|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
I finished reading "The Material Child" by Merry White not too long ago. Essentially, the book is a sociological study on teenagers from the US and Japan (period of the early 1990s). It's a very interesting read and opened my eyes a little to the cultural trends in Japan that I wasn't aware about before.
Perhaps, the two chapters that caught my attention the most were the ones on school and the one on sex [no comments please]. The reason were the statistics given. In the school chapter, I believe the average time per week spent on homework in the US is 3.8 hours while in Japan, it was something like 19.4 h. These numbers I found stunning for the simple reason that I didn't see how one could only spend 3.8 hours a week on homework. I remember spending enormous amounts of time on homework and studying in high school...exceeding the Japanese average by quite a few hours.
As for the chapter on sexual relations, again the numbers stunned me. In this case, they were much higher than I would have thought (both in the US and Japan). I was basing my original thinking on what I believed was happening in Canada (which shares a good deal of similarities to the US). However, these facts made me shift my thinking a lot which is probably a good thing in the long run.
The book's title is derived from the theme that companies and consumerism play a strong role in youth today. However, attention is paid to the greater discrepency in purchasing power among teens in Japan; some families can't afford the designer clothing...but their parents are willing to go into debt so as to help their children fit in.
Second last thing I wanted to note was there was an interesting discussion of the Japanese system to teach relationships; there is some difference in the goals of friends and what not that gets a good deal of attention.
The final conclusion is that although there are some differences between Japanese and American teens, they are more similar than one might think.
I don't have the publication information around right now (though I can get it easily)...there's an interesting appendix on Junior High rules at the back of the book...much different than what most of us faced.
Copyright ©2001
Stephen Congly
|