Part I: What's Wrong with Japan?

If there is no fundamental reconstruction of the Japanese system of education, then in two hundred years historians will remember Japan in this way:

The discussion by pedagogues and plebeians on what makes a school system good or evil has been plagued with the assumption that innovation lasts forever, but indeed, innovation can only be judged based on whether it can last at all. What is true in the short term is not necessarily true in the long, and just because a system is evaluated to be the best in the world based on immediate outcomes does not mean it is the best system possible, nor even a good one.

If a system fundamental to the workings of society cannot be imagined to survive the next century, then a replacement must be first conceived and then achieved before the advent of irreversible cultural collapse. This need not be done immediately—gradual steps can lead to what is ultimately revolutionary change—but it must be taken for granted that there ought to be a radically new system emerging sooner rather than later, and that system must now be, at least in part, known rather than unknown.

The unsustainable birth rate in Japan is the primary, straightforward metric for measuring cultural collapse, and no optimism for the future could possibly come out of observing the curves on the chart. The naive response is to blame the economy, as if it were an abstract and untouchable force of nature, but the economy is rooted in spending, which is influenced by the costs of government programs and the spending habits of the people, which is determined by the philosophy of governance and good-living of the society in question.

The economic philosophy of Japan is not uniquely Japanese; rather, the Japanese have applied the global socioeconomic philosophy of neoliberalism to a uniquely perfect degree, but all neoliberal countries in the world face the same birth rate crisis, their commonality being this philosophy. As it turns out, the beating heart of neoliberalism is the education system. Therefore, revolutionary change is needed in education, even if the system is now the best that could ever be achieved. This change will at last mark the end of the Neoliberal Era and the transition into a new era currently unnamed. Otherwise, with the change never occurring, the Neoliberal Era will designate the end of the timeline of Japanese history as we understand the meaning of the word "Japan," the native population and ethnic culture ceasing to exist...

What I have just written is overdramatic and overstated. Of course, the reality is that the native Japanese will not suddenly vanish, but that is only due to the fact that at one point, the system will be so impossible to maintain that it will collapse rather quickly (thereby bringing a sort of natural revolution and the death of old age of neoliberalism), the government unable to afford paying teachers lifelong salaries even after utilizing the semi-free labor gained through the "community school" movement. Fewer and fewer students will be attending schools (and even now, many entire school buildings in Japan host only a dozen or so students, if that), and school campuses will inevitably be shut down and abandoned as the lofty maintainance costs prove to be endless. Before that, the government will run out of money to support the ever-increasing number of elderly patients in hospitals, and adults will begin to find themselves in situations where they can do nothing but watch their own parents die slowly in a spare bedroom from diseases that were once curable. Taxes could be raised, but income has remained stagnant while the cost of living has continued to rise, and already at this point are young adults feeling pessimistic about how they will afford housing and daily necessities in the near future, let alone carry the weight of their seniors on their shoulders, let alone create new human beings to crush them inside a financial sandwich breaded by the young and the old.

This, in brief, answers the question, "Why Japan?" if the question is being asked for the sake of understanding why there ought to be any concern for Japanese politics at all. Generally, Japan is compared very positively with the rest of the world, including the United States, and criticism of the country is often disingenuous and misleading, such as fearmongering around Japan's sucicide rate, which is not even an outlier and is in fact overrepresented by elderly suicide (due to a healthcare and pension system that cannot keep up with the aging population) rather than what is typically understood to be a population of young, hopeless boys and girls who dramatically step in front of a moving train or hang themselves in the "Suicide Forest" after failing to conform to a crushingly conformist culture; or, even more frequently, Japan's supposedly draconian work culture where people exhaust themselves to death while working unpaid overtime—criticism often hurled by Americans, who on average work even longer hours than do the Japanese. The problems observed now are not the real problems. Japan is doomed by its politics, but its troubled fate entails a costly storm in the future, the present appearing deceptively calm.

