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“social university” (Yan 2008), we see in this case how this idea has become literalized in the founding of a school where migrant women learn to objectify their own labor as a commodity in a process of self-objectification and alienation. They are taught that they are service providers, not servants, and that their employers are their clients, not their masters. This is an education of affects: The worker becomes an eager seller of his or her own labor power. Moreover, the conflict that will occur in the labor process when the interests of master and servant inevitably collide will be successfully negotiated through the smile as the sign of sovereign self-possession and the stamp of professionalism as an asset in human capital formation. The object of the institute is not so much to teach the technical skills of domestic labor as it is to prepare the worker for the workplace at the level of her subjective transformation.
    Yan explores the military imagery that she discovers in descriptions of the market given in class as a battleground, sorting out winners and losers. To put this in a regional perspective, the image of the battleground, along with survival games, is a common trope in Japan as well. The
manga
-turned-film
Battle Royale
discussed by Andrea Arai, in which schoolchildren are compelled to compete in a life-and-death struggle until a sole survivor remains (with a smile on her face), is a particularly vivid example of this. It adumbrates in a particularly ominous way what Teacher Yin, in Yan’s account, meant by consequences—the loss of one’s value as labor results in a symbolic death. In both these accounts, we see a subtle transposition of the battleground of the marketplace into a battleground within, one that lies internal to the self in the struggle for self-transformation. At the same time, these military metaphors resonate with the resurgence of hypernationalism in which the nation is seen as engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival.
    In Chapter Seven , Arai explores another affective economy in the form of a gift of
Notes to the Heart
, a set of booklets prepared as a supplementary curriculum for public school children in Japan in 2002. She reads this act of giving from the school to its students (but also implicit here is a gift from the state to its citizens) as an exemplification of how the Japanese people are asked to accept a profound reworking of Japanese identity formation to meet the challenges of a postmiracle Japan. Problems that had been denied, disavowed, or overlooked in postwar representations of Japan as a homogeneous society and model modernizer have suddenly become visible and are laid bare by the ending of the miracle and the grim new reality of a deepening recessionary economy. One of the key effects of this shift is the discourse of “strange kids,” most horrifically exemplified by the beheading of a Kobe schoolboy in 1997 by a fellow student, and in the discourse of “abnormal nation,” referring to the constitutional stripping of Japan’s war powers. Both of these discourses reveal concerns about national and cultural reproduction that take their form in anxieties about youth and educational reform.
    More particularly, Arai explores education as a site where issues of modernity that have a long history in Japan continue to be debated. “Love of nation” and “freedom” take on different meanings and uses in this specific context. This is not a love that can reproduce the national community as it once was, nor is it simply a reprise of the past. It is a newly individualized love, and it is a different nation than one might think of loving or devoting oneself to. The shift of focus to the individual’s love and heart rather than the nation works as a form of governance by other means. The frontier within offers the promise to transcend the rigors of a harsh new economic reality by developing the strength to live in a system that can no longer offer any guarantees.