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Paper short abstract

This research examines well-being and happiness among junior high school students in Tokyo through ethnographic fieldwork, highlighting how these socio-culturally embedded experiences are shaped (or not) by proximity to dominant norms, where new dimensions of happiness and well-being may emerge.

Paper long abstract

This research focuses on investigating the educational settings of the Japanese context, and how well-being and happiness as an implicit or stated educational goal is practiced within public, private, and national schools. In the broader context of Japanese education, issues such as school nonattendance (futōkō), bullying (ijime), mental health challenges, and stress from entrance examinations are prominent (Sugimoto, 2021). The neoliberal emphasis on academic achievement manifested through the expansion of the cram school (juku) industry, the use of deviation scores (hensachi), and intensified competition and stratification (Cave, 2016; Slater, 2014; Sugimoto, 2021) contributes to creating norms of well-being as being to succeed within these objectives. Specifically, it explores how junior high school students in Tokyo experience (or not) happiness through social interactions within and outside classroom settings. This is analyzed through Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (Bourdieu, 1986), Foucault’s notion of discursive practices (Hall, 2001), and Ingold’s framework of doing and undergoing (Ingold, 2017). It shows that these norms not only define the conditions for well-being and happiness but also implicitly determine who is deemed eligible to attain them within dominant educational and social discourses. In particular, this research highlights how junior high school students experience the adolescent period with many significant transitions (Letendre & Fukuzawa, 2013), and how they navigate these tensions between personal and social level. The value of happiness has been assessed through positivist-oriented publications such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Better Life Index and the World Happiness Report (Helliwell et al., 2012, as cited in Manzenreiter & Holthus, 2017). These data remain useful for policy-making, yet essentialist claims that happiness is a universal, uniform experience easily captured by quantitative measures risk being overly reductive. Therefore, this research adopts a qualitative approach, using ethnographic fieldwork to explore how the concept of well-being and happiness varies across cultural contexts, is shaped by diverse social and moral frameworks, and how it is expressed in everyday life of Japanese junior high school students. It provides insights into how new forms of well-being and happiness may emerge in the educational context through the narratives of students and teachers.