Part II: What about the United States?

Presumably, the more important version of the question in my case is, "Why Japan rather than the United States?" My answer is partly detached and rational, partly personal and illogical. Which means I can now stop writing in a fancy academic style. Thank goodness! I can only brood smartly for so long.

I will premise by saying that I am technically not committed to any particular political path right now, and that in six months or six days my long-term goals may be completely different. This entire website is temporary, and almost everything is up to be tossed out, shoved into a garbage can and rolled down a very large hill, never to be seen again, by me at least, though the residents at the bottom of the hill may possibly have a different perspective. That's actually why I added a "Published so-on-and-so-forth" part to the header of this essay: it may soon have an "Edited so-on-and-so-forth" section as well!

I will post-premise my premise by clarifying that I am, for lack of a better term, an "anti-neoliberal civic education reformist revolutionary." Look, the modernists didn't call themselves "the modernists." We just don't have a word for what I represent yet. But the key aspect of this identity is that I want to bring about a transition from neoliberalism to something new (that involves civic education, as it happens), and I don't exactly care where this happens as long as I can bring it about somewhere. Therefore, I have to weigh my options. Which are essentially somewhere in the United States or somewhere in Japan. (South Korea? Taiwan? France?? Je peux parler un peu de français, je te rappelle.)

Let's start with the rational reasons why I am inclined to travel and reside in Japan at least temporarily, so that I may extend a façade of sophistication for as long as possible.

Japan has one key element of its society that I believe makes it relatively politically volatile and sensitive to the apparent failures of neoliberalism, which is its monoculture, however xenophobic it may or may not be. America has a birth rate crisis, but this problem is covered up by a constant stream of (generally) welcome immigrants (though Chicago's population nevertheless continues to decline). The Japanese, on the other hand, have no particular issue in stating that they don't want a massive, socially-segregated immigrant subpopulation making up a significant portion of their country, which among other wonderful things means that they are constantly paying close and uneasy attention to the dwindling birth rates, rejecting the (de-facto neoliberal) handwave solution that is to merely take advantage of the desperate third-world poor by enriching factories and elderly care centers through their labor. The national crisis felt by many is the potential loss or corruption of intangible cultural elements, even if the population as a whole seems to be relatively unconcerned with the well-being of their hypothetical children or grandchildren as people. This fear of cultural demise is very easy to exploit, politically speaking, though it's an open question whether the youth of today would rather rally for education reform or instead stay home playing video games while being catered to by their overworked parents.

In America, pretty much the only people who dare raise concern over birth rates are right-wing theocrats, whom we can fairly easily brush off as mere representatives of that which is ontologically evil. On the other hand, I suppose the senators and representatives will have to at least pretend to care about the longevity of the American population, so as far as government lobbying is concerned, this issue may still have some relevance.

More personally, but still rationally: a second major advantage of Japan is that it does not have the deranged political culture of America. Again, the American right-wing is a non-starter; even the ostensibly progressive charter school movement has really become a front for theocrats to attempt to gain further control of the education system. One would therefore reasonably assume I would get along swimmingly with the left wing, especially since we apparently both care about the downtrodden and the poor, but I assure you, au contraire, in many ways they are even more impossible to deal with.

The American left wing has become infamous for its bizzarely tribalistic culture of faux virtue; adherents of this culture can be seen sporting Palestinian flags on social media profiles despite knowing less than one word of the Arabic language and even fewer words of the Qur'an, the Hadith, or the Sira, this of course being the present generation who persevered after support for the underdog of the Ukrainian War ceased to be socially profitable and long after of the Black Lives Matter movement faded into obscurity, not to mention the approximately one hundred million dollars that vanished along with it. True leftists, of course, will be quick to correct me by distinguishing themselves from these people, who are actually "liberals," the difference being that one group of people has an impossible political fantasy based on the writings of Karl Marx, while the other derives their fantasy from whatever drivel has most recently appeared on their Tik-Tok feed.

