Playing House with a 6-Year-Old Girl

Last week I spent three days at a local kindergarten. Although my focus was on preschoolers’ cognitions of Japan and foreign countries, I encountered one fascinating episode that could reveal the development of domain differentiation among them.

E: “Hiro, let’s play house. I am mother. You are father.”
H: “Sure.”
(E kisses my right cheek.)
E: “Okay, we are married now!”
(E puts a doll in between her belly and shirt.)
E: “I am going to have a baby. We will need an operation!”
(E then asks the other girl S to operate on her.)
H: “But, I think a baby can be born without an operation.”
E: “No, no. We need an operation.”
(E starts giving S instructions. S then uses toy knives and folks as surgical instruments.)
E: “Oh, a baby is born!
(E exclaims as she brings the doll out of her shirt.)
S: “Let’s give the baby milk.”
(S tries to hand a toy bottle of milk to E. But E refuses it.)
E: “No, the baby cannot drink it yet. I must breastfeed her.”
And so on.

As I have observed 2nd and 6th graders, I suspect that differentiation between social and biological domains occurs earlier among girls than boys. My hypothesis is that girls’ plays (like the house play above) tend to incorporate social and biological themes more often than boys’ plays and therefore encourage girls to develop cognition to differentiate and coordinate social and biological domains in human life.

Exploring the Town on Bike

Today I rode a bike to explore my hometown. In the south part of the town, they are constructing many new houses. In fact, one neighborhood located between the elementary and junior-high schools has changed almost beyond recognition since my old days. There used to be a lot of rice fields, but it’s now full of houses and apartments. The material-mnemonic environment has been re-organized to the extent that I was spatially disoriented and had to ask myself “Is this really the same place where I used to play with my friends?”

As I was riding my bike, however, I did find some houses, streets, and landmarks (e.g., temples) that have not much changed. Although I am not as fond of childhood memories as Proust, I indulged myself for a few moments in memories of my childhood when time seemed to me to flow so slowly—almost stand still—and I couldn’t imagine that I would ever get old.

I shall continue my exploration. Indeed, I should have started this as soon as I got here, to grasp a spatio-temporal matrix in which daily lives of children unfold in this town.

Watching TV during Fieldwork

When I was in Ann Arbor, I didn’t watch TV at all. Since I came here two months ago, however, I have been watching TV for a couple of hours every day. At first, I started watching evening news with my father. Then, I added to my routine a few TV programs on Sunday. One of them is a live-broadcasting of debates among politicians on various political issues. It’s interesting (and, more often than not, frustrating) to watch Japanese politicians engaging in heated discussion on North Korea, China, the UN, and so on.

Another is NHK’s “Junior Special,” a social-studies kind of educational program for elementary school students. Actually, this program is not very good. I can see that the program aims to help kids develop a set of cognitive skills to answer why certain social phenomena are happening (or happened) by critically examining multiple variables and mechanisms, which the Japanese are said to be lacking due to the educational system that pushes students to memorization of facts. Nonetheless, in-program activities are not well organized to help the child actors investigate problems through logical and hypothetical reasoning. I often fail to see clear and cogent connections between problems, hints that the kids receive from adults, and answers that the adults tell them at the end. That is, they tend to stop at providing the kids with pieces of information and are not very successful in facilitating cognitive processes required to solve problems through coherent reasoning based on those facts that they could easily look up in the internet or encyclopedia. I don’t think NHK’s programs for learning English are very good, either, but it will take another blog entry to do justice to this topic.

Anyway, I think TV programs and ads can be useful data in understanding Japanese society and culture.

A Publishing Machine

I have conceived another two possible paper topics. One can be titled “The Importance of Fieldwork for Cultural Psychologists.” In this paper I will illustrate how fieldwork can help cultural psychologists understand the interrelationship between the social-semiotic environment and the development of human mind. Another can be called “Toward a Pedagogic Psychology.” This paper will extend the Vygotskyan paradigm, to use experiments as occasions to facilitate subjects’ cognitive development. For example, after I collected completed surveys from junior high school students, I explained to them what cognitive skills they might have developed by answering questions. Indeed, I don’t want to run experiments, interviews, or surveys from which subjects do not benefit more than financially. I guess it’s easier for me to devise “educational questionnaires” because I study human development. It may well be simply impossible for people in other fields to devise such questions.

Okay, enough papers for psychology journals! What about sociology? (I’m a sociologist after all.) Well, I can write something like “Generational Dynamics in the Nation.” Even though my current research is concerned with ontogenesis, I cannot fail to notice generational differences in Japanese people’s attitudes toward Japan and other countries. For instance, differences between 2nd graders and college seniors are not simply developmental but also generational. (But, alas, my research design does not allow me to distinguish the two.) I think it would be interesting to bring back this generational aspect into theories of nation and society.

Anyway, I have found that people tend to find it more difficult to think about “Japanese people” than about “Japan.”

Significance: Statistical, Theoretical, Social

The best thing about "homecoming" this time is that it is giving me hints to become a socially relevant academic in the future. While I was in Ann Arbor, Iwas isolated from "real" people. Here I am surrounded by teachers, administrators, workers, parents, children, and all those non-academic human beings who engage in hard, sweaty, and mundane activities. By interacting with them on a daily basis, I can somehow feel the workings of social forces, whereas in the U.S. I only theorized them inside of the university.... I think it is education and human development where I can connect my academicwork to "real" people's concerns.

The Feeling of Indebtedness

I don’t think this is particularly Japanese, but I feel indebted to many people one of these days: teachers and professors who let me observe their classes and help me carry out surveys with students as well as students themselves who take the surveys seriously and are willing to talk with me when they have time. Without their generosity, my research is impossible…so I hope I will be able to do something for them in return.

As results of surveys start rolling in, I cannot help entertaining possible publications. One of them is on domain specificity of human cognition. (A tentative title for this paper is “What is Domain Specificity Good for?”) While I tend to agree with psychologists who argue for domain-specific cognitive development, I have come to suspect that a hallmark of human cognition is development of capability to coordinate domain-specific knowledges so as to solve complex problems in real life. And I believe that children are precocious in developing this “interdisciplinary” cognition.