubun.Footnote ¹³³ When Miyasaka did engage DLWM ideas, moreover, he did so in a way that reinterpreted them along more self-consciously “Japanese” and substantively psychological lines. Specifically, he appropriated DLWM to justify his own blending of prewar Japanese practice and postwar American methods—a “fruitful unity of love and science,” as he put it—so as to combine older “Japanese life guidance” with modern “Western guidance techniques.”Footnote ¹³⁴

Thus, despite many Occupation-era DLWM practitioners being neither enthusiastic about American-guidance methods nor especially “Japanese” in self-regard, Miyasaka set about reconceiving their discourse. He de-emphasized DLWM’s criticality, highlighting instead the discourses potential for supporting group socialization. Miyasaka’s 1962 article, “Where Should We Place Daily Life Writing within the Process of Group Building?,” for example, characterized DLWM essay writing as primarily a diagnostic instrument for rendering students’ minds visible to psychological intervention. To Miyasaka, essay writing was no longer a hermeneutical act to critically understand the world, but rather a therapeutic step in a case-study-like process centered around regulating student emotions, developing “life skills,” and encouraging feelings of “responsibility”:

Additionally, Miyasaka questioned the efficacy of prewar DLWM’s underlying educational philosophy. Echoing Tomeoka’s prewar critique, he belittled aspects of DLWM guidance for their amateurism. “Although [DLWM teachers] brought overflowing educational passion and a social perspective” to guidance, he noted, “it is likely that they would have become even more effective if they had been armed with the scientific weapons of education psychology.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Strangely, some of Miyasaka’s highest praise for prewar DLWM guidance was for practices articulated after leading figures such as Sasaki had begun being arrested in 1940. Although Miyasaka sympathized with DLWM leaders’ suppression in the face of Imperial Japan’s slide toward “fascist education,” he nonetheless positively evaluated remaining, non-incarcerated, wartime DLWM pedagogues for their commitment to group-oriented practice. Without irony, he requoted one wartime teacher’s supposed success in “overcoming essay-writing based on individuals’ emotional life and private life experiences, and moving towards a classroom life with cooperative, constructive inclinations.”Footnote ¹³⁷

Evidence suggests that Miyasaka’s blending of Occupation-era guidance techniques with reinterpreted life guidance practices resonated in post-independence classrooms. A 1958 Homeroom Notebook for junior high school students, for example, asked students to write on daily life, but recast along tekio-oriented themes of socialization and personal improvement. It encouraged students to develop attitudes and thoughts in line with “becoming praiseworthy members of society who are useful to the world.” Homeroom Notebook also continued the Occupation-era “democratic modes of living” approach by transforming erstwhile political topics—for example, asking students to compare “feudalistic homes” with democratic ones—into personal and psychological ones. Specifically, such a topic was subsumed within a normative discussion on what “attitudes” families needed to achieve “happiness” and become “very cheerful, pleasant households.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Ideographically as well, Miyasaka’s blending of “Japanese” and Occupation-era guidance succeeded: the identifiably foreign, katakana loan-word of Gaidansu (ガイダンス) was replaced during the 1950s with the more visually Japanese kanji term of seito sido (生徒指導). Ironically, the new term was actually the more faithful translation of the term American GHQ experts themselves used: pupil guidance.

In the ensuing half-century, government-issued pupil guidance handbooks have continued to emphasize tekio-oriented approaches.Footnote ¹³⁹ The education ministry’s 2010 manual, for example, echoed the 1949 Handbook by defining guidance as an “educational activity that seeks to respect the personhood of each student while … raising their social qualities and level of behavior.” Teachers were similarly enjoined to “detect pupils’ futekio at an early stage” by “thoroughly observing and engaging with them,” and intervening through an updated case-study method.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Japanese guidance’s prioritization of students’ social adjustment has not been without controversy. Particularly with the onset of the “miracle” economy in the 1960s, the increasing emphasis on well-mannered behavior and vocational development often assumed a prescriptive cast. One contemporary prefectural guidance program, for example, actively encouraged students to adapt themselves to the needs of employers. As the program characterized it, such efforts would remedy the current “dearth of realistic guidance designed to help the student choose his life path in conformity with those skills and competencies already discovered and developed.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Postwar guidance’s aggressive collection of personal data arguably also facilitated a more invasive relationship between school and student. Through the increasing use of naishinsho –school-created personal dossiers assessing students’ daily conduct through character trait scales and behavioral observations analogous to Occupation-era cumulative guidance records—students’ daily behavior itself became an admission criteria for elite academic schools. With matriculation to top education institutions increasingly determinative of students’ future life course, such teacher surveillance amounted to, in the words of Teruhisa Horio, “psychological violence exercised through everyday behavioral evaluations,” which in turn transformed schools into “agents of the State’s encroaching administration of [Japanese citizens’] inner, private lives.”Footnote ¹⁴²

Even if Horio’s portrayal might be considered extreme, the Japanese government’s commitment to comprehensive student data collection has nonetheless remained as prevalent today as during the Occupation. As the government’s 2010 guidance handbook explained, extensive collection of “objective data” remained paramount, for “regardless of a student’s apparent problems, one must not redress it just through their actual actions; it is through grasping the causes of this behavior that student behavior must be reformed and led to desirable personhood.”Footnote ¹⁴³ This need to realize “desirable personhood” has apparently led to the continuing appropriation of DLWM practices along tekio-oriented lines. Describing a school’s use of student essays and “Daily Life Notebooks” in the 1980s, Rebecca Fujisawa observed how such tools served norm-building ends reminiscent of Miyasaka’s “fight report” from decades earlier. As Fujisawa explained, such writings collected information “on the details of students’ lives, feelings and attitudes, then persuad[ed] students to adopt the prescribed pattern embodied in the numerous routines of the school.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