Leftists are partial towards an acute kind of anti-intellectualism that, if their most pious representatives suddenly became our rulers, would quickly result in my imprisonment, exile, or execution, and while the pop politics of the day seldom relate directly to what I myself am devoted to (civic education reform), I nevertheless may never feel at ease when surrounded by these sorts of people. In a cultish way, there are arbitrary rituals one must perform in order to be a part of a leftist in-group, and I personally happen to be allergic to cults, specifically because following arbitrary rituals without question is the very thing I am worst at.

Though I may be exaggerating for comedic effect, the actual biggest issue with the American left is that, as a political identity group, they fundamentally represent vigilante politics, which I am opposed to due to the fact that this approach is (for the most part) mutually exclusive with revolutionary politics. In this way, at the very least I cannot work with leftists as leftists.

The right wing, with the exclusion of the most extreme and grotesque, is actually extremely accommodating in comparison. They are so accommodating, in fact, that if I were to present to a group of church-goers perhaps the worst, most unpragmatic solution to a major political problem ever conceived and then describe my intended means of floundering about while figuring out how to cover up the ineffectiveness of my approach, they would still congratulate me handsomely for daring to be a young person who "actually gives a damn about his country." I'm sure I could have a few right-leaning fans, but I could never work with this group of people who, when not attempting to curb basic democratic freedoms, only ever understands politics to be a spectator sport. And could I ever, really, have even a single moment of mutual understanding with someone who knows nothing but to cruelly mock the poverty and disarray of a people who had only decades before been systematically segregated from the most basic paths towards personal and financial achievement? Now, though, it seems, along with their secret allies of the left wing, this person would be much more comfortable slipping subtle hints about how they detest the Jews and would likely be just as repulsed by my refusal to affirm their racist nonsense.

No, joining the Prohibition Party is not a viable option. Yes, I am just as disappointed as you are.

Part III: America: The Land of Opportunity!

Before I go on to explain the concrete advantages (and, SPOILER ALERT, disadvantages) of Japan, I do need to discuss the opportunities that might end up keeping me in America. Politics is about opportunity, and while American politics might be rife with tomfoolery, there are certainly individuals who have remained untainted by the theatrical morality of the left wing and the, let's say, openly self-serving evil of the right. Or at least, there should be a fairly high quantity of politicians who have grown more than disillusioned with their own impotent political parties. How might I find them?

"Civic Education Reform" is one of my key buzzphrases. (Is it really mine? It is rather generic.) In approaching education reform from the concrete lens of civic politics (as opposed to an ominously non-specific "anti-neoliberalism"), it will likely be fairly easy for me to gain the support of at least a few senators and/or representatives in office once I have written out my fact sheets, pedagogy, sample curricula, and proposed set of standards (that is, once I prove to be more than just a yapper). In Japan, however, the government would strictly speaking be the enemy, and the bureaucrats would detest me, the conservatives in power finding me repugnant. American education politics seem to have some opportunity at the centralized level, where the governmental players are forced to pretend to care about the future, unlike the apolitical masses, who may unapologetically spend their entire lives chasing self-destructive pleasure without having to worry about winning the next election. Lobbying government in America is not quite a fantasy and, especially in certain dire contexts, may prove to be very achievable.

New Orleans is an idea. The circumstances there and in Louisiana in general are deeply depressing, and it would be trivial to suggest improvements to the education system beyond the "Mississippi Miracle," the system so blatantly up in flames that nobody could so much as hint otherwise. The fear of experimentation comes from the fear of having something to lose; in a place like Louisiana, there is pretty much no way to go but up. Most importantly, of course, I like Dixieland Jazz and have long fantasized about one day sailing the Mississippi.

