She believes in school as a way to secure a job and a future. There is no suspicion of anti-education culture in their household or neighborhood, and his mother fully expects Tomo to graduate and get a job. Like many working-class youths who end up at Musashino, Tomo is somewhat bewildered at how he got to this place or where to go from here. She mumbles something, but in fact, she does not know what sort of work Tomo’s father is doing these days because, after he was laid off from what was a temporary job anyway, he has not lived with them for many months. Tomo’s reply to his mother is a sarcastic indictment: “You mean, so I can get a job like Dad?” The teacher asks Tomo’s mother about her husband’s job at the discount electrical shop in the area. The teacher turns to Tomo, who replies deadpan: “Didn’t you know? Everyone has quit because all the teacher wants to do is drill.” (This is true-the baseball team does not have enough players to field a team.) His mother has reassured him that if he would just come to school, he could graduate and then maybe play baseball when he gets a job. His mother asks his teacher about his participation in the baseball team, a widely accepted index of school integration, especially for a student struggling academically. He points out that there are almost three smoking cases a day at this school, so his getting caught only twice in the first year is not so bad, “on the mathematical average.” While bright, at Musashino High Tomo has stopped following most of the lessons and is beginning to think that maybe he is not “cut out for” school. His tone varies from simmering resentment to feigned unconcern. He has been caught smoking twice before and suspended once for half a day.
Now, having failed to get into any school other than Musashino, he is in school but demoralized. Tomo was very involved in his middle school homeroom and club activities, at least until the end.
Tomo's mother is pleading with her son's teacher, trying to do what she can to keep her son in high school despite his having been caught smoking, again. The final part traces these young people's trajectories into the bottom rungs of the service labor market and into their new status as "freeter." Part III focuses on the sorts of orientations, goals, and strategies that characterize school culture at Musashino High, a place where working-class culture takes institutionalized form through practice. Part II focuses on the ways different class groups navigate the transition from middle to high school. Part I of sketches how class and culture are interrelated within the context of Japanese secondary education. These are features that they share with many working-class youth all over Japan, especially in the urban areas where public schools are more finely ranked and the labor market is larger, but also more unstable and precarious. Two snapshots from those first years illustrate some features of family background, survival strategies, and career trajectories. I have known them since the early 1990's, when I began working at their school. Tomo was a first-year and Keiko a third-year student at Musashino Metropolitan High School, 1 a working-class high school in western Tokyo. Introduction: The "New Working Class" of Urban Japan For a brief outline of the book's arguments, please see Note 1A at the end of the article. This article is a modified and developed version of a chapter from Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Socialization and Strategies, edited by Ishida Hiroshi and David H. The Making of Japan's New Working Class: "Freeters" and the Progression From Middle School to the Labor Market
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