Juvenile Delinquency and Moral Instruction in Japan and the US, 1950–1970

This talk investigates various pedagogical methods for combating perceived juvenile delinquency in Cold War-era Japan and the United States. Both countries shared a presupposition that religion served as a bulwark against moral licentiousness and creeping “godless Communism,” but constitutional prohibitions on establishing religion constrained religious majorities’ abilities to put religion directly into public schools. Faced with this conundrum, creative interpreters coded specific ideas and practices as “non-religious” and therefore permissible in public schoolrooms. Examining instructional films, teachers’ union journals, Buddhist magazines, congressional testimony, policy statements, and newspaper reportage in two languages, I use morality as a keyword to investigate what I call the political economy of secularism. A productively ambiguous concept, morality served as a convenient way to get religion into—and keep religion out of—public schools while simultaneously establishing normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and labor in two capitalist societies.