Chicago is the safe and easy choice, since I live there. Our education system too is collapsing, and nobody doubts this to be the case. On the other hand, there are much stronger bureaucratic barriers in Chicago's system of education, and I'm not so sure how viable it would be to propose radical education reform policy in this city. Theoretically, this problem is the raison d'être of charter schools: while bold experimentation within the centralized system is dangerous, schools that are separated from the state standards may individually experiment with new philosophies, methods, approaches, and curricula, and in measuring the outcomes of these experiments, the public system may gradually bring apparently-beneficial novelties into its schools. In other words, charter schools are ultimately meant to put themselves out of business. This is, as it happens, not the will of the people actually funding and supporting the charter school movement. Also, in "measuring outcomes" to compare public and charter school performance, we still use metrics based on the discredited presuppositions of neoliberalism (see What Is Civic Education?).

In terms of populist politics in America, such as launching a grassroots reform movement, I am somewhat at a loss, however. Anecdotally, I have so far met almost zero people who seem to have any real interest in education reform, granting that I haven't yet met up with any politicians or political candidates, either, and most likely will not do so until I have some substantive documents that concretely illustrate my ideas for reform. (An open question! Will I suddenly find myself surrounded by reform activists once I go public with my politics?) There is currently no popular education reform movement, not even a performative education reform movement. All that is relevant today is the quiet continuation of the charter school movement, which, coinciding now with the discrediting of the right wing under Trump, will likely amount to little more than it already has and, I presume, would be nothing more than a hinderance to progress anyway. At this point, the only thing I can imagine on this front is building support for reform as a school teacher by getting acquainted with parents and staff.

But what about the conspicuously relevant "civic education" reform initiatives occuring now in places like Indiana? See What Is Civic Education?.

Part IV: Back to Japan

As I foreshadowed, there are rational, political reasons why I am partial to Japan, and then there are irrational, personal reasons. I will spare you the pain for now and save the worst for last.

I mentioned that the Japanese lack the virtue-signalling culture of America. In fact, the Japanese at large are so unapologetically apolitical that it flips around and almost becomes insulting again. What this means, however, is that the truly political few stick out like a nail—hammers down, everybody, hammers down. And they are for the most part unafflicted by Marxism. I've so far only had a few opportunities to speak with Japanese people, but even so I've found it surprisingly easy to find fairly sophisticated people who tend towards dissident thought and are able to hold conversations about the implications of history on contemporary politics. This could just be a surface-level illusion, I suppose, and the riverbed may not sink very deep, but it has imparted me with a small layer of optimism sitting like dew on top of a mountainous landscape of cynicism.

Japanese conservativism and its physical manifestation as the union composed of the National Diet and the Ministry of Education is the primary, sky-scraping barrier to any kind of meaningful change, 'change' being a dangerous word that causes members of the Liberal Democratic Party to seize and foam at the mouth, the minority politicians hardly faring any better at the sound of it. What's worse is that the Japanese people are overwhelmingly aligned to this conservative outlook, and no matter how many scandals the LDP finds itself entangled in, it still ends up running the government at the end of the day. But where the United States is lacking, I see a faint glow of opportunity illuminating from within the Japanese populace.

If I were to engage in grassroots politics in Japan, it would not look anything like what grassroots activism is stereotyped to look like: massive riots, oceans of protesters flooding the streets, good-for-nothing status-quoians asking for the people to engage in civil disobedience somewhere else, where nobody's commute will be compromised, or where their otherwise quiet day off may not be polluted by the sounds of mass humanity. There is little-to-no populism to be had in Japan; rather, I see potential in the small-scale, incidentally secretive, "underground" approach to politics.

