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The purpose of this study was to examine the associations between different types of screen behavior and depression, taking into account exercise and sleep among children and adolescents. A total of 23,573 Japanese children and adolescents (aged 8–15 years) participated in this cross-sectional study. Different types of screen behavior, weekly exercise time, sleep duration, and prevalence of depression were assessed using a questionnaire. Independent associations between various types of screen behavior and prevalence of depression were examined using logistic regression analyses after adjusting for age, school, sleep duration, exercise time, and other screen behavior types. A two-way analysis of covariance was conducted to examine whether exercise and sleep can attenuate the negative effects of screen behavior. The associations between screen behavior and depression varied by screen behavior types and participant characteristics. More time spent engaging in newer types of screen behavior, including social media, online games, and online videos, was associated with a higher prevalence of depression. In contrast, more time spent on TV was associated with a lower prevalence of depression. Sufficient exercise can lower the prevalence of depression, regardless of the length of time and content of the screen, and its associations were particularly significant for junior high school girls. Sleep was not associated with the prevalence of depression among any participant group except elementary school boys. Our findings suggest that age- and sex-specific intervention strategies that also consider screen-based behavior can effectively lower the risk of depression in children and adolescents.
The kogal phenomenon has never represented a majority of teenage girls. Rather, it largely symbolizes the evolution of the role of women in capitalist Japan. As such, the kogal style rejects not only traditional gender roles but the spirit of nationalism, seeking to embody stateless consumerism. This consumerism is communicated through knock-off designer goods, trips to photo booths, singing karaoke, partying, the use of love hotels, and incorporating new loanwords into everyday speech. Kogals also take a more liberal approach to sexual activity, employing more risque language or referring openly to sex. Kogal hedonism and impolite language serve to assert self-hood of young Japanese women. Kogals’ expertise in criticizing men, particularly older men, demonstrates their revolt against traditional gender norms. Kogal publications like
During a recent visit to Osaka, Japan, I visited one of my favourite haunts, Junkudo bookshop. Waiting in line at the checkout, I looked at the displays above the cashiers, usually reserved for Japanese popular fiction. This time I was surprised to see rows of young girls in bikinis, all soft focus and dewy eyed, staring down at me. The caption at the bottom of these books read AKB48. AKB48 are Japan’s most popular all-female pop group.
One was aimed at the pre-adolescent girl market. AKB48 graced the covers of magazines, advertised sweets and a myriad other “pre-teen” products and were even featured in video-games. The other market appeared to be directed at an older male audience. This was who the soft-porn books at Junkudo were aimed at. This incarnation of the group relied on the girls’ “sexy” image and played on popular Japanese sexual stereotypes, particularly the “sexy schoolgirl”. A recent campaign for Wonda instant coffeE featured AKB48 members, legs splayed and wearing thigh high boots with super short school uniforms,
In January, I was outlining an article I hoped to write about a recent judgment by a South Korean court ordering Japan to pay compensation for atrocities committed during the Second World War against “comfort women,” women and girls who were transported to war-front “comfort stations” to provide sexual services to soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army. The women were taken by force or entrapped by deception in many countries in and beyond Asia, but a large number came from Korea, which, at the time, was a colony of Japan. Estimates of the number of victims have ranged widely, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. On January 23rd, Japan announced that the Korean court’s judgment, which ordered a compensation of ninety-one thousand and eight hundred dollars to be paid to each of the twelve Korean comfort women who were plaintiffs in the case (seven of whom had died since it was filed, in 2013), was “extremely regrettable and absolutely unacceptable.” Japan said that it was not subject to Korea’s jurisdiction and considered the matter to have been previously settled. I was ruminating on how legal decisions relating to Second World War crimes against humanity might help resolve or aggravate historical traumas that seem impossible to leave in the past—in part, because they have been mired in waves of conflict and denial about the truth of what happened.
The news of Ramseyer’s article had been reported favorably in Japan, and then made its way to Korea and across the globe. It was a controversy that was not merely academic but that could potentially affect the troubled diplomatic relations between Japan and Korea, and also the delicate role played by the United States as their mutual ally. In the U.S., two members of Congress tweeted that Ramseyer’s claims were “disgusting,” and the State Department affirmed that “the trafficking of women for sexual purposes by the Japanese military during World War II was an egregious violation of human rights.” I understood that messages about Ramseyer were being sent to me, specifically, because I was the first Asian-American woman, and the first and only ethnic Korean, to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. I was born in Seoul, and my parents were refugees from their ancestral home, in North Korea, during the Korean War. At least one alumnus wrote to say that, because of my position, ethnicity, feminism, and writing on matters of justice, my silence was “complicity.”
