Transitions in the representation of sex education in post-war Japanese Society

Abstract

This paper is a preliminary study to trace the history of representations of sex education in postwar Japanese society. The data for this paper consists of newspaper article databases from the Yomiuri and the Asahi Shimbun. This paper covers articles in which the concept of sex education appears, and clarifies the configuration of its representation through quantitative text analysis. In conclusion, sex education has shifted from issues of countries and populations to issues of human relationships and the body, but one of the central issue is sexual violence in 2010s, that is not necessarily consistent with the idea of comprehensive sex education. Sex education is still being discussed from the perspective of a “social problem”.