"Adjusting" Lives versus "Composing" Lives: Pedagogy, Protest, and Progressive Education in Postwar Japan, 1945–60

This presentation will explore the conflict between two competing education discourses that emerged during the U.S. Occupation of Japan: the “Life Adjustment” pedagogy introduced by American “progressive” educators and the indigenous “Life Composition Movement” (seikatsu tsuzurikata undo, hereafter LCM) propounded by rural teachers. First, this study will problematize conventional understandings of the U.S. Occupation’s reform of Japanese education. On paper, these policies might have paid lip-service to the ideals of a John Dewey, but in practice --with their emphasis on “mental hygiene,” their embrace of “real-world” unit-learning pedagogies, and their valorization of “scientific” approaches to curriculum—they directly imported the dominant paradigms of American “Life Adjustment” education. Second, this paper will trace the emerging conflict between local LCM teachers and the American military personnel who supervised reform. Although initially supportive of the Occupation’s goals of “democratic” education, LCM leaders’ increasingly objected to the reforms’ technocratic predisposition and its apparent lack of interest in developing children’s autonomy and critical thinking. This presentation will explore examples of LCM’s resistance through examining the best-selling LCM work, Mountain Echo School (1951); tracing the central role of LCM pedagogists within Japan’s Teacher Union movement; and exploring the role of “Life-Composition” pedagogy in broader postwar labor and peace activism. This study will also link LCM’s activism to its prewar engagement with the hermeneutical, bildung tradition of Wilhelm Dilthey. Finally, this paper will place LCM protest within the larger context of American geo-political hegemony in Asia. Contrary to popular belief, the emergence of a conservative, U.S.-backed, Liberal Democratic Party system served to ensconce --rather than displace-- key aspects of Occupation-era education reform. Ironically, the “life-adjustment” progressivism of American Occupation would end up being repackaged as a uniquely “Japanese” approach to education and schooling during the later eras of high speed economic growth.