Miraitizu lists (as of writing this) 812 "free schools" in Japan, that is, schools that are separate from the public school system and that primarily serve students who are not able to succeed in the primary school system, often due to some kind of disability. 203 of these free schools are located in Tokyo alone. Long story short, the general sentiment is that it would be better if the students could re-enter the "real" school system, a feeling that actually comes in large part from the students themselves. What this means is that, presumably, founders and staff of free schools would generally be open to the idea of significant reforms that would make it easier for a diverse student population to be accomodated for in the classroom to combat the ever-increasing dropout rates. This would mean potentially hundreds of political supporters with connections to the government located around the country who happen to have publicly available contact information. Crucially, these people are more or less untouched by the American philosophy of converting everything into a for-profit business.

The assumption beyond this point is that I will be able to find more people "on the ground," so to speak, to work with, which is my primary delusional leap of faith. I will become a live music performer who also happens to be working on a 3D animation, and the presumption is that once I out myself as an impassioned creative artist who is very open to working with others, I will find at least a few other people who are interested enough in me or my work to want to collaborate, politics perhaps being incidental. Whether I find accomplices through my political message itself is totally unknowable. There is certainly a small subpopulation of Japanese people who are utterly disillusioned with Japanese neoliberalism and conformist culture, but these people will also be disproportionately mentally ill, and though one massive advantage of Japan is that, unlike America, drug abuse is not a commonplace pastime, this group of people will presumably have a higher addiction rate than any other in the country. This key part of my political strategy is one that I will only be able to evaluate through experience, and if it proves to be completely impossible to find any other genuine dissidents or dissidents-to-be, then that will likely result in my premature return to the United States.

Part V: Down to Business

All that preceeds this section is folly. You could say that the previous part of this essay represents my initial thought process leading to why I ever considered Japan in the first place. The political circumstances of one country versus another are, I would say, the most real factor, and while the American government may be far more suitable for a lobbying campaign than the Japanese Diet, I am utterly unrepresented by any significant political party or even political subculture in either location. The second real factor is defined by the third sector and organizational circumstances, which are, from what I can tell, much more promising in Japan. Both of these elements, however, assume that my goal and ultimate delusion is that I will lead a successful lobbying movement to introduce structurally-supported experimental reforms ultimately leading to the end of the neoliberal system of education and bringing about the beginning of, for lack of a better term, a system of "civic education." I have very little optimism that I could achieve this in either country in any way that counts, however, because there is no obvious route to populism in either case.

I had once assumed that the route to an American populist movement would be higher education reform given that American universities are both outrageously expensive and qualitatively atrocious in terms of education, and perhaps that may still be a pressure point, but hardly anyone seems to care about education as such anymore, and instead a hyperfocus on career prospects has taken over the desire for the preservation of any kind of real intelligentsia (which is precisely the logical conclusion of neoliberalism as a philosophy of education). The remaining problem of costs is, of course, potent, but unless I were to promise cancelling university debt post-hoc, which I definitely would not, then the only adults who would be interested in the movement would be parents, who are an increasingly scarce portion of the population and seldom oriented towards radical politics. Indeed, the problem of money will be the natural cause of collapse anyway; I would merely be taking advantage of the problem to attach my own political philosophy on top of it in the hopes that the people who sympathize with my efforts for the sake of making higher education more affordable and career-effective will, in the swing of things, also support the abstract and social side of my project (the "civic" part of the equation).

My main point is that while of course, lobbying for reform is my theoretical end goal, I have very little hope to achieve it, and even if I were to achieve some level of success in that realm, it still would be unlikely to have a sufficient effect on the culture at large, meaning that I would be forced to rely on all desired cultural shifts occurring over the next generation, who will be the first students to study under a system based on my pedagogy. Suppose I manage to achieve significant, radical civic education reform in New Orleans. This very process could easily take more than a decade, and at this moment the city would be one of the last considerations for parents who are contemplating where they should move so as to provide a good quality of life for their children. The new school system, which would be in some sense inherently elitist as far as civic education is concerned, would be established in a place totally culturally unsuitable and therefore have a very difficult time taking off.

