W. David Kubiak, contributing editor to Kyoto Journal 

Syndey Morning Herald 14 June 1998. 

 Introduction 

One full helping of man.  The perpetual banninmae – a half helping of man.  Anyone who has ever caponised roosters, for example, knows the fascinating spectrum of personality and physical changes that accompany the transition from natural bird to corporate broiler.   It might be inferred that a steady diet of miso, tofu, soy sauce and so on might not be best for leadership trainees or aspiring Lotharios. 

Do stress levels inflicted on Japanese students repress full sexual maturation, resulting in a compliant male population?  W. David Kubiak examines the evolution of the Japanese schooling system. 

There are a variety of proven methods to enhance a people's reliance on authoritarian groups and curb their sense of, or desire for, personal autonomy.  Japanese culture presents a catalogue of such techniques. 

Education is perhaps the best example.  Most of the recent heavy breathing over Japan's educational "product" has come from the world's managerial class.  And if schooling is defined as among fish – incessant attachment and responsiveness to the heading of the group – then mangers have much to hyperventilate about. 

Of the two competing drives we each harbour – to belong and to become recognisably unique – Japan's education educes and enhances only the first.  The Japanese student is trained to not even question authority, let alone challenge it. 

The only acceptable behaviour is obedience; total, enthusiastic and if possible, brilliant obedience. 

Students here are virtually never taught or required to speak or write their thoughts, whether concerning a problem a policy or a poem.  Most young Japanese can tell you "what is thought", but have great difficulty expressing what they themselves think. 

This creates an extreme permeability to prevailing authority, which is probably the true key to so-called consensual decision-making.  Japanese schooling is carefully designed to enhance this psychic porosity and thus prepare "open minds" for their future group's influence.  But over and above the present system's specific, we should consider its evolution and how it cam to serve corporate, rather than individual, ends. 

In pre-industrial Japan, a fully competent craftsman, musician or healer was referred to in Japanese as ichininmae – one full helping of man.   After traditional education ended, the master released his apprentice to the world in a ceremony that recognised the graduate as ichininmae, an independently viable professional. 

The short-term economic competition this created for the master was more than offset by the pride in siring a new talent upon the world.

This pattern of education breathed enormous life into creative, individualistic professions, but it was deadly for non-productive trades and the creation of corporate groups.  Dealers, politicians, gangsters and military types did not have much cultural paternity to propagate in the first place and the prospect of spawning a plague of their competitive equals upon the land seemed profitless in the extreme. 

Cultural birth control therefore became a serious concern in these circles.  While accounts differ, the wealthy Osaka wholesale house of the early Meiji era (from 1868) are often credited with the modern Japanese solution: the perpetual banninmae – a half helping of man. 

Hanninmae were essentially stunted apprentices.  They were trained to serve useful functions but never permitted to individuate or professionally mature and thus were obliged to spend their whole lives as dependent and subservient members of their widening corporate group. 

The hanninmae were just never meant to grow up.  These devoted and docile half-people are the cultural antecedents of the compliant salarymen so much in demand this century.  State education eventually stepped in to produce them en masse and their proliferation prepared the ground for the rise of the great bodies we face today. 

The shift from education for individuation to mass corporate anthroculture (growing and harvesting of humans) not only affected human social roles, it also covertly affected the psychosomatic being.  A couple of biological parallels may offer some evolutionary perspective on the process. 

When multi-skilled and overworked solitary wasps began to dream of specialised subordinate workers and queenly leisure, they learned to stunt their first-born lava with special secretions that repressed full sexual maturation and enslaved them to the nest. 

Humans likewise learned that sexually debilitating their slaves and livestock could almost magically increase production and managerial efficiency.  Anyone who has ever caponised roosters, for example, knows the fascinating spectrum of personality and physical changes that accompany the transition from natural bird to corporate broiler. 

While caponisation is intended to enhance agricultural productivity, human castration was practised for the purpose of behaviour modification.  It was employed in China as early as the Chou period of about 100 BC to "keep feudal society orderly" and reached a peak when the bureaucracy incorporated over 100,000 eunuchs during the late Ming Dynasty. 

Manly individualism is founded on a frail substrata of male hormones, called androgens, secreted by the testes and related tissue.  Their sudden increase in 12 – 13 year old boys produces puberty and the subsequent rebelliousness, strength and sexual longing of adolescence.   Androgens literally mean "manhood produces" and without their activities males are infinitely easier to unite with tight bonds. 

As feminists archly yet accurately observe, the evolutionary baseline is female and men are a fragile evolutionary afterthought (hence male nipples).  Women are physically and psychologically more resilient and live longer.  At the hormone level too, the force is with them; female hormones or estrogens given to men in small quantities can quickly overwhelm androgenic activity. 

It is interesting to note that certain edible plants produce estrogenic molecules in biologically significant amounts.  These include an isoflavanoid compound called daidzein, produced and concentrated in the common soy bean. 

In Japan, soy is a staple food.  There is a paucity of research on endocrine activity, but it might be inferred that a steady diet of miso, tofu, soy sauce and so on may not be best for leadership trainees or aspiring Lotharios. 

Androgens are also suppressed and disabled by fear, anxiety, exhaustion or any prolonged, intense stress.   That stress hormones are functionally estrogenic explains their effectiveness for building group spirit in military basic training, gruelling cult initiations and Japan's famous management training ordeals. 

While concerned executives and military types have funded considerable research into stress effects on their own sexual performances and aggressiveness, virtually no work has been done on behalf of children. 

The stress levels inflicted upon students during the years of shiken jigoku, Japan's infamous "examination bell" are outstandingly high and bear down at precisely the time they are trying to negotiate puberty.  Extrapolating from adult studies, stress effects may, in many cases, be severe enough to miscarry that fateful transition and psychosomatically fixate the child in early adolescence. 

Indeed, some social critics are beginning to describe the standard behaviour of Japan's salarymen as maturational disorders; for example, their love of comics and toy guns, their taste for sado-masochism (classically a juvenile or pre-sensual for of sex) and their poor adaptation to fatherhood.