The Pedagogy of Writing in Authoritarian Japan.

In studies of totalitarian regimes, which are categorically positioned at the opposite end from democratic regimes in the political spectrum, the notions of the self has not played an integral part in the analytical framework. An implicit assumption exists that the autonomous self is unborn, premature, suppressed or commingling with a primordial community, and therefore lacks relevance as an object of analysis. Is such a view tenable? This paper draws on the pedagogy of writing movement (tsuzurikata) in Japan in the 1930s and 40s. By analyzing pedagogical books, it argues that the rise of the Japanese authoritarian military regime was a concomitant process with the discursive practices to produce the autonomous, self-disciplining self. This process involved the displacement of the cultural sphere of ?self? into the political sphere, which consequently aided the state control and mobilization of the volunteering individual. I argue that tsuzurikata pedagogy emerged at the very intersection between the yearning of the autonomous self and the emergence of the new type of state power which was parasitic on the autonomy of the self. I show that pedagogy of writing sought to find an alternative form of political subjectivity intimately contexualized in the immediacy of everyday life, but was consequently appropriated and submerged in the state mobilization in the total war system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]