The Journal of Japanese Studies

In their new book on Japanese preschools, Akiko Hayashi and Joseph Tobin pose this broad question: "How do Japanese preschools serve as sites where [End Page 499] Japanese children learn to be Japanese?" (p. 13). Their provocative answer: Japanese children learn through exposure to implicit forms of pedagogy that precede rather than follow teachers' cognition and intentionality. Building from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the authors argue that preschool teaching in Japan arises from "habitus, intuition, and emergency" rather than "policy, orthodoxy, or plan" (p. 4). They bolster these assertions with an analysis of the nonlinguistic and intuitive elements of pedagogical practice, particularly the tacit, embodied ways in which teachers communicate emotion, information, and guidance to children in the classroom.

To capture teachers' "techniques of the body," the authors drew upon video footage taken on a "typical" day in several Japanese preschools as well as interviews with teachers who had viewed selected clips of the footage. Many readers may be familiar with this data from earlier writing about the Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited study.¹ For the present volume, the authors also conducted follow-up interviews with several of the original informants, who commented again on the original videos as well as new ones and screen shots created from uncut footage. In addition, the authors created a stimulus video from new footage taken in a private preschool serving deaf children and showed it to teachers from public preschools serving deaf children.

Besides drawing from the work of Bourdieu, Hayashi and Tobin support their contention that Japanese teachers are guided by "bodily habitus" by referencing Rand Spiro's notion that practitioners in "ill-structured domains" like education and medicine rely on a flexible, intuitive "feel for the game" rather than a set of explicit rules. A third theoretical strand derives from the work of Erving Goffman, whose ideas about synchronicity or "intercorporeality" the authors use to describe how teachers employ embodied teaching while also supporting children's developing and embodied social practices. These various theoretical strands re-emerge frequently throughout the book and help to scaffold the authors' analyses and deepen their interpretations.

Several chapters in the book are organized around the presentation of particular ways that teachers use their bodies as they support children's growing skills in becoming skillful participants in navigating the social world of the classroom. The authors focus particularly on the notion of "mimamoru," a Japanese term meaning to stand guard or watch over from a distance. Hayashi and Tobin characterize "mimamoru" as an implicit construct in the sense that it is recognized by teachers but rarely discussed, whereas the embodied techniques used to perform this practice are described as tacit because they are essentially operating outside of consciousness (p. 9). [End Page 500] The cultural practice of "mimamoru" comes to life in several videotaped scenes, one of them capturing an incident in which a teacher allows several girls to engage in a prolonged and emotional physical fight over a stuffed teddy bear. In earlier work,² this video drew negative comments from non-Japanese teachers who judged the teacher as insufficiently alert to the evident distress of one girl involved in the dispute. In their extended analysis in the current volume, Hayashi and Tobin describe the various physical movements the teacher used to let the children know she was aware of what was happening but expecting them to resolve the dispute on their own. Thus, they provide an anatomy of "mimamoru."

The concept of "mimamoru" is developed further in a chapter on the changes in practice that occur as teachers move from the status of novice to that of expert. The central finding in this chapter is that the veteran teachers believed they were able to engage in more skillful "mimamoru" than were novices because they were relatively less self-preoccupied and anxious, enabling them to be sensitive to children's needs to...