Recently, the claim that children in Japan are now in crisis and have become dangerous appeals to public opinion. Although the discourse of childhood in the mass media depicts varying and contradictory images of childhood, public images of childhood in general seem to share the as sumption that Japanese children have greatly changed through the past several decades. But is such an assumption true? And if so, how and why have Japanese children changed?
This paper firstly examines how to engage in sociological research on children in changing society without any distortion derived from popularized images of childhood and children. I identify four areas of study: children's consciousness and behaviour, their factors of change, adults' perspectives on children and their factors of change. We must put together many empirical studies which specifically focus on topics within one of these four areas.
Secondly through an investigation of how popular images and the discourses of ‘child at risk’ and ‘dangerous child’ have changed since 1945, this paper illustrates that the dominant representation of childhood has been deeply linked to political agendas. That is to say, until the mid-1970s both ‘the child at risk’ and ‘the dangerous child’ had been depicted. as children who needed protection/correction by the state, and consequently reflected promotion of welfare state policy and the dominance of government service over the people. Since the mid-1980s several new political factors have attacked the protection/correction policy. The children's rights movement and postmodernists have begun to proclaim that children had been discriminated against by adults under the needless protection/correction system. In addition, the New Right has portrayed young offenders as evil, and fiercely attacked the protection/correction system of the past.
To conclude, sociologists of education who try to study children in contemporary society need to apply multiple perspectives in order to examines the four areas concerning the question if and why children have changed these several decades. Moreover, sociologists must pay attention to contemporary political debates which redefine the notions of childhood and adult-child relationships.