Japanese conservatives are pushing traditional ethics in schools:
The 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education and prewar ethics education are the bases for the new guidelines, which publishers are now incorporating into textbooks. The books will be used in new ethics classes to be taught in elementary and middle school starting in 2018 after a period of public comment and government approval.
Mr. Abe’s initiative is welcomed by many Japanese who see a link between the Western emphasis on personal freedom and a moral decay they say is afflicting the country’s youth, as seen in rising cases of bullying, juvenile delinquency and classroom disorder.
“Teachers and students have become equals, resulting in loss of authority in the classroom,” said Shigeki Kaizuka, professor at Musashino University and a leading advocate of ethics education. “The classroom has been reduced to a jungle, creating room for bullying.”
The ideological principle at the root of the Emperor’s authority was the concept of Kokutai which was a means to organize Japanese society, but it eventually turned into religion of the military state. The ‘National Body’ was a metaphor with the Emperor at the head, the armed forces the limbs, and women the womb.
Parents were supposed to have children not for themselves but for the state, the war effort, and ultimately the state’s head, the Emperor. Conformity was to be attained through discarding individuality and emotional interactions, and submitting one’s physical interactions to imperial subjugation.
Sometimes overlooked was how the post-war American occupation brought a sort of sexual revolution that the long repressed Japanese readily embraced. This is perhaps the chimerical ‘Mouse that Roared’ logic behind the ‘Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy‘ expectations of American power.
Interesting. I think all of that rescript’s precepts would have been baseline assumptions in the US of that same era, or UK. Even that last one, if it hadn’t been phrased quite that way. If he had said country, republic, union…