Symbolic Violence in Contemporary Japanese Children’s Literature : Case study of a Japanese folktale in its twenty-first century picture books renditions

Abstract: This paper questions the relation between narrative and symbolic violence in a Japanese context. It stresses the importance of children’s literature for socialization into a specific sociocultural reality and it especially focuses on the role played by folktales and picture books with their representations of narrative violence. By assuming a structural perspective on the sociology of childhood, the present work engages the concept of symbolic violence and its mechanisms to stress the structures of domination present in children’s literature. Particularly, the analysis of eight renditions into picture books of a Japanese folktale shows this relationship through a casual-tracing process approach to a case study employing multimodal discourse analysis in its data generation and discussion. The data examined reveal how the faulty normalization of symbolic violence in twenty-first century realizations into picture books of Kachi Kachi Yama reveal a shifting idea of children and childhood in Japan.