In Japan, it is difficult to think of any city in particular in which I might get involved (directly or indirectly) where there would be sufficient opportunity for structural change, but it would presumably be a small city with a significant youth population that is nevertheless not large enough to be so politically significant; but so too in a place like Munakata, even fairly modest approaches to changing perhaps the most unquestionably failing part of Japanese education, English classes, are extremely difficult to get through the local bureaucracy, which is just as terrified of change as the national players, even when there is essentially no way to go but up. (In this way, Japan is simply not a democracy at all.) There are some places here and there where an elected politician finally decides to enact certain experimental programs, and this may be something important for me to look out for, but these opportunities are riddled with uncertainty and therefore very much less real than most of the factors I covered before.

It should also be said that on a national level, the solution cannot possibly be understood to be a matter of reform individual cities. If one city implements radical reform but the others do not follow, then under the natural closing of the Neoliberal Era the country will still necessarily collapse. The optimistic assumption is that a small city or large town first takes on radical reform, then the nearest major city takes note and applies similar reforms, and finally the Ministry of Education, recognizing the social and pedagogical success of the reforms in this particular urban area, gradually enforces an implementation of the reforms across the country. But even given this optimistic domino-effect outlook, there must be a discourse that first emerges which leads to a major city taking on radical change, followed by the national government. Radical reform must become a hot topic that major politicians start to seriously contemplate as they come up with new policies. National education reform, and therefore a national transition from Neoliberalism into something new, must become the biggest talking point in all of politics such that it would be impossible to watch the news for more than thirty minutes without hearing reference to the discussion at least once. The concrete, pragmatic assumption is that my role must be to bring about systemic change through lobbying; it is something measurable and, to some degree, plannable. The truth is that my role will be to do whatever I can to bring the idea of radical civic education reform into the public mind, which may mean that I myself end up doing no lobbying at all.

For this reason, I came to the conclusion that I must engage in cultural influence through media creation.

When I was a teenager, I was dastardly enough to think that I would one day publish a culturally significant video game. For this reason I started figuring out how to compose a soundtrack, which led me deep into the art of music. I grew out of the video game idea (as a video game is not an ideal medium for politics, I would say), but I was still committed to music. There was a time when I assumed I would turn music into a career, but I soon discovered that this would be an impossible route because the music industry is dead. Nevertheless, I still had (have) so many musical ideas that I wanted (want) to make real, and I also had a combination of programming and 3D art experience that I was (and still am) itching to put to use. In other words, I'm telling you that I am a selfish, self-indulgent fool who wants to pursue my childhood dreams. The good news is that I'm also a political radical and these dreams just so happen to involve starting a political movement. (I will still write fact sheets, a book(let?) on pedagogy, sample curricula, and a draft set of standards, plus their Japanese counterparts, while also attempting boots-on-the-ground organization and, potentially, actual lobbying. Selfless, sufferous busywork still no doubt awaits me in the near future.)

Part VI: Futuko and the Refrain: Why Japan?

The actual answer to the question, "Why Japan," is actually extremely underwhelming and unimpressive, whether or not the outstandingly brilliant and well-thought-out first chunk of this essay suggests otherwise. The long-term drafting of excuses makes any man professionally persuasive. Naturally, there must have been some sort of impetus for me to look into Japan to begin with (as opposed to, say, Uzbekistan), long before I knew of its (real and potential) political advantages.

When I was an actual toddler, I became infatuated with Chinese characters due to spending too much time playing with Google Translate. Long story short, this ultimately led to several decisions to learn Japanese and Chinese. When I was homeschooled in 9th grade, I tried teaching myself Japanese but failed spectacularly since I knew nothing about linguistics. (Why Japanese? Besides the kanji, my linguistic revival just so happened to coincide with my junior high anime phase.) After that I entered into away school and they had no Japanese program, only Chinese. I decided to resurrect my interest in the Chinese language and quickly learned far more than the entire three years worth of course content offered to me by the school, which was based on the correct assumption that almost all of the students taking Chinese had zero interest in the language beyond the fact that it was a mandatory part of the curriculum. I eventually became a language nerd and tried learning just about every language in existence, and I ended up sticking with Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish (the humble addition).

