Redefining the Crisis on Childhood – Investigation through Amending of the Juvenile Act (1949) in Japan from the 1990s into the Next Century
type: CreativeWork
description: Childhood presents various images associated with words such as ephemerality, vulnerability, innocence, extraordinariness, immaturity, growth, energy, and hopefulness; yet childhood is an invented concept, which does not provide concrete or fixed implications of what a child is or what the being of a child is. Age is set as a rough standard for the adult- child distinction in legal systems. In Japan, the idea of childhood has been discussed with the age of adulthood in the civil code and juvenile law after 2000. The legal age of adulthood had been 20 for almost 150 years. In the civil code, the voting age was lowered from 20 to 18 in 2015. In 2018, the legal age of adulthood was also decided to be lowered from 20 to 18, and that change will take effect in 2022. Lowering the age of criminal responsibility has been discussed in the juvenile law, called the Juvenile Act in Japan, and it is an ongoing area of debate in the Legislative Council of the Ministry of Justice. Discussions in Japan relating to juveniles under the legal system intensified in the 1990s after two juvenile-related events and one phenomenon took place. Since then, several laws have been amended in response to public reaction. Some amendments of juvenile law led to a more penal stance, because punitive intervention is thought to be a criminal deterrence and appropriate treatment for juvenile delinquents. Although there was no scientific evidence to confirm that more severe punishment functions as criminal deterrence, the public positively supported the legal changes to juvenile law, and the media, where the term “self-responsibility” repeatedly resounded, contributed significantly to this atmosphere. The idea of “self-responsibility” emerged after 2000 in Japan, and it became a popular term often heard in discussions of social problems. “Self-effort” also became heavily assessed in parallel; poverty is assumed to be the result of a lack of self-effort, for instance. Japanese author and ex-diplomat Ma…
abstract: Childhood presents various images associated with words such as ephemerality, vulnerability, innocence, extraordinariness, immaturity, growth, energy, and hopefulness; yet childhood is an invented concept, which does not provide concrete or fixed implications of what a child is or what the being of a child is. Age is set as a rough standard for the adult- child distinction in legal systems. In Japan, the idea of childhood has been discussed with the age of adulthood in the civil code and juvenile law after 2000. The legal age of adulthood had been 20 for almost 150 years. In the civil code, the voting age was lowered from 20 to 18 in 2015. In 2018, the legal age of adulthood was also decided to be lowered from 20 to 18, and that change will take effect in 2022. Lowering the age of criminal responsibility has been discussed in the juvenile law, called the Juvenile Act in Japan, and it is an ongoing area of debate in the Legislative Council of the Ministry of Justice. Discussions in Japan relating to juveniles under the legal system intensified in the 1990s after two juvenile-related events and one phenomenon took place. Since then, several laws have been amended in response to public reaction. Some amendments of juvenile law led to a more penal stance, because punitive intervention is thought to be a criminal deterrence and appropriate treatment for juvenile delinquents. Although there was no scientific evidence to confirm that more severe punishment functions as criminal deterrence, the public positively supported the legal changes to juvenile law, and the media, where the term “self-responsibility” repeatedly resounded, contributed significantly to this atmosphere. The idea of “self-responsibility” emerged after 2000 in Japan, and it became a popular term often heard in discussions of social problems. “Self-effort” also became heavily assessed in parallel; poverty is assumed to be the result of a lack of self-effort, for instance. Japanese author and ex-diplomat Ma…
author: Udagawa, Yoshie
keywords: Japan, Juvenile Delinquency, Law, Media Representation, Public Perception, Social Control
date published: 2020-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:39:50Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University