After I spent time digesting my colleague’s reasoning, I spoke with him to say that we were about to have a public disagreement, but that I would not be joining or encouraging any possible calls for institutional penalty for his exercise of academic freedom to engage in scholarship or express his opinion. I posted a brief critique of Ramseyer’s arguments on social media, explaining that contract analysis assumes voluntary bargaining by free agents, and that when sex is mandatory, without the option to refuse or walk away, it cannot fairly be described as contractual. I was confident that he would not have described it as such if he believed comfort women’s accounts of having been conscripted and confined by force, threats, deception, and coercion. It seemed to me that his view reflected a prior choice not to credit those accounts because he deemed them inconsistent, or, as he wrote, “self-interested” and “uncorroborated.” I noticed, however, that he did choose to credit Japanese government denials, even where they contradicted other statements by the government. Trying to read my colleague’s work most generously, I thought his views might be a product of a skepticism of generally accepted wisdom that had informed his academic career. I approached the matter in the vein of criticism and disagreement over facts, logic, and interpretation, regarding a subject that triggered strong emotions around nationalism and human rights. I expected that scholars, by delving into Ramseyer’s research, would be able to further assess the accuracy of his claims; I could not have imagined how straightforward and yet how mystifying that work would prove to be.
Despite how easy it may be to reduce the issue to a conflict between Korea and Japan, victim and perpetrator, or women and men, historians have carefully explored the features and meanings of the comfort-women system, which involved several hundred comfort stations in war-torn Asia, individuals of many nationalities, and myriad experiences. Scholars have debated the precise role that the Japanese military played, along with private recruiters, in procuring the women. In South Korea, reckoning with the role of native recruiters in entrapping fellow-Koreans, and with impoverished families in allowing their girls to be taken, has been difficult, to say the least. There have been debates about whether the phrase “sex slavery,” given its common associations with chattel slavery, best captures the non-chattel situation of abuse and rape in brutal confinement. Over decades, historians have determined that there was a range of force or coercion used against comfort women, but that violence and threats were endemic. By contrast, Ramseyer’s statements seemed intent on flattening the complexity down to a plain denial: Korean comfort women went to the war front as voluntary prostitutes.
Meanwhile, in South Korea, resentment about Japan’s attempts to downplay its responsibility had been building, sometimes hardening into intolerance of anything short of a purist story of the Japanese military kidnapping Korean virgins for sex slavery at gunpoint. In 2015, a Korean academic named Park Yu-ha was sued civilly by comfort women for defamation, and criminally indicted by Korean prosecutors, for the publication of a book that explored the role of Koreans in recruiting the women and the loving relationships that some comfort women developed with Japanese soldiers while they were confined in a “slavelike condition.” The book did not, as some have claimed, absolve Japan of responsibility or deny the comfort women’s brutal victimization. Gordon, the Harvard historian of modern Japan, signed onto a letter with sixty-six other scholars, in Japan and the U.S., expressing “great consternation and concern” at the South Korean government’s indictment of Park, and conveying appreciation for her book’s scholarly achievement. Park was ultimately found civilly liable, and was ordered to pay damages to comfort women; she was acquitted of the criminal defamation charges, with the trial court citing her academic freedom, but an appellate court overturned that verdict and fined her.
Eckert and Gordon did not think it was reasonable to infer, from sample prewar or wartime prostitution contracts for Japanese women, that Korean women entered similarly termed or structured contracts for sex work serving the Japanese military at the front. The historians also noted that, even assuming Korean women or their families had entered contracts for the women to work at comfort stations, they may not have known the sexual purpose for which they were being recruited—in which case, any contracts could not be considered voluntary. Eckert and Gordon
When I spoke to Ramseyer for this article, he said, “I don’t have any Korean contracts.” He further explained that he was “building on” an article he’d written in 1991 about indentured-servitude contracts for prostitution in prewar Japan, based on “vast amounts of discussion in historical records.” That article on prewar prostitution did not address war-front sex work during the Second World War or Korean comfort women. Ramseyer told me, “I thought it would be cool if we could get the contracts” for Korean comfort women. “But I haven’t been able to find it. Certainly you’re not going to find it.” Because he’d argued in the 1991 article that Japanese prewar prostitution-indenture contracts were largely for voluntary labor rather than “slavery,” I gathered he thought that, if Korean women had similar contracts for work in wartime comfort stations, that labor could also be characterized as voluntary rather than sex slavery.
