Why sex education was omitted

Before examining these texts in detail, we should pay attention to the following points that appear in these texts. First, in a sense, these books succeeded in producing an excellent summary of today’s inochi discourses; at the same time, however, some subjects and discourses are intentionally omitted for the purpose of strongly supervising the students (kanri kyoiku). For example, we cannot find any inochi discourses concerning sex education, environmental pollution from factories, and the safety of nuclear power plants. I suppose the last two subjcets were omitted because of the government policy to push forward with industrialization and nuclear power generation, but why sex education was omitted is a mystery. Okuchi (1984) and Toriyama (1985) deal with sex education as one of the most important subjects related to inochi. The Ministry of Education’s textbooks seem to completely ignore this important topic and should be openly criticized for this omission.

Second, these books have been widely used since 1988 in almost all Japanese primary schools and junior high schools. This means that the replies to our questionnaires from primary and junior high school students may have been deeply influenced by these books. In fact, there are a number of replies that mimic expressions that are to be found in these books. It is difficult to clarify the relation of cause and effect between them, but, nevertheless, we must necessarily take this point into account.

These books do discuss inochi, but unfortunately not in a well ordered manner. Hence, I have put in order and classified these discussions into two major categories: (a) properties of inochi, and (b) norms of inochi.

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The Concept of Inochi, Part 2
(1991)
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