I became interested in the Sinosphere and contemplated living in Taiwan but eventually concluded that there was no future to be had in that country. I had a Vietnam phase where I was seriously contemplating getting involved in humanitarian work in the northern part of the country, where there is an active human trafficking operation that results in impoverished rural women being kidnapped and sold as forced brides. Unfortunately (and extremely predictably), Vietnam proved to be an impossible venture. Mainland China was out of the question for perhaps similarly obvious reasons. Korea was an option, too. Am I forgetting something?

My Japanese is workable and my Korean is not. I will eventually be able to speak Korean to an acceptable degree, but that time is eventually and not now. I don't know as much about Korean politics, but I don't believe there is any advantage in attempting to organize there than in Japan. Correct me if I'm wrong. There was a period of time in the recent past where I was holding South Korea in one hand and Japan on the other and seeing which country would tip the scale, and Japan came out victorious. So I started researching the politics of Japanese education, the third sector, etc. and recognized an advantage.

The most humiliating part of the story that I left out until now is that I was, for quite a while, a strange combination of Epicurean and American Transcendentalist and assumed that I would live in the woods. I only became devoted to politics within the past two years or so. In being interested in the Sinosphere and looking dejectedly at housing costs in America, I too fell victim to the allure of the akiya. Unlike in Japan, dilapidated rural houses in Korea retain their value and remain horribly costly (granting that, as the days pass, there are more and more opportunities to strike a deal with an old man who suddenly finds himself needing to sell his house quickly due to liver failure, which requires expensive emergency medical care). So I gravitated towards Japan and started planning for a future in that country, political or otherwise. In conclusion, while my goals are now unapologetically political, in the past they were only partially political (I had a vague idea that I would somehow be involved in English education reform or in starting a private school or something, but only so very vaguely, while my main concern was in figuring out how I would otherwise live a maximal distance away from other human beings).

It was also during this quasi-political time of my life that I first came up with the idea of 不登校 futōkō, or 'Dropout', the story that I am currently intending to turn into an animation. Because I was thinking of eventually living in Japan, I thought of a story that takes place within the Japanese education system, which at that point I had already developed a strong distaste for as I learned about its inner failings. As the idea became more fleshed-out and detailed in my mind and the characters once novel became canon figures in my head, I grew so attached to the (admittedly genius) story and the protagonists that I became compelled to tell it one way or another.

Part VII: Futoko Explained

Futoko is, in the most abstract sense, a story about the inevitable collapse of Neoliberalism and the ways in which the education system is at the heart of this collapse. It deals directly with the failures of the Japanese education system in both the short and the long term as well as the unsustainability of Neoliberal ways of life on family building and the economy in Japan while also comparing Japan to the United States, discussing the ways in which the American model will ultimately lead to the collapse of the First World. It will also be targeted especially towards teenagers, so this is not exactly the summary that will be printed on the back of the DVD case.

There are certain very tangible advantages to this story taking place in Japan as opposed to the United States. Perhaps the most significant is that it allows me to write a character (Dove) who is deeply knowledgeable about Western, especially American, history and politics and who is able to apply her newly-obtained foreign perspective to her environment when those around her, being so much more culturally incubated, simply take their circumstances for granted. A Japanese audience will be forced to understand their own country from a critical perspective, and an American audience will be forced to do the same. In this regard Osprey is Dove's foil, as she leans into the Japanese system rather than moving away from it. As Dove and Osprey live life, they are forced to re-examine their once optimistic outlooks, Dove having been naively attached to a highly individualistic and asocial understanding of life influenced by American Transcendentalism and Osprey having been blindly pursuing success as narrowly defined by Neoliberal standards. The relationship between the two characters then represents a broader dialogue in which one side is radically anti-Neoliberal and the other is in favor of the status quo.

