The purpose of this study is to analysis the discourse of purity education.
In Japan, sex education was first included in the public school system under the framework of “purity education,” which required children to maintain chastity. The “purity” prescribed therein has since been criticized as a gender-oppressive moral norm that was considered more important for women than for men. However, it has also been noted that “gender-equal purity” was the dominant theme in the discourse on sexuality at that time.
When only the 22 major publications on purity education were analyzed, the discourse was found to contain no clear emphasized indications of a double standard in gender norms. Conversely, nine publications noted that under the postwar democratization policy, the concept of purity was one that applied to both sexes, and three of these actively sought to redress social inequalities and promote “gender-equal purity.” Nevertheless, promotion of “gender-equal purity” was not discussed in publications issued by the Japanese Ministry of Education, and discourse critical of the double standard aimed at promoting “gender-equal purity” did not come to dominate. Instead, the dominant discourse was one that treated the female body as a “childbearing, child-rearing body.”
Through the incorporation in physical education of eugenics, population problems, and this discourse in purity education of the “childbearing, child-rearing body,” a course of Health and Physical Education was created that had “biopolitical” as well as “anatomo-political” power. However, the separation of “physical purity” and “spiritual purity,” which was part of the discourse on purity education, also served as an opportunity to develop a counter-discourse. That is to say, the more prominent the discourse on purity education became, the more it undermined its own foothold to become a factor that facilitated the shift to sexology-oriented sex education.