A key factor is that unlike in the United States, in Japan the people broadly believe in their system of education since it is not so horribly failing in the immediate sense. In this way the story provides a "steel-man" position of the Neoliberal status quo by presenting a system that appears on the surface to be highly functional, meaning that the ultimate penetrating criticisms of the Japanese system hold just the same weight as though they were targeted towards the American system, or any other Neoliberal education system in the world.

A Japanese setting also provides me with a unique opportunity to deal with issues of philosophy, religion, and theology outside the context of American semi-Christian semi-secularism. Pheasant is a minority Japanese Christian who in this way acts as another foil to Dove, who is an atheist. However, as a distinct minority, Pheasant's philosophical role in the story is important because her religious point of view cannot be taken for granted either as that of an oppressive religious majority or that of a reasonable minority. Pheasant has to contend with the fact that the rest of her country takes for granted the evidential truth of atheism and is forced to promote her faith as an intellectual "underdog," so to speak. Crucially, this happens because of the antagonism of Dove, which leads to the two participating in years of discussions, research, and study on the topic, resulting in Dove studying and describing the history of Ancient Israel and early Christianity.

In this sense the Dove-Pheasant dichotomy is one of historical ignorance versus knowledge (allowing for a lot of straightforward historical edutainment!), but the religious versus atheist dichotomy also allows me to naturally introduce the problem of the amoral nature of secular education into the plot as Dove has to reconcile with the fact that the Japanese system of secular education has conspicuously extracted direct moral teachings from the curriculum as would be relevant to civic education, resulting in a student population with little sense of civic duty and therefore an overall lack of concern about the fate of their country (and this discussion happens outside of a cultural context wherein a significant portion of the national population assumes that the answer to the problem is explicitly religious education). Dove learns about the religious history of American education as well as the fascistic history of Meiji Era education, and throughout their discussions on these matters, Dove and Pheasant are able to come up with a system of moral (civic) education that is original and distinct from both the religious and militaristic traditions of the past.

The other main character, Raven, presents Dove with a final dichotomy, that of life in the woods versus life in the city (that is, political society), or as the story presents it, a retelling of Cicero against the Epicureans, where Cicero in The Laws asks the audience to "beseech them [the Epicureans] to do their talking in their little gardens, and let us ask them to retire a little from the society of the Republic, about which they neither know anything nor want to know anything." Raven's subplot presents an immediate moral crisis caused in part by a failure of the education system to support her and also in part by, more importantly and more significantly, the anti-social aspects innate to Neoliberalism (which happen to be hyperprevalent in Japanese society while also being separate from social ills caused by poverty and drug addition, as seen in America) as it pervades culture at large, and this crisis forces Dove to recognize the degree to which her desire to flee from a society in which she does not fit merely perpetuates the cruelty and injustice that made her culture so detestable in her eyes to begin with.

As an additional point, I found the history of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement of the Meiji Period to be a great source of historical inspiration and a strong basis for detailing what a fundamentally pro-democracy movement looked like in the past, which is important because the "civic education reform movement" will fundamentally be a fight to rejuvenate a hibernating quasi-democracy. (Keep in mind that the "democracy" formed around the time of the American Revolution was really a creation by the elite aristocrats of the colony, and the extent to which it was in some ways explicitly anti-democracy must be made clear.)

To many, my brief overview of Futoko may sound a touch too complex, erudite, or just downright boring (although I myself am jumping for joy at the sound of it all), but in the end all of this complexity will be wrapped up in what is ultimately a silly, quirky, and sentimental coming of age story about a cast of eccentric characters who struggle to discover how they ought to live within a society that was not built for them or their generation, dealing as well with issues like bullying and family trauma, and I think that many people, young and old, will be able to find much to relate to and be moved by, and they may even stick around long enough to absorb the political messages that the story is really all about.

So that's that.